A lot of people really want coaching, they really want feedback. And while a lot of people feel like giving that constructive feedback can cause defensiveness, I'm pleasantly surprised at the number of people who say, I can only get better if you tell me what I can do differently or better.
One of the biggest challenges for most organizations is hiring good employees. Once good employees are on the job, another challenge is retaining them. So how do managers keep good, reliable people from leaving, the key might be understanding why good employees leave, chances are, it's not them. It's you. This is random acts of knowledge presented by Heartland Community College. Today we're talking about a rising gap between employees and management. Our expert today says the gap is in communication. He's here to tell us what managers can do to keep good employees on the job.
I'm Terry Lowe, and I am currently a professor in the College of Business at ISU and I also am a adjunct at Heartland Community College. And prior to my teaching career, I was with State Farm Insurance. And for 25 of those years, I was a manager and a department called Learning and Development which was under the umbrella of human resources.
I as somebody that has a lot of experience with human resources, you probably see employees come and go or have seen employees come and go for a lot of different reasons. What are some of the big reasons that people decide to leave a job, I mean, sometimes it's opportunity, but there are other reasons as well.
So we know from recent surveys that a lot of people leave for more money, that's just always been a given. In fact, a recent survey by PayScale found that 25% of people who leave their jobs said it really was for more financial security. But 27% of the people who left and this is an increasing worrisome number said they're leaving because they're looking for more meaningful work. And when they were asked how they would know if they had meaningful work, many of those people say it's a matter of communication, somebody management or otherwise needs to share with me that I'm valued, that I'm doing something meaningful. And we're losing that, in large part because the span of control of managers is increasing, what seems to be year to year, so managers say You know what, I would love to talk to people more, but I just don't have the time.
That's a significant percentage you mentioned. And I know that one of the biggest concerns for any operation is having good reliable employees and retaining those employees, there really are only so many levers that you can push or pull when it comes to salary with some places. So what are these communication gaps that are keeping employees from feeling like their work is meaningful,
but believe it or not, I have both read and heard anecdotally, from employees that sometimes their managers, they could go for a week, and the manager doesn't even say hello, good to see you again. And employees report that they don't really need a lot. Maybe it's just an occasional, great job on that project. I liked the way you wrote the memo. Thanks for supporting the team. But they're just not even getting that as much as let's go back 10 or 15 years. So when we ask them even in a more detailed way, what would it take to let you know that you are valued that you do contribute meaningfully, a lot of employees say I just would like to sit down once in a while with my manager, whether they initiate it or whether whether the manager initiates it and just kind of talk about how I fit in what I'm doing that really matters. What I could do better. A lot of people really want coaching, they really want feedback. And while a lot of people feel like giving that constructive feedback could cause defensiveness. I'm pleasantly surprised at the number of people who say, I can only get better if you tell me what I can do differently or better. So it's not necessarily going to be one of those uncomfortable conversations. It could just be, here's how it turned out this time for the future. Maybe we could try it a little bit differently. So it's not some big long, detailed conversation. It's just perhaps a few minutes, maybe monthly maybe every other week, where you just touch base and chat.
One of the things that you mentioned earlier is that the dissatisfaction that employees might have is feeling like they're doing meaningful work. And some managers might not take that into consideration. Maybe they're very task oriented. So they're thinking, why wouldn't you Have you these tasks to do if they weren't important, it's part of your job. It's this task. But having that connection between what the work you're doing might be, and what piece that work is in the hole is probably where that meaning comes from. For some people,
and particularly for newer employees, it's harder for them to understand that. So those discussions where they could be made more aware of what might seem to be to them as busy work, how could they better understand how all of that fits into the team, the unit, the department, the company, those are the things that we seem to be missing. And they're just so easy, because it wouldn't take all that long to have those touch points. And just those just those small little conversations that say, this is how you're contributing,
when managers are trying to approach developing a better communication style with employees, are there different overall management styles that people just naturally gravitate to, and are some of them just not conducive to what you're talking about? I think that sometimes people's management styles can be situational based upon the type of position they're in. But what are the types of management styles that you've identified, that may help or hinder this particular issue with clear communication, and meaningful communication with employees.
