How do your Frontline Managers impact your bottom-line?

 

70% of employee performance, discretionary effort and engagement is driven by an employee's immediate manager.¹ In your organisation more people report to a frontline, or first-level, manager than anyone else.

 

These two facts mean that the productivity of your company, or your business unit, is dictated by the youngest, least experienced and least skilled managers in your workforce. Their impact on employee performance far outweighs that of you and your senior managers in delivering on your organisational strategy.

 

No doubt you've seen the results of this situation in one or more of the following scenarios:

 

 

What is the key to better performance?

 

Nearly all jobs require employees to make choices about their work, such as the pace at which they work, how and how well the work is done. The extent to which they choose to do more than the minimum requirement dictates their level of productivity or performance and is referred to as ‘discretionary effort'.

 

Increased discretionary effort is a direct predictor of improved performance. As such it is the only way an organisation can maximise performance. This means that organizations that can trigger valued discretionary effort from their employees do better than others. And the key to triggering this discretionary effort is increased employee engagement.

 

The conclusions from any number of studies around the world illustrate this. For example, a meta-study undertaken by Gallup found that highly engaged workgroups within companies outperform groups with lower employee engagement levels. Top-quartile business units have 18% higher productivity and 12% higher profitability than bottom-quartile business units. Conversely, bottom-quartile business units experience 31% to 51% more employee turnover, 51% more inventory shrinkage, and 62% more accidents than those in the top quartile of workplace engagement.²

 

 

Overall, moving from low to high engagement levels can result in an improvement in employee performance by up to 20 percentile points.

 

In addition, more highly engaged employees are higher performers who frequently help others with heavy workloads, volunteer for other duties, and are constantly looking for ways to do their jobs more effectively.²

 

 

How emotional commitment increases frontline performance

 

There are, however, two types of employee engagement - emotional commitment and rational commitment. It turns out that emotional commitment is four times more valuable than rational commitment in driving employee effort. Employees stay with their organisations when they believe it is in their self-interest (rational commitment). But they exert discretionary effort when they believe in the value of their job, their team and their organisation (emotional commitment). ³

 

An employee's immediate manager has tremendous impact on their level of emotional commitment to the job, team and organisation. High-scoring manager activities and attributes increase emotional commitment to the job by 34%, to the team by 47% and to the organisation by 38%. This has a significant impact on discretionary effort, which is evident in the following graph:³

 

 

Where the opportunity lies

 

Unfortunately, the majority of frontline managers are much less successful in the frontline leadership activities and practices that drive emotional commitment and trigger discretionary effort than they are in the process, or policy-based, aspects of effective management.⁴

 

The major opportunity for productivity and performance gains in most organisations lies with their frontline managers. This can be achieved by triggering valued discretionary effort in their team members. But in order to do so, they need to understand, and become fluent in, the effective leadership activities and practices that achieve this.

 

For more information on how Brava's frontline leadership expertise can help you raise the performance bar in your organisations, contact Blair Stevenson, CEO on +64 (0)9 623 3662

 

Creating high-performing workplaces through Frontline Leadership

 

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Sources:

¹ The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave. Leigh Branham with the Saratoga Institute. Amacom, 2005

² 12 The Elements of Great Managing. Rodd Wagner and James K Harter. Gallup Press, 2006

³ Driving Performance and Retention through Employee Engagement. Corporate Leadership Council, 2004

⁴ Engaged employees drive the bottom line. Tower Perrin - ISR brochure