Start Improving Employee Experience from Your Managers!

Start Improving Employee Experience from Your Managers!

22 January 2021 in Blog by feedbackandbeyond 0 Comments

Your managers are employees just like you, and managing their experience is essential.

In one of our “employee experience for leaders” training sessions last week, one manager asked: “What you have explained is very helpful, and I can understand that when we apply these approaches, the employee experience will improve. But our managers will also apply these approaches for us, right?”

I’ve heard this question many times in numerous executive training sessions. These questions are a manager’s way of saying, “I am an employee as well as a manager“, and this is an important signal of the manager’s own employee experience. We need to recognize this signal and prioritize managerial experience across all employee experience practices. But why?

Manager Affects 3 out of 4 Critical Experiences

Managers huge impact on business outcomes in the organization is beyond argument. Managers play a crucial role in conveying company culture, strategy, and goals to all employees.

From an employee experience perspective, managers have a significant impact on the experience. According to the State of Employee Experience report published by TI People in 2019, 3 out of 4 critical experiences of each employee occur while they are interacting with their manager. Numbers don’t lie! Unless managers own employee experience, the excellent practices and processes we design to improve the experience has no choice but to fail.

This is precisely why we need to increase the awareness level of managers in employee experience management. We need to ensure they have access to employee data and learn ways to improve the experience. But most importantly, we must focus on what kind of experience they live as managers because the experience of the managers is reflected in all employees.

Turn Manager Experience into Advantage

All organizations have great expectations from their managers. We want them to meet many responsibilities—performance process management, situational leadership, coaching, team development, etc. We call the process they go through the “manager experience”.

Studies on employee experience show a strong positive relationship between the experience of managers and employee experience in an organization. For example, managers who can clearly understand what is expected of them in the performance management process, have the information they need, and use a user-friendly technological infrastructure, can reflect this good experience to their employees and enable them to experience the process more positively one.

Prioritize Manager Experience

Working with various organizations, we often witness that first-level managers are exhausted with the burden of the responsibilities. With a well-designed manager experience, we aim to precisely see these processes from their perspective and redesign experiences that are simplified, effective and meet their needs and expectations. In order to achieve this, we need to design their experience with them, not for them.

When we do this, it is possible to turn the manager’s influence into an advantage in the employee experience! As the experience of managers improves, we see an improvement in the team members’ experience.

For those wondering, our answer to the question we mentioned above was “Yes”. Employee experience awareness should always be spread from the top down, and its practices should be expanded from the bottom up. Let that be the subject of another article as an essential principle in employee experience 🙂

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