Why?
FACT 3:
Line managers strongly influence all six employee engagement drivers!
Today’s task-focused business climate often leads to managers being selected, not for their interpersonal skills, but for their high-achievement ethos and functional skills. Those attributes do not always make for good team players and team builders. Also, management development programmes generally focus on process and take the vital people-skills for granted.
As a result of these two factors, many line managers are ill-equipped to engage with and draw out the latent potential of their people: indeed, they may even be inadvertently causing disengagement! This systemic flaw exists largely because the full extent of managers' influence on employee engagement levels is not generally recognised.
Line managers can play a pivotal role in satisfying all six key drivers – if they are aware of them!
Research indicates that employees’ relationships with immediate line managers play the biggest part in decisions to stay or leave, to work at the minimum or invest discretionary effort, in short to engage or disengage. It is primarily what happens to people in the workplace on a day to day basis that gradually turns engagement into disengagement.
This often goes unnoticed, often because employee opinion surveys neither place sufficient focus on line manager issues, nor give employees free voice to express their real concerns.