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Companies that backed off on supportive climates after pandemic saw dips in worker experience.
By Maggie Ward
Workplace well-being across the United States has steadily declined in recent years as employers have scaled back the supportive, flexible climates they implemented in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new report from the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School .
An annual survey of more than 1.5 million individuals at over 2,500 organizations in the U.S. found that workplace well-being from 2019 through 2023 spiked at the start of the pandemic in 2020 and has since regressed as workers have returned to offices and lost some of the flexibility that had provided work-life balance.
The survey is detailed in a report— Well-Being At Work: Fostering a Healthy Work Climate for All —from Carey's Human Capital Development Lab .
Female, African-American, and younger employees all scored lower in well-being than colleagues who were male, white, and older, according to the survey. The survey's findings regarding gender and race highlight a worrisome gap that supports "the ongoing need for organizations to address equity, inclusion, and belonging for all employees," the report states.
While all surveyed industries experienced the same downward trend, the health care, retail, and hospitality sectors recorded the lowest levels in workplace well-being.
"The COVID pandemic heightened employers' awareness of the importance of well-being, and many of the best organizations worked to create a positive work climate," said Michelle Barton , a Carey Business School associate professor and co-author of the study. "The challenge now, will be to integrate those practices into everyday work life, rather than simply as a crisis response."
The research—conducted in partnership with Great Place To Work —measured key dimensions for fostering corporate climates of well-being: "mental and emotional support," "sense of purpose," "personal support," "financial health," and "meaningful connections."
Companies with high levels of well-being prove what the survey and other research has shown for years: "Proactively addressing employee well-being makes good business sense," the report states. "Poor mental and physical health in a workforce can erode profits through higher turnover, decreased engagement, reduced customers service, and increased health care costs."
One problem: Executives and managers reported higher levels of well-being, which leaves many of them "out of touch with their employees."
"Improving employee well-being can be complex—our research highlights a need for leaders to address organizational culture factors coupled with a more nuanced management approach to create a climate of well-being for all," said Rick Smith , faculty director at the Human Capital Development Lab and co-author of the study.
Leaders who enjoyed a "great deal" of confidence from employees and who continued to allow flexible and remote work options enjoyed a higher level of workplace well-being.
The survey found the highest levels of well-being at companies that prioritized "trust in leadership, pride in work, and connections among colleagues," the report states.
"By involving employees in decision-making processes, fostering fair management practices, encouraging work-life balance, and connecting employees to meaningful work, organizations can create a positive workplace culture conducive to employee satisfaction and productivity," the report stated.
Posted in Politics+Society
Tagged business , carey business school , workplace
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August 28, 2024
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by Liz Mineo, Harvard Gazette
Good managers are hard to find. Most companies pick managers based on personality traits, age, or experience—and according to a recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper , they may be doing it wrong.
Co-authored by David Deming, Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School, the study concludes that companies are better off when they select managers based on two measures highly predictive of leadership skills .
The Gazette talked to Deming about the study's findings. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Being a good manager requires many different qualities that often don't exist in the same person. First is the ability to relate well to others, to create what Amy Edmondson and others have called psychological safety, meaning the ability to make people feel stable and secure in their role so they are comfortable with critical feedback. That's a key component of being a good manager.
Communication skills are also essential. As a manager, you should know that there's not one good way to deliver feedback to your workers because the words you use and the way you frame your statements also matter.
At the same time, you must also be analytically minded and open to different ways of doing things and be able to take a step back and reassess whether your team or organization is working as well as it could be.
Overall, being a good manager requires both interpersonal skills and analytical skills. You also need to have a strategic vision—which is something that our study does not capture. Managers must have a sense of what their organization is trying to accomplish. Any one of those skills is hard to find. Having all three, and knowing when to use them, is even more difficult.
In the study, we randomly assign the role of manager. That was half of the experiment. In the other half, we asked people which role they wanted, and we assigned the role of manager to the people with the greatest preferences for being in charge.
We found that people with the greatest preference for being in charge are, on average, worse than randomly assigned managers. It's hard to know exactly why because there are a lot of factors in play, but we show evidence in the paper that they are overconfident in their own capabilities, and they think they understand other people better than they do. We all know people like that.
This was a surprising finding. And it's important, because interest in leadership plays a big role in how companies pick managers. Companies have their own hiring and employee evaluation policies of course—they don't pick managers randomly like we did—but it's surely true that preference for leadership plays a big part in who gets promoted to management.
For example, we find that men are much more likely to prefer being in charge, but they aren't any more effective than women in the role of manager.
The main lesson I take from this finding is that there's a big difference between preferences and skills; just because you want to be a manager doesn't mean you're going to be good at it. Organizations that take more scientific or analytical approaches to identifying good managers are going to come out ahead.
