When manager training is suggested or announced, there is often a level of skepticism. What’s the importance of supervisor development vs. getting one’s daily tasks done on time? Is is really that important for supervisors to have soft skills? What’s the ROI of this training?
Before I answer these questions, let me explain the problems with NOT giving your team the proper training:
Poor supervision has far-reaching and dramatic effects on an organization. Research demonstrates that supervisors have a direct impact on the workplace in 10 big ways:
Any one of these impacts should be cause for concern. Every one of them has serious consequences for businesses that don’t take them seriously. Stagnating and underperforming business often improve when they take steps to develop supervisors in the most basic ways.
The research that backs this up is abundant, compelling, and undisputed. For example:
Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, authors of “Great Leadership Creates Great Workplaces” and the world’s foremost researchers on leadership, concluded that “The best leaders elicit three time the amount of talent, energy, commitment and motivation from employees compared to their counterparts.”
The CEB’s research affirms this: “Engagement is the key to performance and retention. Highly committed employees try 57% harder, perform 20% better, and are 87% less likely to leave than employees with low levels of commitment.”
The Boston Consulting Group study “From Capability to Profitability: Realizing the Value of People Management” found that “Companies that excel in leadership development experience substantially higher revenue growth and profit margins.”
Bloomberg reports that $11 billion is lost annually due to employee turnover, and HR Dive estimates an average cost of 33% of the employee’s salary to replace him or her. At the same time, 63% of companies say they have to pay more because the job market has gotten so competitive (CareerBuilder), so the cost of replacing employees continues to rise.
HR Dive’s survey found that 75% of employee turnover is preventable (through the direct supervisor). And 78% of employers are worried about a talent shortage but do not take actions, like training supervisors, to prevent turnover (Spherion).
Companies that increase their number of talented/trained managers (vs. untrained) and double the rate of employee engagement because of it achieve, on average, 14.7% higher earnings per share than their competition. Gallup’s study also shows the cause-and-effect of improved supervisor training and employee engagement, the single greatest driver of retention, productivity, customer satisfaction, top line revenue, managed expenses, and profitability.
The benefits of putting trained, capable supervisors in place cannot be overstated. There are ten core skills that new (and not-so-new!) supervisors need in order to boost employee engagement, emotional commitment, and work output. They are:
Most of these skills are not learned or instinctively picked up without formal training. When individual contributors are thrust into supervisory roles without training, they are more likely to rely on policies and authority. This alienates employees and tanks workplace morale.
These are the foundational supervisory and leadership skills embedded in the popular Workplace Conversations program from PFPS. The workshop is available in English and in Spanish. It is customized by supervisor group education level and industry. For example, our bi-lingual trainers work primarily with teams in agriculture, manufacturing, and production environments where many supervisors prefer to receive training in Spanish and without a lot of theory. The program is practical and immediately applicable in all settings.
Soft skills are not optional. They are often overlooked, with a false sense of security coming from having supervisors who are technically proficient. Retaining, motivating and getting the most from employees, though, has nothing to do with functional expertise. Emotional commitment and employee engagement stem directly from the relationships people have with their direct supervisor. To set the company up for short-term success, supervisors have to manage the work. And to set the company up for long-term success, too, supervisors must lead people. Putting people first is the secret to driving every kind of business result.
The emotional commitment is what matters. CEB’s study found that “Emotional commitment drives effort. Emotional commitment is four times as valuable as rational commitment in producing discretionary effort. Indeed, the search for a high performing workforce is synonymous with the search for emotional commitment.”
Emotional commitment starts with supervisors who have soft skills. There’s no around it.
You know, deep down, that the gap in your organization is the result of inadequate or ineffective supervisor training. Busy, over-tasked HR professionals can’t do it all alone! Getting approval for supervisor training may take some doing, especially since the “soft” skills are often seen as optional. Here are some tips for making the business case for supervisory skills training, all related to showing the return on investment your organization can expect.
Add up all the costs of recruiting, screening, interviewing, background checks, hiring, onboarding, and ramp up. Training managers will save you a significant portion of these expenses.
Overtime, rush order deliveries, rework due to errors, tardiness and absenteeism, worker’s compensation, safety violations and non-compliance fines, slow downs in time to fill or interdepartmental handoffs, etc. Training managers so employee engagement increases and additional discretionary effort is applied will save you big dollars here AND drive improved profits, too! Drucker’s research revealed that “… for most companies in which labor costs amounted to roughly half of their total earnings, a 10% increase in productivity would double most organization’s profits.”
In most, replacing a customer requires significantly more time and attention than working with the ones you already have. Losing customers also impairs your ability to get referrals and good word-of-mouth promotion. Gallup gives you the ROI for this one: “Organizations with above-average levels of employee engagement reap 50% higher customer loyalty levels.”
Hewitt Associates research proved that “Employee engagement scores were 21% higher in double digit vs. single digit growth companies.”
The choice really boils down to this. You can continue admiring the problems you have with disengaged workers, high employee turnover, low productivity, poor customer satisfaction, underwhelming revenue, and suppressed profits. Or you solve all these issues by training your supervisors in the critical skills that result in emotional commitment and create a domino effect of all these benefits.
When everybody is “too busy” to find, facilitate, and attend basic supervisory skills training, it’s a surefire need for said training! Here’s what you need to act swiftly and without regret: