Managers are faced with the difficult task of meeting business objectives, while also managing the expectations of their team. This requires a long list of skills and abilities, including communication, coaching, collaboration, and decision making. Knowing the right manager action to take in every situation, big or small, can feeling overwhelming.
While there is little debate over which skills are most important in the modern workplace, it’s still difficult to understand how they translate into action on a daily basis. For managers, that means spending time trying to figure out which actions have the biggest impact.
To help answer this question, we decided to analyze data from thousands of managers and their teams in the Workday Peakon Employee Voice platform to find out what really works. As a result, we were able to identify a number of actions that result in long-term improvements to engagement scores.
We’ve highlighted some of the most impactful recommendations below, but if you’d rather see all of the most effective manager actions in one place you can download our report on the relationship between manager action and employee engagement.
Start With a Weekly Commitment to Your Team
In order to be successful, managers need to establish trust with their team, which is impossible without an open line of communication. That’s why the number one action managers can take to improve their team’s engagement is schedule bi-weekly one-on-ones, whether that’s remotely or in the office.
Managers that introduced one-on-ones as a result of Workday’s recommended actions were able to see a one point increase in their management support scores within three months. Over such a short timeline, that’s a significant upturn.