What remains important is for managers to keep giving thought to these issues; checking in with their team members; and keeping the wellness and leisure incentives coming.

An important focus for managers in any given new year, is how to create best-in-class structures and send productivity levels soaring as team members start gravitating back to work after the summer holidays. Here’s the advice of an expert on the subject, Charles Edelstein of Executive Placements.

A recent special report, the “Executive MBA Insights”, shares key trends to help senior leaders overcome their manager job challenges in an increasingly demanding corporate environment. Five specific focus areas are bulleted below:

•Focus on sustainability

As climate change presents an increasing existential threat, so managers should work with their teams to help lower rising temperatures by implementing strategies to decarbonise their business operations.

•Focus on equal opportunities

Managers are becoming more aware of how the work their company is doing is impacting the greater society in which they are based. This means steering clear of any kind of elitism, to make sure that all groups – including women and those with disabilities – have similar levels of representation, remuneration, and potential for advancement.

•Focus on desirable incentives

When the pandemic hit, millions of individuals in skilled jobs around the globe resigned because their priorities surrounding being gainfully employed had shifted. Today, managers need to be clever about what perks they offer to the individuals they most need to employ, and retain – with duvet days, hybrid working arrangements, sponsored lunches, and travel incentives ranking highly among those employees with critically sought-after skills.

•Focus on burnout avoidance

Following closely on the heels of these proffered incentives, is the need for any short-staffed teams with frantic workloads to avoid the hazards of burnout. Those in management positions should therefore seek to implement corporate wellness programmes that include benefits such as: access to a gym, life coaching or psychological counselling, and on-site massage therapy.

•Focus on advancing technology

As IT jobs continue to change our lives – and the workplace – beyond anything we may ever have guessed, so managers need to undergo constant training on how to remain abreast of the changes, including how to keep the data generated by their team members as secure as is possible. This can extend to matters like putting cyber security insurance in place, and organising insurance cover for servers and other hardware should a power outage cause damage.

The fairness equation

While it may seem that all of these focus areas can be addressed by throwing funds at the matter, it can get tricky when it comes to managing what is fair – or not – from one employee on your team to the next.

Who can work flexibly, and who has to come into the office? Why does a parent get a childcare incentive, while someone else gets nothing as a non-parent? As inflation rises and doling out raises and 13th cheques becomes increasingly less feasible, is shortening the working week a viable option instead of offering a salary increase?

It could be that the solution to all these issues is for repetitive management tasks to be automated, so manager-employee relationships can be prioritised, team members feel heard, and staff turnover levels are kept as low as possible.

What remains important is for managers to keep giving thought to, and conducting surveys on, these issues; checking in with their team members; and keeping the wellness and leisure incentives coming. It’s an approach that has, at its core, the idea of money well spent to keep employment levels constant against a shifting and disruptive corporate landscape – where it still rings true that people leave managers and not companies.

Sources:

https://www.businessbecause.com/news/insights/8027/management-trends-2022

https://hbr.org/2022/01/11-trends-that-will-shape-work-in-2022-and-beyond

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