Want The Best From Your Employees? Listen To Them

For people who study the dynamics of organizational cultures, employee engagement has been a top-of-the-list issue for decades. And despite all the handwringing by corporate leaders, the overall numbers remain dismal.

Gallup, which has been studying the subject for many years, defines employee engagement as the involvement and enthusiasm of employees in their work and workplace. Engaged employees produce better business outcomes across industry, company size, and nationality.

Trouble is, engagement continues to head in the wrong direction. A 2022 Gallup survey of 67,000 people found that only 32% of workers are engaged with their work, compared to 36% in 2020. And the share of workers found to be “actively disengaged” is rising.

In the decade before the pandemic, engagement had been creeping upward. In 2021, it started to fall.

Employee engagement is not just a “feel good” data point. It affects productivity, innovation, profitability, and a whole host of other important metrics—not to mention the physical and mental health of workers.

Former Campbell Soup CEO Doug Conant offers a concise perspective: “To win in the marketplace you must first win in the workplace.”

Dr. Jack Wiley has devoted his career to the issue. An award-winning organizational psychologist, researcher, and leadership consultant, he’s president and CEO of Employee Centricity LLC and chief scientific officer at Engage2Excel. His latest book is The Employee-Centric Manager: 8 Keys to People-Management Effectiveness.

Wiley’s book is undergirded by surveys of more than 80,000 employees in 27 countries. He and his team posed a straightforward question to employees: “What is the most important thing you want from your manager?”

Because most people work and operate in a global economy, Wiley was searching for universal answers. He and his team stratified the samples from each country to ensure proper representation of employee groups in terms of age, gender, education level, job type and job level (i.e., individual contributor, first-line supervisor, middle manager, or executive). The samples also represented the industry mix of each country. Data collection took two years, and the 27 countries included in the research accounted for 85% of the world’s GDP. During the analysis stage, data from each country was given equal weight. This gave Wiley confidence that the results were universal in application. He's distilled the findings into eight specific attributes.

Multiple studies show that many managers seem to overestimate how well they perform in their relationships with employees. To what does Wiley attribute this lack of self-awareness?

“It is not uncommon for managers to self-rate their performance about 15% higher than the ratings provided by their employees,” Wiley says. “Of course, this is only a general trend. Some managers, typically the best managers, are much more modest. One reason for this lack of self-awareness is the failure on the part of managers to understand how employees define good performance, that is, what they want and need from a manager.”

As a result, Wiley says, managers may be aiming at the wrong target. Also, managers are often more interested in impressing their own leaders. After all, they’re the ones who most influence the manager’s compensation and promotional opportunities, so that’s where their energy flows.

Another factor is the absence of performance feedback from employees. “In the training programs I conduct,” Wiley says, “managers routinely regard employee feedback as one of the most valuable parts of the training. While upward feedback systems are not new, many companies still don’t deploy them. As a result, managers are under-informed about how they show up to their employees and unaware of what they must do to improve.”

A survey he conducted of 1,000 people managers in the United States indicated that more than 70% had either received no training in people management or the training they received had been capped at only four hours. “Given the centrality of people management skills to the overall success of the manager, this hardly seems adequate,” he says.

What role does empathy play in a manager’s journey to becoming employee-centric?

“It plays a central role,” Wiley says. “If I could offer only one piece of advice for those seeking to become better people managers, it would be to imagine themselves in the shoes of their employees. It’s hard to improve upon the golden rule of treating others the same way you want to be treated. Empathy is central to two of the employee-centric manager attributes: showing support and understanding and treating employees with dignity and respect.”

For an employee-centric manager, what are some best practices for giving—and receiving—performance feedback?

“It’s most helpful when managers share observations about employee performance versus being overly judgmental,” Wiley says. “Best practices include focusing on improving future behavior, offering feedback promptly, providing details, making positive feedback public and negative feedback private, and keeping emotions under control.” He says the best managers encourage two-way feedback, which helps ensure that the manager and employee share a common understanding of the expectations.

Wiley says showing support and understanding is the attribute most frequently identified as what employees most want from their manager. “This means employees want their manager to be present and accessible, provide help in daily activities, stand up for them, and follow through on their concerns,” he says. “It also means they want their manager to be a good listener, to be considerate, friendly, encouraging, and to pay attention to their needs and difficulties. Managers do this when they take time to get to know their employees and understand what helps and hinders them in getting their work done. Managers fail to show support and understanding when they do not follow through on employee concerns, show a lack of regard for their physical or psychological well-being, or show impatience or offer immediate criticism to employee suggestions for improvement.”

Treating employees with dignity and respect may seem like a “given” for most managers, but of course the quality of such treatment is in the eye of the beholder. Some “dignity and respect” behaviors seem to be universally appreciated by employees?

“Treating employees with dignity and respect means first to presume good intent,” Wiley says. “That is, to presume employees want to do good work and make a valuable contribution. But it also means trusting the experience of employees, respecting their diversity, and ensuring their safety and physical well-being. Managers who excel at this attribute respect the ability of employees to make good decisions, keep employees informed, listen to them, prompt their input, make them feel part of the team, and encourage them to take the initiative.”

Clarity in communicating performance expectations is critical to work quality as well as to relationships. What are the keys to getting it right?

Wiley says research with employees shows that he most effective managers are clear about work priorities, deliver honest, timely, and helpful performance feedback, and connect the employee’s work to the organization’s larger goals. “Managers fail at this attribute when they review performance infrequently, provide new tools with inadequate training, and make giving feedback seem like a chore,” he says. “Managers who truly excel at communicating clear performance expectations model high standards in their own performance, encourage two-way communication to ensure a proper understanding of expectations, and explain to employees why changes are being made to work priorities.”

Despite the purported good intentions behind “equity” programs, many people regard them as no more than bias masquerading under a new name. How can managers best address such concerns among employees?

“Employees want their managers to be fair and just,” Wiley says. “This means treating employees equally, objectively, and consistently.”

He says employees want to be reviewed based on their performance, not individual characteristics. What is critical to employees is that managers follow ethical guidelines, show the same flexibility to all employees, distribute tasks and rewards fairly, and adjust workloads to offset extra demands.

“What employees do not want from their manager is showing favoritism to pet employees, punishing employees for reporting violations, or allowing subpar performance from other team members,” he says.

Even in the best of workplaces, occasional conflicts are inevitable. What are some of the best practices Wiley has seen displayed by managers who are particularly effective at managing workplace conflicts?

He says the origin of the conflict and the personalities involved are important factors in successfully navigating a workplace conflict. “If the conflict is about which path to choose, managers may employ a majority vote to resolve the conflict,” he says. “If the conflict is about personalities, managers may choose to remove or replace certain team members if no other solutions are effective.”

Some managers opt for a problem-solving approach, requiring those in conflict to focus on the root cause of the problem rather than their clashing styles. “Once the root cause is determined, solutions are easier to identify,” Wiley says. “Certain types of conflicts can also be successfully managed by insisting that each of the involved parties compromise, that is, each side pleads their case but gives up something of value to resolve the conflict and restore balance.”

There are many frameworks or people management theories in use today. How is Wiley’s approach different?

“The employee-centric framework is the only one based entirely on the voice of the employee” Wiley says. “We started with a blank sheet, simply asking employees worldwide to state the most important thing they wanted from their manager. This produced an eight-attribute taxonomy that is universal in scope. There were no preconceived notions about the results. We allowed the data to produce the conclusions.”