How Managers Can Use Unbiased, Data-Backed Engagement Insights

The manager’s role has changed dramatically over recent years. Hell, the world has changed dramatically over recent years. The combination of rapid technological advances, societal shifts, and competition for talent has given birth to a new world of work.  

The interpersonal requirements of the modern manager have advanced faster than our interpersonal skillsets. Managers must often be coaches, mentors, cheerleaders, messengers, psychologists, and even best friends to their teams. Thus, only the most skilled and emotionally intelligent managers have transversely excelled in this role.  

Whether it’s changing team sizes, new responsibilities, or communicating the fluctuating demands of the business, managers are on the front line of the employee experience. They are often solely responsible for cultivating high performing environments. This requires clearing roadblocks and bottlenecks, providing the team with effective tools, distributing work to the most capable people, managing work-life balances, supplying opportunities for learning, and more. These areas of management have underutilized data and hold the greatest potential for impact. 

Technology has improved our access to information, communication, and collaboration. However, few pieces of technology have helped improve our interpersonal and leadership skills. With the help of AI and machine learning, we are beginning to make sense of the employee experience and how greatly it affects an entire organization from an unbiased, data-backed lens. 

Why Managers Have a Large Role in Employee Engagement 

Gallup defines employee engagement as, “the involvement and enthusiasm of employees in their work and workplace. Employee engagement helps you measure and manage employees' perspectives on the crucial elements of your workplace culture.” Gallup also found that up to 70% of the variance in employee engagement levels can be attributed to their experience with their manager. 

Company surveys often fail due to the sheer number of constantly changing factors contributing to engagement levels. Continuous employee engagement software can help your managers measure the employee and team experience while it is changing, while surveys only provide snapshots in time.  

Think about your own experience. What are some contributors to a good or bad workday? How often do those change? It could be something as small as spilling coffee at your desk in the morning to something as significant as losing a promotion to a colleague. The daily network of interactions, projects, tasks, disagreements, accomplishments, and failures are all contributing to your engagement. 

Here is a brief list of managerial responsibilities that directly affect the employee experience. 

• Managing conflicting priorities: balancing the needs of the team with the needs of the organization, while also considering the needs of individual team members. 
• Building and leading a team: recruiting, hiring, and training team members, and fostering a positive team culture. 
• Communicating effectively: communicating with team members, other managers, and stakeholders, and ensuring that information is shared effectively and efficiently. 
• Managing performance: setting expectations, providing feedback, and holding team members accountable for their performance. 

• Managing conflict: addressing and resolving conflicts and misunderstandings among team members. 
• Delegating tasks: Assigning tasks and responsibilities to team members and ensuring that they have the necessary resources and support to complete them.

How Managers Can Utilize Peoplelogic Data for Performance and Engagement

Managers can regularly log in to the Peoplelogic platform and understand what is happening in their team’s engagement. Most commonly, Peoplelogic can be used to get unbiased information about people and processes prior to team meetings and 1:1s.  

Checking into the platform daily/weekly will provide signals into the promoters and detractors of the employee experience while prompting to explore deeper with different dashboards and tools. Thus, enhancing managers' decision-making and communication topics.  

When communicating with their employees and teams, managers should be prepared to help clear roadblocks, bottlenecks, and inefficiencies that often cause disagreements, arguments, and detract from the employee's experience. Without Peoplelogic, managers must attempt the time-consuming task of jumping between their teams' tools to weave together an understanding of what is happening.  

In less than 5 minutes inside the Peoplelogic platform, managers can review their team’s and employee’s: 

• StayFactor™ scores: measuring general engagement and burnout levels 
• ONA graph: measuring the communication networks of the team 

• Custom dashboards: measuring work-load levels, productivity levels, and tool behavior changes 
• Recommendations: automatic messages showing promoters & detractors of engagement 

If you’re interested in how continuous, automatic, unbiased, and data-backed insights can help your team's engagement management, contact us today!