Our inaugural EX Report highlights ‘building line manager capability’ as the biggest challenge for practitioners, as well as a key priority for many organisations. The evidence is clear, line managers can make or break your employee experience and impact employee engagement. But we know that it’s not easy managing people, and in fact it’s probably never been tougher.
Recent research from OC Tanner found that leaders are 43% more likely to say work is interfering with their ability to be happy in other areas of their lives. And a study by Gartner (2022) found that 35% of managers say they have more direct reports and 49% report that the complexity of their responsibilities has increased since before the pandemic. And in their recent research looking at the top priorities for HR leaders in 2024 (2023), leader and manager development was number one. In this research Gartner found that 75% of HR leaders say their managers are overwhelmed by the growth of their job responsibilities and 73% aren’t equipped to lead change.
We know that people are often promoted to line management roles based on their technical expertise, or subject matter competence, rather than their ability to lead others. It’s so often the case that organisations expect line managers to somehow just know what to do to when it comes to EX and engagement. And then line managers take the hit when EX isn’t where it needs to be, and engagement scores are low.
The view from EX and engagement practitioners is that we’ve got work to do to set our line managers up for success;
It is clear from this that we need to help them understand our plans and the role they play in facilitating employee experience and engagement. We need to work on building their skills and capability. And we need to do this in a way that doesn’t add further stress and pain to their already busy workload. Rather than telling them that this is yet another task on their to-do list, we must find ways to motivate and inspire them to want to improve EX, and then make it easy for them to do the right thing.
We’re going to explore this topic further at in our upcoming webinars. And because this is such a big and important topic we’re going to run x2 sessions.
Webinar 1 – The critical role of line managers in employee experience and engagement
Tuesday 31st October, 13:30-14:30 (BST)
In this webinar we’re going to look at:
- The evidence – exploring the role of line managers in EX and engagement
- The positive (and negative) difference your line managers can make to EX and engagement
- What’s changed since the pandemic
- What we need line managers to do and why
- The skills and strengths required by line managers to develop capability
- How to do all this without further adding to their workload and stress
- Introducing our ‘EXceptional Manager’ framework
Sign up here to join webinar one
Webinar 2 – Empowering the middle – introducing the EX Space Line Managers Toolkit
Wednesday 15th November, 15:30-16:30 (BST)
- In this webinar we’ll share practical tools to help you as practitioners set your line managers up for success
- We’ll walk you through our tried and tested line manager toolkit
- And share some success stories from other organisations who have taken this approach
- In summary we’ll show you how you can unlock the potential of line managers to make a positive difference to EX and engagement.
Sign up here to join webinar two
If you’d like to hear how else we can help you with this challenge, then why not drop us a line.
Otherwise we hope to see you later this month!
