In digital transformation, managers are ‘mission critical’

Line managers are the ‘unsung heroes’ of evolving modern workplaces, but they need better support to manage the challenges of future

As digital transformation reshapes workplaces, line managers increasingly are on the front lines of organisational change, yet they often receive little support. Human resources expert Carol Kulik says better-designed roles reflecting modern challenges are key to fostering a healthy and productive workforce in the face of constant change.

In a presentation for Arch_Manu (ARC Centre for Next-Gen Architectural Manufacturing) – an interdisciplinary, industry-focused research and training initiative hosted by UNSW Sydney and funded by the Australian Research Council – the Bradley Distinguished Professor at the University of South Australia suggested a rethinking of how organisations design and support managerial roles as rapidly changing workplaces add to an ever-growing burden.

In her talk, Line managers: The unsung heroes of your organisation, Prof. Kulik pointed to research showing that employees report experiencing two significant human resources events every week about things they care about, such as conversations about their career, skill development or work arrangements. “But, importantly, they are not having those conversations with HR managers; they’re having them with their line managers.”

This change is largely a good thing, as academics have long encouraged organisations to consider the benefits of this process, known as devolution, said Prof. Kulik, who is also author of Human Resources for the Non-HR Manager.

“What we mean by that is taking some of the day-to-day people management activities that HR managers used to do and putting them in the hands of line managers, so that your HR people are doing more of the long-term, strategic things, and line managers are making those decisions on the ground where they have a better understanding of their employees’ needs,” she said. “They’re in the right place at the right time; they can design more personalised arrangements and practices.”

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The University of South Australia's Professor Carol Kulik said today’s managers have much more challenging jobs than previous generations of managers. Photo: supplied

While employees at organisations that have embarked on a devolution process report feeling like they’re managed better and the organisations, in general, are more effective, a key question is about the impact on an organisation’s line managers. “They’re taking on these big responsibilities, and I feel kind of bad for them – I think they’re underappreciated in their roles, and that’s why I use the term ‘unsung heroes’,” Prof. Kulik said. “I think we really need to put them in the spotlight a bit more and demonstrate a little more support.”

‘Creating a flight risk’

A significant barrier to understanding how “mission-critical” managers are, and the challenges of supporting them, is the fact that this is “one of the few roles that you get into because you’re really good at something else”, Prof. Kulik said. “Managing” is not something people aspire to, and that creates a problem from an organisational perspective.

“When we ask young children what they want to be when they grow up, have you ever heard any of them say, ‘I want to be a manager’? Do any of them ever dress up as managers?” she asked. “If you don’t aspire to be a manager and you don’t have that identity developing, you’re probably not looking for opportunities to develop managerial skills,” she added. “Then, suddenly, you’re in the role and have to do everything by trial and error; you’re pretty uninformed.”

Moreover, today’s managers have much more challenging jobs than previous generations of managers. For example, in the 1980s, academic researchers recommended line managers be responsible for five or six employees, which Prof. Kulik said now seems “shockingly low” considering managers in most organisations manage at least double that number of employees, and it’s “not at all unusual” for a manager to have 20 or more direct reports. “Their workload has just gotten bigger”, she said.

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At the same time, managers’ budgets are getting smaller, with fewer dollars per employee for reward systems or training purposes. Meanwhile, managers are increasingly expected to manage employees in dispersed, remote work environments. “We have to remember that these are working arrangements that managers themselves only started experiencing a couple of years ago. They never saw managers doing a good job in this kind of environment; they didn’t have a lot of opportunity to learn best practices,” Prof. Kulik said.

“My point is, we haven’t made this managerial job very attractive,” she added. She cited research showing that, between 2019 and 2022, 29% of people promoted into managerial roles for the first time in US labour markets quit within a month.

“The first time I saw this statistic, I was staggered by it. I thought, ‘isn’t that a shame?’ These are the people you think are your best and brightest, and you’re giving them a promotion that you think is a reward, and instead, what you’re doing is creating a flight risk.”

Challenges of transformation

The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic meant “we moved a lot of the things we used to do face-to-face online and started using technology”, Prof. Kulik said. “We remote-hired, remote-onboarded, remote-trained; we did a lot of things that removed some of those social relationships.”

Following these changes, it has become clear that organisations are “just a lot less sticky”, she said. “People tell us they don’t make friends at work anymore; they used to have a best friend at work, and now they don’t. They’re less likely to know people outside of their own teams, and they’re finding it easier to quit because it was the relationships that held them together. Without those relationship channels, a lot of the messaging gets lost.”

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Developing, rewarding and caring for employees are areas that require better support as organisations go through digital transformation processes. Photo: Adobe Stock

Prof. Kulik said she wanted to emphasise that the “one enduring relationship” in this transformation process is the one between employees and their managers. “And we’re asking a lot, now, of this relationship,” she said, as adding the digital piece to the transformation process only increases the challenge.

“Not only are you trying to change the message – you’re trying to change it with technology that itself is changing. You’re looking for a workforce that is motivated to continuously learn and upskill, that is keen to experiment and innovate. The digitality makes the transformation even harder and puts more pressure on that link between manager and employee,” Prof. Kulik said.

Managers’ changing roles

There are three areas where managers are central and which are undergoing dramatic changes as organisations digitally transform – and where there can be better support on the ground during the transformation process. According to Prof. Kulik, these are developing, rewarding and caring for employees. She then asked what organisations would look like if they “really took this seriously”, beginning with the employee development piece.

