As companies strive to do more with less, some employers have taken the ratio of workers to managers to an extreme. For managers of task workers, such as call center agents or back-office workers, it’s common to see managers overseeing teams of 20 or even 30 hourly employees. While the large numbers alone make managing hard, complicating the task is the rise of telecommuting. Now managers may have some or all of their teams working remotely. In this kind of work environment, it’s worth asking if managers are even expected to really manage their employees.
After all, how much time can managers spend working individually with each person on their team? Between staff meetings, paperwork, recruiting, managing up, and managing across, managers have no time for managing down. If a manager with a team of 20 spends half of his or her time working with individual employees, that still amounts to only a half-hour a week.
In response, management of task workers has devolved to managing by metrics. Managers have dashboards of their favorite key performance indicators (KPIs), which are numbers reflecting productivity, hours worked, quality scores, etc. When an employee shows up as an outlier, meaning his or her scores are substantially below those of his or her peers, then the manager has cause to drill down and study that person. Of course, that means that while one or two people might be getting attention from their manager, the vast majority of employees are generally ignored.
A Game of Whack-A-Mole
Managing by metrics doesn’t make sense. To understand why, it helps to look at the performance gap between the actual and potential performance of employees and teams. This gap is substantial. An Enkata productivity study at one client found that on average, workers in the top quartile produced 87 percent more than those in the bottom quartile. In a quality study, it was found that while the top quartile had a near flawless error rate of 0.7 percent, the bottom quartile had an error rate of nearly 13 percent. The patterns are similar everywhere.
In manage-by-metrics environments, a manager would pick a small number of the worst employees and try to coach them to be average. When those employees reach average, he’d move on to the next employees while the ones he’s just finished with revert to their baseline. It looks like a game of whack-a-mole, and it’s unlikely to actually change overall productivity. In the Enkata study, getting the bottom quartile of employees to produce like the average employee would only deliver a net gain in output of 8 percent.
The real opportunity isn’t to get the worst to perform like the average, but to get the average to perform like the best. If managers completely ignored the bottom quartile, and got the two middle quartiles to perform like the top quartile, the gain in output would be 14 percent. Managers who want to see double-digit gains in productivity can only get there by focusing on most or all of their employees.
Tools for Improvement
Unfortunately, this leads to the next problem with managing by metrics. Metrics don’t tell managers what they need to do to help employees improve. While problems for the worst of the worst employees may be obvious, managers can’t tell what to do to help anyone performing reasonably well. Average employees may know the target they’re measured against and stop working once they hit the target. People who could be great may need extra coaching to get past being good. There are dozens of damaging work habits that slow people down, increase mistakes, and prevent people from reaching their potential. Managers have little insight into these habits, and even less of an ability to correct them.
Changing the ratio of managers to employees won’t solve this problem. Even if companies double the ratio of managers to employees, managers still will be strapped for time. More importantly, without tools to help them identify the work patterns that are problems, spending more time with employees won’t really help.
Companies that want to help their employees perform at their potential need to think more about the tools and processes they give the managers to help their teams. Managers don’t need more hours in the day or fewer employees. To really get improvement, managers need:
- Real insight into how each of their employees is working. Work habits and skills have an enormous impact on productivity. Employees may be easily distracted by e-mail or Web surfing. They may have knowledge gaps that slow them down. Being able to understand how people work is the first step in helping them improve.
- Help finding the opportunities to make employees more productive. Knowing how someone works helps find improvement opportunities. Deeper analysis can help find more. For example, understanding the causes of the mistakes is critical for eliminating them. Identifying patterns of behavior is far more useful than finding examples of problems.
- Tools to communicate with employees about how to improve performance. Managers often have a hard time getting past metrics to provide helpful coaching, and many line managers find themselves promoted into the role with little training or support. They need tools that help them show employees how to improve.
- Follow-up support to reinforce improvements and prevent backsliding. The biggest challenge in coaching isn’t the initial conversation, but the follow-up meetings and reinforcement that prevent backsliding and help improved behaviors take root. Too often, employees believe their manager’s interest in them is only temporary, and they can go back to what they were doing when the meeting is over. Too often, employees are right in their belief.
The savings companies may have achieved on greater employee-to-manager ratios are forfeited in lost productivity from poorly managed teams. With the manage-by-metrics paradigm, employers and managers may think they know what is going on. But in focusing on outliers and the worst performers, employers fail to help the majority of their employees reach their potential. If companies rethink management and invest in their managers and tools, they can see substantial performance and quality gains. If not, lost productivity will just be business as usual.
As Chief Marketing Officer, Daniel Enthoven brings 20 years of technology and call center experience to the Enkata team. Enthoven was one of the early employees of Nuance Communications, developing its vertical marketing and channel sales programs. Later, he joined BeVocal as director of Marketing. In 2005, Enthoven joined Trovix, a semantic search company, as vice president of Sales and Marketing. Trovix was acquired by Monster Worldwide in 2008, and Enthoven became vice president of Product Marketing for Monster. Enthoven has a B.A. and an MBA from Stanford University, and has one patent on using voice recognition to find information in stored audio files.
