What constitutes an effective manager today? Worklytics research found that the role of the manager has changed exponentially since the pre-pandemic. With the rise of hybrid models and distributed teams, greater employee expectations, and the need to integrate new technologies – these significance shifts in the workplace are all making the role of managers more complex.

To discuss these shifting dynamics, in this episode of the Digital HR Leaders Podcast, host David Green is joined by Catherine Coppinger, Head of Customer Insights at Worklytics. Together, they delve into Worklytics latest findings on manager effectiveness, revealing some surprising insights that challenge the traditional views of management.

Topics covered in the discussion include:

• How the role of managers has evolved post-pandemic due to hybrid work models, distributed teams, greater employee expectations, and new technology integrations.

• Explanation of what passive data is and how it can be utilised to assess manager effectiveness from workplace tools.

• Analysis of how a manager’s network density affects the effectiveness of hybrid and return-to-office strategies.

• Insights into the optimal frequency of communication between managers and their remote or hybrid team members.

• Examination of the effects of delayering trends in large organisations on manager and organisational effectiveness.

• Exploration of the best team size for maximising managerial effectiveness based on recent research findings.

• Discussion on the ethical considerations in using passive data to inform business and HR strategies.

For anyone interested in understanding and enhancing team dynamics and manager effectiveness through data, this episode is for you.

Support from this podcast comes from Worklytics, a people centric analytics solution that combines passive listening with Organisational Network Analysis (ONA) to help you understand how work is getting done.

Curious to see how it works?  Worklytics is offering a free Collaboration Analysis to the first 10 qualified companies who express interest by clicking on the following link: www.worklytics.co/DigitalHRLeaders

[0:00:00] David Green: The rise of hybrid models and distributed teams, greater employee expectations and the need to integrate new technologies are all making the role of managers more complex.  But what exactly constitutes a great manager at your organisation; what can recent research tell us about the ingredients of a successful manager; and, how can you use people analytics to understand and enhance managerial effectiveness?  Worklytics, the sponsors of this series of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, regularly publish insightful research on team dynamics.  I regularly include these resources in my monthly LinkedIn data-driven HR newsletter.  Worklytics' most recent research on manager effectiveness is particularly insightful, as it found that some of the attributes required to be a good manager today are profoundly different from what constituted manager effectiveness prior to the pandemic. 

To delve into this research, I am joined by Catherine Coppinger, Head of Customer Insights at Worklytics.  In our conversation, Catherine will share insights on the evolving role of managers, the surprising findings from their latest study on manager effectiveness, and how organisations can leverage passive data to foster stronger leadership in these changing times.  For anyone interested in using data to understand and enhance team dynamics and manager effectiveness, this is an episode you do not want to miss.  So without further ado, let's get the conversation with Catherine started.

Today, I'm delighted to welcome Catherine Coppinger, Head of Customer Insights at Worklytics, to the Digital HR Leaders Podcast.  Catherine, welcome to the show.  Please could you share with our listeners a little bit about yourself and your background, your role at Worklytics, and maybe also bring us up to date with the progress Worklytics has made since we had Phil Arkcoll on the show last year, about ten months ago?

[0:02:10] Catherine Coppinger: Absolutely.  Well, first of all, thank you for having me, excited to be here.  As you mentioned, I lead customer insights for Worklytics, which essentially means my team and I help customers make use of the data that underlies your collaboration, tools like the calendar, email, and Slack in a way that still protects employee privacy.  We're sort of a mini consulting arm within Worklytics and we do anything from full deep-dive projects on a particular topic, to advising on methodologies among teams that are working on projects themselves. 

So, my background is really at the intersection of workplace analytics, go-to-market strategy, and consulting.  I spent a good part of my early career at LinkedIn doing any one to three of those things at the same time.  But what I really most enjoy is helping the customers of earlier-stage companies realise business value from data.  So, that's the main thing I'm doing at Worklytics, and it's been really fun so far.  In terms of progress that we've made over the past ten months, I would say the main thing that's different is how the world of work itself has evolved, given that the use cases for passive listening, which is in a lot of ways what we're doing, have evolved with the market.  So, this time last year when you were talking with Phil, we were doing a lot of helping teams with returns to the office and executing there, understanding meeting reduction initiatives and how to make those improved.  Whereas, now that we've mainly settled on that front, or at least are more settled, we've really been digging in on the realities of distributed work.  So, that's what's going on now.  We've evolved the product to take that into account, but the main difference is that.

