Are you ready to give manager effectiveness a nudge in 2024?

Managers can struggle to lead effectively. But, more often than not, their shortcomings aren’t caused by a lack of care and concern for their teams, but a lack of support for their own development, according to Achievers Workforce Institute’s (AWI) Manager Effectiveness report.

The study reveals that 71 per cent of managers don’t receive the support they need from their company to develop their management skills, leaving many feeling overwhelmed, overworked and undervalued. This organisational oversight calls for significant change – and while the change will come with training, workplace technology is an equally critical avenue to explore.

While moulding effective managers requires extensive time and energy, organisations can drive improvement overnight by adopting employee nudging, a tool that sends notifications or signals that provide information to help leaders use their technology and time most impactfully. While this solution should be coupled alongside other initiatives, such as learning and development, this integrated approach not only fosters effective leadership but also satisfies the crucial need for genuine employee connections and engagement. Embracing the right technology can promptly set organisations on the right path.

The real-time coach

In the era of remote work, employees who entered managerial roles don’t have a front-row seat to effective leadership practices, lacking the ability to listen to, watch and learn from their favourite leaders. To offset this, companies can use employee nudging as a real-time coach. This technology can recognise essential trends and offer actionable next steps to influence positive behaviours – from pinging managers to follow up on emails to reminding them to recognise their team members’ achievements.

The all-time cheerleader

While employee-nudging can drive positive results in countless ways, the technology moves the needle the most on organisational recognition – which is critical given that 65 per cent of employees say “feeling recognised” would reduce their desire to job hunt. When employees receive weekly recognition, they’re 10 times more likely to recommend their manager than those who are never celebrated, which shows the power of praise. With nudging, the simple but valuable “I loved the takeaways in slide five!” or “Thanks for your energy on today’s call!” will no longer go left unsaid. The truth is that frequent recognition can promote engagement, job commitment and productivity, but too often the same people are getting praise, with some, in particular female employees, feeling actively slighted.

The any-time bias detector

Recognition frequency is skewed at many organisations, whether the unspoken bias impacts you or not. Recent AWI data shows women are 54 per cent more likely to say they are never recognised by their manager, a troubling and overlooked statistic. Instead of forcing women to voice that they feel slighted, businesses can get ahead of the curve with employee-nudging technology. For instance, nudging can tell a manager that they recognise men on their recognition platform 70 per cent of the time and suggest that they send an accolade to a female teammate. By helping close recognition equity gaps, nudging boosts the overall health, inclusivity and belonging in a company’s culture.

The ultimate matchmaker

Employee friendships can have major benefits in the workplace, but great organisations need to help these connections along. AWI data finds that workers who say their company supports them in building relationships at work are almost three times as likely to report high organisational resilience. They are also three times more likely to report being their most productive selves at work.

Yet forming connections with team members proves more difficult in a largely remote and global workforce. That’s where managers can help encourage socialising by scheduling in-person meetups or virtual social time for their teams to connect away from specific task-oriented meetings. However, this isn’t the only way they can empower workplace friendships.

According to the AWI 2022 Culture Report, connection tools are the most wanted technology for driving a sense of belonging. These are tech tools that recreate water cooler conversations by pairing workers who normally would not interact to connect virtually or in person. What’s more, if a company is equipped with the right employee experience platform, it can integrate nudging with its employee connections tool and ensure workers receive reminders to step away from deep work and set up much-needed coffee chats.

The future of nudging

The cost of letting ineffective managers maintain their present course can cause direct harm to businesses. During 2024 planning meetings, the C-Suite must align on how they will equip leaders with the tools they need to succeed – and employee nudging should make the list. With this powerful tool, organisations will bolster manager effectiveness and revolutionise employee productivity, engagement, retention and belonging.

However, managers aren’t the only thing evolving in 2024. Nudging is poised for disruption, too. While nudging technology already exists and empowers companies everywhere, AI will give it the boost needed to gain widespread adoption. The generative AI revolution has caused people to rethink the relationship between AI and bias. How so? By demonstrating how AI can help mitigate bias and boost inclusivity in the workplace, instead of the opposite. Forward-thinking, inclusive and people-centric companies in 2024 will start to explore how AI can bolster nudging as a real-time coach and further foster workplace cultures of belonging, recognition and inclusion.

If you want to explore an all-in-one platform to transform your people strategy, visit the Achievers website for a demo of the Achievers Employee Experience Platform™.