It has nothing to do with how a person looks, how they speak, or what their preferences or personality traits are. None of those things are predictive. There are only two things that are: One is IQ as measured by the Raven's Progressive Matrices test, which measures general and fluid intelligence, spatial reasoning, problem-solving , etc.
But the one that's more interesting to me is a measure of what we call economic-decision-making skill, or the ability to allocate resources effectively, that my co-authors and I created in a different paper. We use that very same measure in this experiment, and we found that it is highly predictive of being a good manager.
If you want to predict who's going to be going to be good at a specific performance task, in this case, managing a team to solve a problem, the best predictors are most closely related to what you're asking someone to do.
What matters is the ability to make decisions about the allocation of resources under time constraints ; how to organize and motivate the members of your team to produce the most output. The lesson for me is that it's a crutch to use personality traits and preferences to predict performance because they're not that closely related to the performance you're interested in.
We see this pattern elsewhere. There's a huge amount of research literature on figuring out who's going to be a good teacher in the classroom, and study after study finds that characteristics such as age, gender, education, SAT scores, college major don't do a very good job of predicting who's going to be a good teacher.
Yet if I put you in the classroom for a little bit of time and I see how much you improve student learning, that is a very good predictor, because it's very closely related to the thing you ask people to do. If you want to know who's going to be a good manager, make them manage. Don't just rely on personality characteristics, or whether they raise their hand to say, "I want to do it."
At the broadest level, it's important to have good management because companies, universities, and other organizations face such an open-ended strategic landscape. They must tackle a variety of issues, such as where they should direct their attention, what are the most important things to focus on, and how to deploy resources toward solving certain problems.
If you look at major corporations , they tend to be conglomerates that have many different divisions that do many different things. Google, just to give one example, in the beginning had a core product: a search engine. But now Google is Alphabet, and it still does search, but it also does venture investing, autonomous driving, drug discovery, and many other things.
If you zoom down to the micro level, a manager who leads a team of three or four employees faces the same sort of problems: What should I focus on? Who's going to do what? How do I give people feedback? What are each person's strengths and weaknesses?
To be an effective manager, you must think about how to assign workers to roles to achieve the greatest success, and you must know how to communicate with a person to help them improve. The skill of being a good manager is probably underappreciated. Good managers are not necessarily the most vocal leaders; sometimes they're quiet but effective, like diamonds in the rough.
It's a hard problem to solve, because part of what makes a good manager is the people they're supervising. If you give a manager a team of workers who aren't very capable, that team is going to do a poor job, and if the workers are all-stars, they will make the manager look good regardless. In other words, when a team succeeds, we don't know how much credit or blame to assign to the manager compared to other members of the team.
To solve that problem, we bring a bunch of people into a controlled lab setting, and we assign them a group task that they must do together. We randomly assign the role of manager to one of the three people on the team, and we ask them to lead their group in the task, and we see how well they do. Then we randomly assign each manager again to another group of workers.
Each time, as a manager, you're getting a different set of people, so we have a way to account for the quality of the workers you're getting. And since we're assigning workers, we can also identify who's a good worker because we can see their performance with different managers.
I think the paper's main contribution is to open the door to the idea that we can be scientific and analytical about selecting managers and that management is not a squishy thing that we can never get our arms around.
We can measure management skill, and measuring it well unlocks huge productivity gains for organizations and for people. We're doing this experiment in a lab; it's not a real-world setting, but we are in talks with several folks to do this in the field. I do think it would work because we're asking people to manage and we're measuring their performance, and we're showing you that there's a repeatable predictive quality to this.
Our contribution is to outline a very simple methodology for measuring who's a good manager, and to say to people that they can use it. Figure it out in your own organization, and you will unlock big productivity gains.
Provided by Harvard Gazette
This story is published courtesy of the Harvard Gazette , Harvard University's official newspaper. For additional university news, visit Harvard.edu .
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Definition: Research Paper is a written document that presents the author's original research, analysis, and interpretation of a specific topic or issue. It is typically based on Empirical Evidence, and may involve qualitative or quantitative research methods, or a combination of both. The purpose of a research paper is to contribute new ...
Set the top, bottom, and side margins of your paper at 1 inch. Use double-spaced text throughout your paper. Use a standard font, such as Times New Roman or Arial, in a legible size (10- to 12-point). Use continuous pagination throughout the paper, including the title page and the references section.
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Workplace well-being across the United States has steadily declined in recent years as employers have scaled back the supportive, flexible climates they implemented in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new report from the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School.. An annual survey of more than 1.5 million individuals at over 2,500 organizations in the U.S. found that workplace well ...
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Good managers are hard to find. Most companies pick managers based on personality traits, age, or experience—and according to a recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, they ...
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