[0:03:51] David Green: What we're going to really discuss, or what I'd like to discuss first, and certainly first of all, is the recent research that you've done on manager effectiveness.  Because as well as actually helping individual clients that you work with at Worklytics, Catherine, you're also publishing quite a lot of aggregate insights on some of the stuff that you're finding, which I think is a really important contribution to the field.  And I definitely recommend those listening that are interested in this type of work to actually check out the Worklytics site, where you see a lot of the work that Catherine publishes.  We are going to talk around passive data as well and passive listening, so maybe before we get onto manager effectiveness now, I'm just changing my mind, it might be helpful, can we just kind of explain to people what passive listening actually is and the passive data sources, because there may be some listeners that aren't quite sure what that is?

[0:04:40] Catherine Coppinger: Yeah, of course.  So, happy to delve into any and all of the above.  When we say passive data, we're really talking about an extension of employee listening that goes beyond just what people say in a survey, to really provide those behavioural insights about how work is getting done and what that looks like at a more granular level.  So, if you think about your work day, you might be badging into a building or an office, maybe you're sending a message on Slack, maybe you're on a video call of some sort.  All these activities that are happening throughout the day create a trail of data that many organisations aren't necessarily leveraged to their fullest.  So, what we're doing is kind of taking all of that metadata from the different tools and pulling it together in a way that makes it usable and harnessable for analysis. 

One reason I think this is important and is really exciting, especially right now, is that the traditional role of HR was just around, or was really around, at least in my view, understanding structure and hiring and process.  Whereas now, leaders are being asked to more directly hit on the operations of the business; and to do this, understanding workflows and collaboration and networks are all really critical pieces of the puzzle.  So, that's what we mean in terms of passive data and that's of course a big focus for our company.

[0:06:01] David Green: What prompted you and Worklytics to look into this topic of manager effectiveness?

[0:06:06] Catherine Coppinger: Yeah, so it's a great question, one that's always interesting to me as well when I read other research from other firms.  This one for us, like most of our research, was prompted by a combination of customer feedback and questions that we're hearing, as well as kind of a meta-analysis looking at all of the work that we had done.  To me, one thing that's really interesting about the frontline manager group in a modern workplace is how critical these people are to the success of an organisation, but how overlooked they can be in terms of the resources that they are provided. 

My team, in general, does a lot of outcome driver research, where we combine behavioural data with some sort of outcome, whether it is a survey or something like attrition or performance ratings, etc.  And even when managers are not the topic of whatever we're looking into, it's pretty frequent that one of the takeaways that bubble up as a driver has to do with the manager.  So, for example, how frequently you meet one-on-one with your manager, which seems like perhaps a basic thing, is actually a very good predictor of how happy you are at your company and how long you intend to stay there.  So, we're seeing managers as an important group within the organisation from that research.  And then in parallel, over the past few months, we've started to hear more and more that manager-related survey results, and in particular perceptions of support, have started to decline, at some companies, not all of course, but that was an interesting trend for us that prompted us to say, "Wait a second, maybe we should dig a little bit deeper into this group and try to understand what makes a good manager and what are the various factors that contribute there".

[0:07:53] David Green: What were some of the key insights that you found from the study; and maybe, were there any surprising insights as well?

[0:07:59] Catherine Coppinger: Yeah, for sure.  So, I would say yes to all the above, right?  We found a lot of things, I found many of them interesting.  I would say the main ones, so generally speaking, I've alluded to this, but what we're thinking about when we do this research is trying to determine what drives manager success based on the outcome type of research that we do.  And some of those things were relatively basic, right?  So, I mentioned the one-on-ones already, having a regular schedule one-on-one, and in particular we see once every one to two weeks is right about the right range for most managers to have that cadence with their employees.  And it's important that that meeting is scheduled rather than ad hoc.  A lot of managers that I know, and I'm sometimes guilty of this, if you see the person that you manage day-to-day, you think that you're doing your job, you're talking to them.  But those water-cooler type conversations end up not really being as constructive in the long term.  They're a little less career focused, they're a little bit more tactical about what has to get done that day, and therefore less of a driver of perceptions of support. 

Another one that was maybe not that surprising but interesting, is that it's really important how frequently and ideally infrequently your manager messages you outside of normal work hours.  That was a driver of not just support perceptions, but also stress among employees.  When your manager reaches out to you on Slack or some other channel, people tend to respond three to four times faster than they do when it's a peer.  And that, as you can imagine, creates this environment where people feel like they have to be always on, and you're also more likely to do after-hours work if your manager is frequently pinging you after hours.  We also learned that there is sort of a fine line between support and micromanagement.  While manager engagement and involvement in the work is generally a good thing, too much overlap with you and your manager in the same meeting, people get super-frustrated if the manager always reschedules or skips or starts their calls late. 