One of my learnings or discoveries even about myself has been that we managers, teachers, whatever occupational ran, we tend to communicate and the way that we prefer to be communicated to. So we unfortunately get into this habit of, of there's one way to communicate, and it's the way I'm most comfortable communicating with others about and that's, that's not the best approach. So one of the things I encourage all of us, but particularly managers to do is to explore the different communication styles and methods that are out there. And then to acknowledge that they are not going to be all the same. There's an interesting, it's called a color personality test I like to give to managers, and you'll be one of four colors. And whatever color you happen to be, we'll also involve a preference for a certain way of communicating. And we need to understand at least through that test, that will be one color, but we're likely going to be managing people who are in those other three colors. And we have to understand that they may not match up very well. So if I'm an extrovert, but I'm managing an introvert, the way I communicate with that introvert has got to be different than someone else who's like me more extroverted. So once you get to kind of understand that there are these different styles, and once you understand how to best communicate with those other styles, that's when I think you can become much more effective and help people understand and validate be validated. Rather, in many of the tasks they're doing. Are there any
kind of generational commonalities for that type of thing with management styles? You see, a lot of younger people have grown up with different ways of communicating with technology, their expectations might be different. The job market certainly been different for the last generation that is started to work in the fallout of the huge economic recession. Is there a general sense of managers maybe have to think about that. So maybe they've managed somebody successfully for over a decade or manage employees, they're starting to see some different styles need to adapt to
such a good point. There are workshops now everywhere, that talk about how to best manage millennials, Gen Z. And now we have the newest generation, which I was waiting to get a label to those younger people born in the year 2005 Or later are going to be called alphas. Apparently, we ran out of letters, we had this disease. So we're going to start over. Absolutely, managers have got to understand what's happening here. And it's changing so very rapidly, these alphas and even the ones before then the Generation Z. What you and I are doing right now, they are very uncomfortable doing they have a very hard time sitting down across the table from somebody and having a discussion because they're used to texting and emailing and Instagram and Snapchat and all these other things. So some people are labeling this even as some sort of social anxiety even in the workplace, difficult to approach another person, certainly difficult to be summoned by your manager to a face to face verbal discussion. And so they go to those discussions already anxious. And then if the feedback is going to be constructive, that's yet another aspect that the manager needs to think about because they can be very threatened compared to the 50 year old, who you've been supervising for decades, who is very comfortable with this kind of thing. So this is a huge challenge. And if the manager has several different generations that they're supervising, absolutely, you got to have different styles, or it probably won't be as effective
are their standard practices, there's something called performance management, is this something that can help people standardize their way of having touchpoints with employees and finding out that information employees might not necessarily be voluntarily giving up or thinking to give up regarding how they think about their job,
we are moving now to this label called performance management. Some people call it continuous performance feedback, continuous performance management, as opposed to what we used to call performance appraisal, which was the one time of year that you've sat down and had a meaningful discussion with your supervisor about your performance. Now, we're saying that those one time conversations have become passe. And a lot of the big companies are doing away with them. I just read recently that Microsoft has done away with them. GE, some of the bigger companies, progressive companies have said, You know what this needs to be a day to day thing. You need to give people immediate feedback, positive and constructive on their performance. And then maybe once a month, stop for 30 minutes, maybe have a discussion, write some notes, type those notes, rather. And maybe at the end of the year, we have 12 Little performance discussions that make up the big now performance review for the year. And then you aren't pushing all of this off to one time a year, employees are getting that constant feedback, that constant opportunity to talk with our managers. And those companies that are doing this kind of thing are reporting that this concern about employees feeling valued and doing meaningful work is decreasing. So they're happier. That's an
interesting point, too, because I think that sometimes if you have an annual performance review, things might be starting to slide or going south with what the expectations of an employee might be. But they might not necessarily know it. And so when they get hit with a bad performance review, and they haven't had enough touch points, since the year prior, when their goals were set, they might come as a shock to them, it might not come as a shock to the manager, they might be like, Why isn't this person doing what we clearly talked about 11 months ago, but I think for some employees, they might not necessarily know that they're not heading in the direction that their manager had thought that he or she had clearly
set forth. Excellent point. And we have always said the performance appraisal should never have surprises, that would certainly be an example of a surprise that you would not want someone to get. And conversely, going right along with that, what if the employee a few months ago decided that they wanted to have a career change? Or what if they decided they wanted to do something different within your own area? If you're not having these conversations and not building trust, that might not come up and that employee could leave. And you only hear later that if you could have just talked with them more, they would have stayed. So what a shame that it was this lack of touch points that cause somebody to move on something you
mentioned earlier was when you're giving employees feedback, that the feedback sometimes can be very useful and very helpful employees might they might appreciate it. However, sometimes, you know, there has to be feedback regarding things that are negative things that aren't meeting to the standard that you want. How do you deal with making sure that an employee is not defensive about feedback that they're taking it in the right way, or that it's being delivered in the right,
there takes a lot of practice. And all of us have some responsibility in those conversations to not become defensive, but to adopt an attitude that we need to hear it and find out how we got off track and go to that root source and try to solve that. Unfortunately, not everybody is good at that. And we do have people who who kind of go to the defensive side, but maybe if they do, you come back again and follow up that conversation and be sure that you don't leave it as being a defensive situation. Come back again, follow it up maybe two or three times until you know you get to the place where We're in that best place. But I would also say that if you are having frequent conversations and giving frequent feedback, the chances of the employee becoming defensive for no good reason is probably minimized, because they're gonna trust you. And if everything has been going along or right, and you've been giving this positive feedback, and then there's a little blip, I think that's far more tolerable than if suddenly, after a few months, they haven't heard much good at all, you bring them in and say, I need to give you some constructive feedback here. Where's the positive been, if the positive had been there first, the negative is going to be a whole lot more easy to swallow and accept. So we're back to, if we just can do this frequently enough and build a trust and build a confidence and make it easy to talk to each other. I think a lot of that could be minimized.