“We know that there is an overall trend toward microlearning and self-initiated training, and this is one of the big places where we’ve lost a lot of social relationships,” as training has become much more individualised, Prof. Kulik said.

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“For the most part, again, this is a good thing; self-directed learning has lots of advantages,” she added. But there are a few problems with how people learn and train that throw up further challenges, particularly for managers: people are poor judges of what they need to know, how they should learn and how much they need to learn.

“My point is, people don’t do a very good job of training on their own,” Prof. Kulik said. As a result, only about 60% of training transfers immediately; that figure drops to about 30% after a year. “Managers are critical in determining that transfer-of-training process, and there are lots of things they can do when an employee comes back from training,” she said. For instance, they can ask employees to demonstrate what they learned from training and set up sandboxes for them to practice new skills.

“It’s easy for me to say that; it is incredibly difficult for a manager to do it on the ground because they have deadlines, they have customers, they have things they have to do,” Prof. Kulik added. “They don’t really have time to create that space.”

She then proposed another “what if”: “When we design training and development, what if, sure, we kept the learner in mind, but we also focused on the manager’s needs? How would you build in enough slack so that managers could facilitate transfer of training? Most managers don’t work in environments that give them that slack, so they have to be quite proactive.”

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Research shows that people experience less stress and greater wellbeing when they can control the stressors and demands in their life. Photo: Adobe Stock

Rewarding employees, caring for wellbeing

Turning to the other areas in which managers are central, Prof. Kulik noted that “star performer” strategies are increasingly taking hold as a way of rewarding employees by focusing on a specific metric, such as billable hours or new clients. While this makes sense in many ways, she said, it also creates additional pressure on managers because of “what gets lost”.

“In a star performer strategy, you can start to grow brilliant jerks – it does not reward people for helping, for mentoring, for socialising,” she said. “It’s a problem if you’re a line manager because now, suddenly, you’re the one who’s responsible for all the mentoring and development.”

She asked what would happen if organisations instead designed systems to “reward the right kinds of behaviour, rather than the results of that behaviour”. In other words, what if they rewarded values?

“I ask managers if they reward values, and they say, ‘Oh yes, of course, because in our performance evaluation system, we have five questions, and the last one is on values’,” she said. “But I’m really asking them to think big – what if you really put values at the front; what if all those questions were about values?”

Expectations are also evolving around managers’ role of caring for their employees’ wellbeing. A recent Deloitte survey revealed that 94% of employees believe their manager is responsible for their wellbeing – and that 96% of managers agree.

Read more: How has COVID changed the way we should collaborate and innovate?

But as organisations seek to respond to digital transformation in this sector with an ever-growing offering of employee wellbeing activities, such as mindfulness training, well-being apps and lunchtime yoga, despite no clear relationship emerging between these specific practices and employee wellbeing, “I think we’re starting to get pretty disenchanted with this,” Prof. Kulik said. “It’s not working.”

The importance of autonomy

Fortunately, organisational researchers already know of a major key to supporting employee wellbeing, Prof. Kulik said, referring to autonomy.

“There’s a wealth of research showing that people experience less stress and greater wellbeing when they can control the stressors and demands in their life. The more autonomy we build into people’s jobs, the more wellbeing they’re likely to experience,” she said.

However, an underappreciated aspect of autonomy is how complex it can be, with levels of control over how and when we work, not just where. This has been evident in the current return-to-office debates, which tend to oversimplify the issue as “employees want to work from home, managers want them in the office”, Prof. Kulik said.

“During COVID, employees experienced unprecedented levels of multifaceted autonomy along with remote work. One of the things we often talk about in the job design literature is that once you give people a taste of autonomy, they never want to go back.”

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Line managers need to be front and centre in any kind of organisational transformation to help initiate change. Photo: Adobe Stock

However, this runs up against another problem: that managers are "notoriously bad" at giving employees autonomy, Prof. Kulik said. “Where we’re seeing this on a broad level is that as more and more managers recognise that employees value working remotely and don’t want to be in the office, they simultaneously increase their monitoring of employees. 

"We’re seeing an upward trend in employee surveillance; this is why we have a whole business evolving around mouse jigglers. That’s a great example of where we’re messing up the message, sending two signals: ‘Of course I trust you to work from home, but I don’t trust you enough to not monitor it.’”

Starting small

Prof. Kulik’s final “what if” proposition, therefore, involved trying to “pack as much autonomy into jobs as we possibly can”, while also empowering managers to give employees that autonomy and educating them about its importance. For line managers in workplaces that do not give employees much autonomy, she suggested a good “start here” would be to “put your own oxygen mask on first”. 

“It surprises me very much how little autonomy we give managers,” she said. “During COVID, managers were the last to leave offices and work from home; now that people are returning to office environments, managers are the first ones to come back. When you become a manager, one of the very first things you do is give up control over your schedule. It’s very hard to exert control over your own autonomy.”

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As a result, line managers are not doing a good job of role-modelling self-care, she said, adding that it’s a good reminder of the small things managers and organisations can do to start enacting the necessary change. “I think the most important thing is that we just start anywhere – that we just start putting line managers more front and centre in any kind of transformation we’re trying to initiate in organisations,” Prof. Kulik concluded.

Arch_Manu is the ARC Centre for Next-Gen Architectural Manufacturing, whose mission is to address the productivity, performance and sustainability issues in Australia’s Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) sector through a sector-wide digital transformation. The centre is a transdisciplinary government-funded research and training centre with strong industry partnerships through 25 industry-embedded PhD candidates across three Australian universities. Arch_Manu plans additional sessions on the arena of data security, data privacy, and ethical AI considerations.

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