The other one that I wanted to call out was just the idea of network density.  So, how dense the network of your manager is, is really important, with managers that are more connected to departments outside of their own typically having an easier time driving the kind of support and sponsorship and visibility for their teams that they really need to.  And finally, most surprising to me is that a lot of companies, even big ones, don't really know what of their organisation drives manager success.  So, we would argue that going deeper into the data and really understanding what this looks like is possible and that more companies should do it.

[0:10:47] David Green: Let's explore a little bit more about the managers' network density, because I think that's quite an interesting topic to explore a little bit further.  I mean, do you see that that has as a ripple effect on the success of hybrid and even return-to-office mandates that companies are adopting, for example?

[0:12:12] Catherine Coppinger: Yeah, definitely.  So, generally speaking, I would argue that there is no network at your company that matters more to you as the individual than your managers'.  It's really critical, as we've talked about, to proactively have managers building those networks to ensure their team's work gets put in front of the right stakeholders.  We see this somewhat notably in sales teams, actually.  So, when we're thinking about what drives performance in that kind of organisation, we hear that people think it's activity or effort or some sort of volume type of thing.  But what bubbles up usually in the driver analysis is your network, your manager's network, who you know internally that can help you get the job done.  So that, I think, is one really critical component. 

But to your point on hybrid work and the RTO situation, we do see that network size, interestingly, when teams become more remote does start to contract a little bit, and that some amount of in-person interaction can help with this.  But most companies aren't really equipping managers, at least that I have seen and heard, with the "why" around needing to be in the office, if that's something that the company is pursuing, and therefore engagement among the management layer tends to be a little bit lower.  So, yeah, I think in terms of the return-to-office idea, we tend to recommend starting with the managers and just equipping them with knowledge about what in-person time means to their organisation.  If there is evidence that it's critical, starting there usually helps get the managers on board, and then ultimately the teams follow when that is the starting point.

[0:13:58] David Green: So, what does your research say about the frequency of communication between your remote hybrid members and maybe those that are spending more time in the office?

[0:14:08] Catherine Coppinger: So, the role of the manager, as we've been talking about, has shifted a bit since the close of the pandemic period.  And one thing that I mentioned is, of course, that first time managers don't have that observational element.  I think one thing that we're seeing in the distributed and remote teams is that more communication is required and more of that is happening on digital channels.  Another thing we're seeing is that when people have more frequent facetime with their manager, they also tend to spend more time talking with their manager on digital tools, which is an indicator that connection is happening, that the in-person connection kind of extends to the digital, and lasts longer than those couple of moments you spend together in the office.

[0:14:52] David Green: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.  And I guess another thing that can impact on manager effectiveness is organisational design.  And there are a number of organisations, I think Meta is an example, that's come out publicly about this, jumping on the delayering trend.  So, for listeners, what we mean by delayering is removing layers of management from the structure.  What has your data shown, Catherine, about how that is affecting managers and indeed organisational effectiveness as well?

[0:15:21] Catherine Coppinger: Yeah, for sure.  Delayering is a very interesting topic.  And I think because Meta started out that trend, a lot of companies are following suit and starting to do that at their organisation.  What we're seeing is that it has somewhat of a hidden cost.  So, for the most part, the perception around this was that management was bloated.  There's not a lot of non-senior individual contributor roles.  So people, like you said before, are promoted into leadership positions that don't really make sense.  There's like a leader that has one direct report and the layers of management looked a little bit either unstructured or just unplanned, for lack of better phrasing.  And the idea, of course, is that delayering will lead to faster decision-making and more efficient workflows.  In some senses, yes, you do get these things in some regard when you are removing layers. 

But going back to the very beginning of our conversation today, right around the time when companies were starting to delayer was when we started to hear those survey scores related to how people feel about their manager going down.  And to us, this was a really interesting timing, because what you start to see is when organisations remove management layers, managers' teams start to get really big.  And there's also to the point where if you're a manager and you have like 15 direct reports, it can be very hard for you to provide adequate levels of support to that many people without burning yourself out.  So, we're starting to see what we would consider burnout risk at the manager level, things like super-long work days, lots of after-hours work, starting to be more prevalent among people that remain in those manager positions, paired with the fact that any time a big organisational change is made, there's going to be some instability that happens for at least the beginning of when people are adjusting to the new normal, if you will.  But that's been super-interesting to see the impact of big teams.  And we've started to do some work to figure out, or help companies figure out, what is the right size, and how do you even start to think about that?

