“How do we get managers to take ownership of the experience and engagement of their people?”
This question came up in our recent webinar. It reflects a challenge many organisations are grappling with: how to make employee experience part of everyday management.
Managers play a critical role in people’s working lives. They help translate organisational priorities into meaningful work. They allocate tasks, give feedback, support development and respond when someone raises a concern. Their decisions and interactions can make a considerable difference to someone’s day.
But should we ask them to “own” employee experience?
People’s experience of work is shaped by much more than their relationship with their manager. Workload, systems, policies, senior leadership decisions, colleagues and opportunities all contribute. Managers influence some of these directly. Others sit well beyond their control.
So perhaps a more useful question is: what should we expect managers to contribute to employee experience, and what needs to be in place for them to do it well?
Make the role tangible
“Create a great employee experience” is a broad expectation. Imagine receiving it as a manager. What would you actually do differently on Monday morning?
Would you hold more team meetings? Arrange individual check-ins? Organise something social? Work through your survey results and produce an action plan?
Without a shared understanding of the role, managers are left to interpret it for themselves.
We can make that role more tangible by looking at everyday experiences. Helping people understand what matters. Setting clear and realistic expectations. Listening and responding. Recognising contribution. Supporting development. Involving people in decisions that affect their work.
These give managers something concrete to act on. They also give us useful questions to explore with employees. Where does their manager make the biggest difference? What support do they value? What’s currently missing?
This helps us move from a general expectation about employee experience to a clearer understanding of the contribution managers can make.
Look at the reality of the job
Now consider a manager whose week is filled with operational problems, reporting requirements, customer demands and their own delivery targets.
They’re also expected to hold thoughtful conversations, address concerns, support development and build a strong team.
What happens when someone needs an hour to talk through a difficult situation, but a report is due that afternoon? What gets postponed? What will the manager be asked about by their own boss?
These choices reveal how the role works in practice.
If supporting people depends on finding time after everything else is done, we need to examine how the job has been designed. How much work is it reasonable for one person to carry? How many people are they supporting? What could stop or become simpler? Where do they need help?
Clarifying expectations is useful. We also need to establish whether those expectations are achievable.
Pay attention to what the organisation reinforces
We can tell managers that employee experience matters. The signals they receive every day need to support that message.
Who gets recognised and promoted? What dominates leadership meetings? What questions do senior leaders ask? How do they respond when a manager challenges a deadline because their team is already stretched?
If we ask managers to listen, there needs to be somewhere for difficult feedback to go. If we ask them to involve their teams, they need clarity about which decisions are open to influence. If we ask them to support development, they need realistic ways to follow through.
Managers’ own experiences matter here too. Do they receive clear priorities, useful feedback and support? Can they raise concerns and ask for help? Does their manager make time for them?
These experiences shape the conditions in which they lead others. They also demonstrate what the organisation expects management to look like.
Be clear about where influence sits
Managers should be accountable for how they treat people and how they fulfil their responsibilities. That includes responding to concerns, acting where they can and seeking support when they need it.
But accountability needs to reflect their ability to influence what happens.
A manager may be able to improve how work is allocated within a team. They may have little authority to change staffing levels, replace an unreliable system or revise a policy that creates unnecessary work.
When employees raise these issues, we need a shared understanding of what happens next.
What can the manager change directly? What can they explore with their team? What requires a decision elsewhere?
That last category needs a route forward and someone responsible for responding. Otherwise, managers can find themselves repeatedly listening to concerns they cannot resolve, while employees become frustrated that nothing changes.
The manager has a role in explaining constraints honestly, escalating issues and keeping people informed. Other parts of the organisation have a responsibility to act on what reaches them.
Employee experience requires those connections to work.
Understand what support is needed
Training can help managers develop skills in listening, feedback, difficult conversations and involving people in decisions. We also need to understand what happens when they return to work.
Will they have opportunities to practise? Support when a conversation becomes difficult? Enough discretion to respond to what they hear? Time to follow through?
A manager might know how to hold a useful development conversation and still struggle to make it happen in a week dominated by urgent demands.
Understanding the obstacle helps us choose an appropriate response. Sometimes that will be learning and practice. Sometimes it will involve simplifying a process, adjusting workloads, clarifying authority or addressing expectations further up the organisation.
Often, several changes will be needed together.
Design with managers and their teams
This is a useful place to apply People First by design. Before launching another manager initiative, explore what managing people currently involves.
Ask managers to talk you through a recent week. When were they able to support their team well? What helped? When did they struggle? What got in the way?
Explore employees’ experiences too. When did their manager make a useful difference? Where did they need more support? What happened after they raised an issue? Bringing these perspectives together can help identify something specific to improve.
Perhaps managers need a simpler way to resolve competing priorities. Perhaps concerns raised by teams are getting stuck between departments. Perhaps reducing an administrative burden would create space for better conversations.
Involve managers and employees in developing possible changes, then test them in real work. Find out whether they help managers fulfil their role and whether employees experience a difference.
A critical role within a wider responsibility
Managers make an important contribution to employee experience. We should be clear about what that contribution involves and expect them to take it seriously.
Alongside that, we need to examine how organisational decisions, practices and priorities support their efforts. People teams, senior leaders and other functions all shape the experience employees have, including the conditions in which managers operate.
We’ve been asking what we would do differently if we were designing People practices today. The manager’s role deserves the same attention.
If we expect managers to help create a better experience of work, we need to intentionally design their jobs, and the support around them to make that happen. If you are interested in leaning more about how we do that. we’d love to hear from you