Even with touch points, some employees just don't want to voice their concerns. They don't want to stir the pot, maybe they're conflict avoidant, maybe they're intimidated by that sort of thing. And it could be as you say, generational, it's the style of communication face to face might be intimidating. In other cases, some people just really pull back when it comes to having to assert something that bothers them. There's certain personalities. So as a manager, this person might still be a good employee, but you want to hear if something's going wrong. How do you deal with something that you don't necessarily know because somebody is conflict avoidant?
So that is a casebook study that probably goes in a textbook. And if we could find the answer, we could probably all make make headlines. Those employees, I'm going to call them in a kind way. introverted, conflict avoidant, what you just said, some of those people are wonderful workers, they sit very quietly, they do their job, you don't hear much from them, they appear to be okay. But then one day they submit their resignation. And you're wondering, what happened? What did you not do? Those are the probably the bigger challenge for everybody. Because while they do tend to be very good workers, you have to draw them out. So those folks require, I think, more questioning, when you get them in conversations. How are you? How are you doing? What more can we do? What are the challenges? Would you like in the job? Are you satisfied with what you have? And I think frequency, more frequent discussions with those kinds of personalities can pay dividends, it takes longer to build trust, and confidence with that kind of personality. But rather than just let it go and say, Oh, well, he or she is just the quiet type, I worry more about those people, because you really need to try to understand them better. And if they're that good, even if they're quiet, just be sure that both you and they are feeling good. And back to our theme here a feeling valued. I have had experiences with people who are like this. And when they do something great and get an award, I want to know how they want to celebrate, because I've supervised people before who say, I don't want a party, I don't want anybody jumping up and down. Just put it in the newsletter. That's fine for me. And then there are others who are those extroverts who want the streamers and the balloons and the celebrations. So I think it's important to ask people don't assume, but ask people how we can celebrate their accomplishments. And that's another small way to build trust, I think
a real challenge for some managers is they have to have an eye on the people, they supervise all of the different touchpoints all of the different management styles in some cases, but yet, they're still getting a pretty good workload of stuff from their boss. How can people strive to be better managers when they also have to try to juggle so many other things that they're doing?
I think it's the responsibility of a manager to go to their manager and say, You know what, I'm getting a little over extended here. And people are always a priority. So let's say that I have 10 subordinates that I supervise. If I'm going to meet with 10 people every month for 30 minutes, that's got to be the priority. And I have to let my management know that that's important to me, and the other things they're giving me might need to take a backseat to that. But you want to be sure that you clarify that with your manager and help them understand what you're dealing with and hopefully, they will agree with you. If they don't, then it's time to work something out where different duties can be maybe reassigned because this I think is what has happened to a lot of managers and kind of why we're at this place where 27% of the people are leaving I think too many managers have said, I am overworked. And I am going to let some of these meetings that I know I need to have go. Because it looks like the people are okay. But apparently they're not. And they shouldn't be. So we can't let this keep sliding, where we say, well, I've got to do a project. So I'm going to cancel three meetings this month with people, that's going to come back to haunt you. And time management prioritization of all of these things, should never take a backseat to being overburdened with just all kinds of work.
Sometimes managers get into a position because they're really good at one thing they do, and they advance. But what they do might not have been managed people do organizations frequently enough, take in consideration the fact that some managers might need to have training to be managers, they might know the job of the people that they're now in charge of. But they might not necessarily know the things that we're talking about just today.
So I'm going to take you back to the 1950s 1960s. And the paradigm back then was, if you were good at a technical job, you surely could lead all the people who did those jobs like you did. So what we saw in that era was a whole lot of people being promoted to management who were very good technically. But then they got into management. And they were supervising those people. But what we began to realize probably in the 70s, but much more so in the 80s Was that managing is a completely different skill set than what you were doing operationally or technically. And we made a lot of headway in the 80s and 90s, the early 2000s, in recognizing that, and the journals were full of articles about how management training should be separated away from technical training, and it was a whole department within a training, function management, development and management training. I am sad to say that I think we're starting to slip back into that mindset that if you're really good at what you do, technically, let's just promote you over this group of people and you can supervise them. But we didn't say often enough, either. Before we do this, or right after we do this promotion, you need to go away and do a comprehensive training program in managing, supervising leading, because that skill set is still different. And it's getting more and more different as we move ahead. And I think this need that we have identified and communicating more with people is the result of the fact that we have just said, Okay, you go be a leader, but we've left them standing if they've never led before. And they don't quite know how to do this yet. So I'm afraid we've shortchanged people. And I think it's easily corrected, we just need to say that we recognize those and get folks where they need to go for the management training. Well, Terry,
thanks so much for coming in and talking to us about this. It's something that most of us have experienced one way or the other in the workplace. And so it's great to think a little bit about how there is a responsibility for management employees upper management, to think about what's going on with satisfaction in the workplace, because ultimately, that's going to make for better operations.
My pleasure, thank you.
Terry low teaches business related classes at Heartland Community College and at Illinois State University. He specializes in human resources. If you're interested in other topics about business, communications, diversity, and more, check out our other random acts of knowledge podcasts. You can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify and audiobook. Thanks for listening