[0:17:32] David Green: Yeah, we're going to come to the optimal size in a minute.  But actually, a really good point; if you overextend your managers by giving them too many direct reports and piling too much work on them, then they will send their emails and communications out of hours, and that will have a negative impact on the people they're managing as well.  And then how can they do weekly or biweekly one-to-ones with their team if they're managing 15, 20 people and they've got to do all their work as well.  It really is piling a lot of weight onto the shoulders of managers.  So, I guess that then leads to the next question, you alluded to it a little bit there, Catherine, what did your research say on optimal team size required to really get the best out of managers?

[0:18:15] Catherine Coppinger: Yeah, for sure.  So, one trend we're starting to see, which for me is really cool, is the use of organisational network analysis to triangulate and get this answer.  Essentially, you want to ensure that, to your point, managers have sufficient time to give the right level of support to their team without going overboard.  You want to make sure you're mitigating the burnout risk elements so that everybody has the optimised workflow.  For most managers, having seven to eight direct reports is associated with some version of the negative outcome.  So, once you cross the eight-ish threshold, it varies a little bit organisation to organisation, that's when you start to kind of be at a level that we would consider to be too much. 

On the other end of the spectrum, when managers have just one or two, sometimes even three direct reports, that's associated with, at worst, micromanagement and at best, underutilisation of company resources and inefficiency in how orgs are structured.  So, yeah, we would recommend that range in the four to six, four to eight, somewhere in there, as what is optimal, though of course the broader recommendation is that there's a way to figure this out for your organisation specifically, and depending on how your teams are structured and who comprises them, the answer might be slightly different.  So, for example, we see that people that are early career or more junior in terms of seniority tend to need more support.  It's maybe not an earth-shattering takeaway, but if you're managing a bunch of people that are right out of university, you're going to need to support them more than if you have a bunch of senior leaders that have been in the workforce for 10, 15 years.  So, there's kind of a mix of what the ideal size would look like, but these are some of the factors that we would consider.

[0:20:10] David Green: Let's talk about passive data.  We mentioned it at the start in terms of defining what it is and the type of tools that you can collect some of this passive data from, so I mean it's email, it's calendar, it's collaboration tools like Slack.  There's an ever-increasing number of collaboration tools that we seem to be using within organisations as well, and you talked about the type of data that you can collect.  I think some of the key elements we'll talk about, the ethics and privacy thing, you're not looking at individual data here, are you?  You're kind of looking at more aggregate data and trying to understand patterns, and then the survey data is another indicator that you can bring in to give you a better understanding of what may or may not be happening; is that right, Catherine?  Maybe you could speak to some of the controls that you put in place at Worklytics around that data so that companies can be reassured that you've got the ethics and privacy boxes ticked.

[0:21:54] Catherine Coppinger: Yeah, definitely.  So, generally speaking, any time you are looking at data that involves an employee, we would really advocate that privacy and security and helping employees feel comfortable with whatever their data is being used for is really central to what you should be doing as part of a rollout.  Intent is where we start with thinking about this on our side.  It's like, the reason that Worklytics was created as a company and the reason a lot of HR teams are embarking on using passive data is to help employees have a better experience at work.  And with that as a starting point, the policies that you should put in place and some of the product features that we built are directly related to that.  So, there's some basic ones, and of course the technology does a lot of the work here, but we go through a lot of effort to pseudonymise IDs so that you can't pick out a person.  Typically when we are delivering an analysis or customers are using it, it's at the aggregate level.  It's never like, "Catherine, you did this thing on this day".  And reporting on trends without exposing information about the people is something that our technology allows you to do. 

We also really advocate for transparency in companies that are either working with us or using any sort of similar type of data.  We recommend a formal comms where maybe you include an opt-out, you detail exactly what the data's going to be used for, and importantly what it won't be used for.  Another thing that I think is a common misconception about passive data and this whole world is that someone is, I don't know, understanding during the workday when you're texting your sister, or when you're moving your mouse, or all of these things, and really what we're looking at is much more limited in scope, and it's the data that's about work, right?  So, how often emails are happening and the flow of information is very different than individual monitoring, which is not something that we would advocate.  So, there's a lot of elements there, but I think intent is really key, as is transparency.  And for us, the technology doing some of the legwork there really helps with making sure that it's feasible for companies to use this data. 

