Workplace well-being has been a central focus for organisations in recent years, resulting in a host of initiatives intended to make staff happier and more motivated. From ping-pong tables to free fruit, ‘duvet days’ to flexible working, and well-being apps to yoga in the park, employers are trying everything to retain and keep employees happy. But is it working?
While these are all nice-to-haves, the reality is these initiatives just aren’t having the desired effect. According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2024 report, only 23% of employees globally are engaged and 41% are stressed. In the UK, engagement is at a miserable 10, and the report found that employee well-being declined further in 2023.
So what can businesses do to truly move the needle on employee happiness and well-being? The secret is cultivating workplaces where people want to be and instilling a sense of trust and autonomy within teams. When staff feel trusted to get the job done, and encouraged to take control over their work, their sense of fulfilment skyrockets and engagement increases. Easily said, but how can we create that sort of culture?
Our managers hold the key to achieving this. Managers account for 70% of the variance in employee engagement, and research has shown that they have the same impact on people’s mental health as their partners, doctors or therapists. Staff happiness, perhaps unsurprisingly, is contingent on good management practices.
Here are three tips for managers to make a measurable impact on employee happiness and engagement.
Stop and take a step back
In the absence of clear guidance as to how they’re supposed to perform as a line manager, many default to a typical command-and-control approach. When an employee approaches them with a problem at work, they provide solutions and tell the employee what to do based on the manager’s own experience.
Though coming from a good place, the manager has inadvertently prevented the employee from learning how to resolve the problem for themself. In doing so, managers create a culture where employees feel a lack of control over the outcome of their work and rely on their manager’s approval before anything can move forward. Managers risk stifling the progress of their people, as well as preventing them from developing the confidence and initiative to act when they’re not there.
Managers must learn to stop, take a step back and bite their tongue, rather than sharing their opinion so readily. This brings them into the moment to assess what their best response could be for the benefit of the employee and their development.
Identify coachable moments
Having made a conscious effort to stop, the next step is identifying whether the situation presents a coachable moment—mentally assessing whether it’s an emergency or high-pressured situation or is there the potential here for learning?’, ‘is the person open for this conversation right now?’. A quick assessment here can guide a manager in how best to engage an employee and help them to identify their own solution instead of fixing it for them.
Ask more powerful questions
If the situation is a coachable moment, managers must practice an enquiry-led approach by learning how to ask more powerful and stimulating questions that can generate a positive outcome.
Questions are key not only to increasing performance and engagement, but also for fostering an authentic connection with staff. Whenever a manager decides to ask a well-intentioned question about a problem, they help to engage the other person’s problem-solving capabilities by shifting their focus onto what they can change about the situation. This opens employees up to a wealth of skills development – it can help them to prioritise their tasks more efficiently, build confidence in decision-making, and foster a deeper sense of purpose in their work. Questions asked in a purposeful way indicate the manager’s belief in the employee’s capability to succeed, which lays that important foundation of trust and collaboration that motivates staff to excel within the organisation.
A good place for managers to start is by replacing ‘why?’ questions with ‘what?’ Questions. Why-based questions can feel personal, like the employee is to blame somehow or that they’re being criticised, which can lead to defensiveness. Replacing why…? with what…? removesthe (unintended) personal inference from a question and focuses on the situation itself. The employee is then more likely to be open to exploring specificsrather than feeling that they need to justify or defendtheir actions.
Following these steps invites managers to break old habits and begin to adopt new behaviours, including situational awareness, which together help to embed a coaching mindset.
Bringing coaching into the flow of work in this way is the golden ticket for managers to give staff the trust and autonomy they need to feel happier and thrive at work. Taking a step back, assessing the situation and learning to ask insightful questions for the benefit of the other person are all key skills every modern manager needs to create a culture of value, support and fulfilment.
