Let’s face it, there’s never any shortage of management fads and business buzzwords. But they can feel particularly overwhelming these days given that the world of work has been experiencing its biggest shakeup in a generation.
The shift to more hybrid, flexible and asynchronous working has given us a deluge of different management styles, new axioms and conflicting advice about emerging best practice. The sheer level of noise and increasing complexity can be daunting – deterring businesses from confronting crucial shifts and implementing necessary changes.
It can help to try and look at a bigger picture. For example, one useful way to think about all these myriad workplace shifts is to consider the question of employee energy levels. This is a useful big lens that effectively captures issues around hybrid working, productivity, wellness and employee engagement.
Traditionally, bosses have focused on managing people’s time and what they do with it. You see this in how project requirements are described – days spent on tasks, schedules, deadlines, measurable goals and milestones. This approach is not necessarily bad, but it can have some shortcomings. For example, many people work in bursts, rather than at a steady pace – certain staff (and roles) contribute in ways that are not easily measured and, of course, some people work faster than others. These issues are exacerbated in the new flexible, hybrid and asynchronous world of work – making the concept of managing people’s time feel even more old-fashioned. It is increasingly clear that time put in no longer correlates with output. We need a new way of ensuring staff stay productive. Hence the idea of managing energy levels.
So how can managers start thinking in terms of managing their employees’ energy rather than their time?
Until recently, energy levels have been difficult to measure and it’s hard to manage what you can’t quantify. But new technology and tools are changing this. “It’s about understanding when people are productive and what makes them productive, especially in environments such as hybrid workplaces where you don’t have a line manager physically present,” says Lampros Sekliziotis, a product leader at software company Sage.
Sage People, an all-in-one HR and payroll solution, can offer powerful people insights and HR analytics to help managers spot where they can intervene most effectively to keep employees energised and productive. Companies can use insights and analytics to see if people have problems, which indicate flagging energy – for example, are they not taking holidays, are they constantly working long hours or have their absence rates increased? These are often signs of stress or burnout. Moreover, tools such as Sage People can demonstrate where initiatives to tackle these issues work and where they don’t. Data analytics and AI are improving all the time and the more information HR platforms have, the better they get.
Steve Watmore, HR and payroll product manager at Sage, says another example of this energy-based approach might involve using tools and technology to look more closely at meetings. You can delve into how employees find meetings and what they get out of them: “How do staff feel about them? Both past meetings and meetings that are coming up. How is the time used?”
You might, he suggests, use these insights to change hour-long meetings to 45 minutes of focus and 15 minutes of recap. The recap could be made more efficient using tech – for example, AI and transcription tools that pull out and summarise the key points and create an agenda for future meetings. This also frees up the person who once did minutes from a lot of drudge work and allows them to take a more dynamic and energetic role.
Kate Travers, principal solutions consultant at Sage, says much of it is about understanding that employees are not all alike. Different employees, at different life stages, working in different locations are going to have different needs. “Employers can use tools that boost energy and spark engagement and focus,” she explains.
For example, when it comes to invigorating staff through personal development and training, micro-learning tools can give employees more control over their pace of learning new skills and knowledge – allowing them to tailor things so that they feel energised rather than overwhelmed. One such tool is Uptime, a learning and personal development app that offers five-minute learning hacks and is offered to Sage customers.
Micro-learning in bite-sized chunks can be more rewarding as well as empowering. “If I do a day’s training, I feel I’ve got to put it into practice immediately because it’s a valuable investment of a large amount of time,” adds Watmore. But if you do a half hour of training online, it’s very different. Not only is it easy to fit in when you have an hour before lunch, but you don’t feel the obligation to use it immediately. Nonetheless, it makes you feel positive – as if you’re making progress and adding value to your CV.
Other tools and platforms can help by integrating employee wellbeing directly into workflows – such as Sage’s human capital management software (HCM). Again, this helps galvanise people’s energy and can be tailored to the individual. “A combination of HCM and Uptime, for example, can offer a really powerful way to do this,” says Travers.
Ultimately, measuring and maintaining energy levels is a technologically-enabled and holistic approach to doing business the right way in a world where you may no longer bump into your boss in the corridor. Good companies, says Watmore, take the time to find out “what makes people tick and feel engaged”.
Discover more about how managing people is changing in the workplace