We've recently rolled out Worklytics with a few different customers at very large organisations, and we had instances of offering an opt-out, explaining the project.  And usually, we have a handful of employees at a 10,000-, 20,000-, 30,000-person company that decides to not be part of it.  But for the most part, when you are presenting the information, the ideas in the right way, employees will understand that this is going to help them and then want to be a part of it.

[0:24:39] David Green: We're coming towards the end of our conversation, Catherine.  I'm going to ask you two kind of summary questions.  One, I'm going to ask you to summarise some of the key points from our conversation.  But first, if I'm someone listening to this organisation that maybe hasn't really used passive data or analysed passive data before within the company, but I'm listening to you, Catherine, I'm thinking, "Well, this sounds really interesting, because I think we might have a problem with manager burnout, we might have a problem with team effectiveness because of the way we're working at the moment", what would be your two or three tips that you'd give people to get started with this?

[0:25:17] Catherine Coppinger: Yeah, for sure.  So, if this person is a manager, I would start with the basics around what we know about what makes a good manager.  So, keep your one-on-ones, schedule your messages to send during work hours unless it's an emergency, and work on building your network as a primary component of your management strategy.  For HR leaders and people getting started with this type of work in their main capacity, I would say, assess organisational design in a more data-driven way and use that to inform team size; build an enablement plan for managers when you're making any change at the organisation, whether it's a new policy or an organisational shift, because those really are the critical people to help the message land at the individual contributor level; and then generally, it's relatively seamless, hopefully, to get started with using data in these new ways.  So, yeah, have that be a component of how you think about manager strategy.  And even just something as simple as starting to measure a few of the metrics we've talked about over time can be really critical to improving the ways that your team can work.

[0:26:26] David Green: And I suppose it's being clear on the why.  It's the same with any type of technology, potentially, isn't it?  Don't start with the technology, start with the business problem or business question that you're trying to answer, and then think how the technology or that data source can actually help you answer that question.  Don't be afraid to start small, maybe don't apply it across the whole organisation to start off with.  Maybe start off with a team or a business function or a country or something like that, and then learn and then potentially roll it out into other parts of the organisation as well.

[0:26:57] Catherine Coppinger: Definitely.  We find little mini pilots with a group that's either super-engaged or has more of an issue than other parts of the business, can be a good way to build the level of comfortability you need to then roll something out more broadly.  I think that's a really tangible suggestion that we often see work.

[0:27:15] David Green: How can HR leaders harness the power of employee insights and analytics to help revolutionise the workplace experience?

[0:27:23] Catherine Coppinger: I love the question!  Yeah, so we've been hearing in general, we talked about it a little bit earlier, that the role of HR is changing and evolving, becoming more strategic, for what feels like years and years at this point.  Leaders are being asked to understand more about operational efficiency, decision-making processes, velocity, and other complex issues.  I feel like these concepts are very critical to what HR does.  And what's very exciting about now, today, is that the toolkit has evolved to be able to better meet this kind of challenge.  So, we would fully recommend leveraging all of the data that's available to you, including the more operational behavioural type insights.  By doing that, you can have an outsized impact on workflows at your company and ultimately organisational effectiveness. 

So, yeah, if you think about the questions like, is our strategy for return to office working; how can our managers be more effective outside of a survey; that used to be something you couldn't answer.  And now we're really excited to be a part of helping teams do just that.

[0:28:34] David Green: Really good, Catherine, and it's really impressive, the work that you and the team at Worklytics are doing.  Definitely one I'm keeping an eye on, I think, as we move forward.  Can't believe we've come to the end of our conversation.  Thanks for being a guest on the Digital HR Leaders podcast.  Can you let listeners know how they can follow you and also learn about the great work that you're doing at Worklytics?  I think you have a LinkedIn newsletter; I think you also have a newsletter by the Worklytics site as well, don't you?

[0:29:00] Catherine Coppinger: Yeah, we do.  Well, thank you so much for the conversation and for having me.  You can follow our company page on LinkedIn, which is where we drop the newsletter.  I'm on LinkedIn as well.  Or, if you want to reach out to me directly, I'm catherine@worklytics.co.  So, yeah, looking forward to engaging with the community and thanks again for having me on the podcast.

[0:29:24] David Green: It's been a pleasure, Catherine.  Thank you very much.  Look forward to meeting you in person, hopefully one day.

[0:29:28] Catherine Coppinger: Yeah, that'd be great.