When studying the overall culture of a company, and how culture can affect the organization’s bottom line, it’s crucial to understand that many issues arise from the leadership level, and your leadership needs to understand this as well. We take a pretty scientific approach to employee engagement, and understanding it’s role in creating better culture, and improving profit margins. To do so, we break down every organization into five categories, including leadership.
Leadership has a direct impact on line management. It also has a direct impact on culture. So when we study leadership in particular, we break it up into three categories itself: adhoc practices, employee training, and continuous improvement activities.
1) Adhoc practices are reactive actions for solving workplace problems. These actions should not wait because problems eat the performance and customer satisfaction.
2) Employee training is important in keeping the working skills and competencies at a good level. Training should be planned in advance according the operative and strategic needs.
3) Third, there should be continuous improvement practices which accept that organization operations change and develop in line with tangible investments (including your staff) and business strategy.
We recommend line managers, or supervisors, having a yearly HR-practices roadmap. This overall plan should include, for example, employee surveys, group development meetings, and performance appraisals, which are the activities that can be planned in advance. Of course, Adhoc practices, like early involvement discussions, are essential to know, but naturally can’t be scheduled in advance.
Line managers also have to overcome the social dilemma, when management requires maximum profit, yet are in a situation where team quality of working life needs improving. Team leaders know that improving staff well-being and solving problems will require precious working time, which therefore seem to reduce the monthly profit.
On the other hand, maximizing the monthly profit without trying to spend the time improving your quality of working life, could ultimately eat into employee performance for the future profit of the company. Many leaders fall into this trap because the monetary drivers are so powerful. It is a paradox that those managers that require maximum profit may also cause the loss of competitiveness in the long run.
