How should managers and managers adapt their management style to meet the expectations and behaviors of new employees?
Since the remote work revolution was caused by various lockdowns, we are now in a position to take a step back and take a closer look at the impact on work habits. Remote work has profound consequences for the “demographic transition” we are facing in businesses.
It seems that the younger generation of employees tend to seek a different way of life. Or they are looking for a job with a clear and meaningful goal that matches their beliefs (Les Echos), or they tend to consider their job as purely food and therefore their center of interest is elsewhere. The second is very much in line with remote or nomadic working habits (Boss Magazine).
The average length of employment in some high-growth companies in the United States is about 1.8 years on average.
These two phenomena have major consequences for businesses, which leads to greater turnover for employers. The lifespan of some high-growth businesses in the United States is 1.8 years on average. (forbes). “The big resignation will pass into a sustained resignation. “(Harvard Business Review). That is why the current trends we are facing can be considered as a demographic transition within businesses.
These 2 trends — remote work & increased turnover — which have been fuelled in recent months have 3 consequences for managers:
The development of management & productivity tools accelerated by remote work has reshaped the role of managers, many are now automated, allowing the same level of performance to be maintained with fewer managers. Then, businesses can choose to operate with fewer managers or change their roles for more personalized relationships with employees. “Organizations that choose to change the expectations of their managers will need to change the mindset and skills of managers, from managing tasks to managing the complete employee experience. “(Harvard Business Review).
In both cases, their ability to transmit knowledge or their ability to empower teams to do so will be essential.
What remains essential, even more and more essential with the new generation and the new way of working, is the quality of exchanges and listening between manager and manager. More than ever, with the trends of remote working and the loss of interest in the company, managers have a role to play in retaining talent.
How? By maintaining regular exchange rituals to capture the employee's needs and nourish their motivation. There are numerous specialized tools for career management, such as our partner Empowill for example, which make it possible to streamline exchanges and make them useful.
There are also innovative and collaborative platforms that have emerged since the acceleration of hybrid work. WorkAdventure is a good example of a platform that aims to make communication between teams more fluid and easier, thus helping the role of managers and the relationship with employees. With your avatar, you can interact spontaneously with your colleagues and collaborate on your team's project while creating social ties.
Studies show that remote workers perform just as well as employees who work in the office. (Gartner). “However, managers think that people who work in the office are more successful and more likely to be promoted than people who work from home. “(Harvard Business Review)
In addition to the potential risk to diversity and inclusion (people from minorities and women are more likely to work remotely), this poses serious threats to organizations that may reward or blame employees for non-objective reasons, making them more likely to leave or disengage from their jobs.
This perception bias is reinforced by managers who publicly declare that remote workers are less efficient (WeWork, Spotify, etc.). There may indeed be a correlation between business performance and the number of remote workers, but it is difficult to establish causality. For this, we should either have access to the individual performance evaluations of these companies (if they are objective), or have several data points from numerous companies in various sectors to compare different work policies without bias caused.
Going from a situation where employees stay for 3 to 5 years, to a situation where they look the other way after a year and a half, completely changes the way companies must manage know-how.
On the one hand, organizations can no longer afford to spend days training to integrate new hires or to wait 6 months until they have found out on their own how to navigate the organization and the processes in place.
On the other hand, new recruits are much more demanding in terms of skills and training than previous generations (forbes).
Not being able to provide healthy and relevant training programs makes it more likely that new hires will leave in the coming months and their expectations go beyond meetings that last for hours or outdated PowerPoint booklets that they stop reading after the 2nd page and are asked to update 1 week after they arrive.
Not being able to quickly and effectively secure the know-how accumulated over the last 6 months before the departure of employees can put the business at risk given the importance and unpredictability of resignations.
Organizations need to move from a system where few people have the power to share knowledge to a system where any individual easily disseminates knowledge to deliver the most relevant and actionable content as quickly as possible to the person who needs it.
By comparison, businesses should move from a vision where training materials are controlled by small groups of people and delivered through a single channel, as was the case with television, to a system where everyone can share content and tutorials with clear editorial guidelines and minimal moderation, as YouTube allows. “70% of millennial users watched YouTube to learn how to do something new” (Think with Google).
“With Komin, we documented our operating procedures 10x faster than with paper”
- J. Cerruti (Methods & Industrialization Manager)
