News
Are Your Managers Set Up For Success?
9th July 24
Having the right local leaders in place determines the success of your business, and shapes both customer and colleague experience.
Anyone with experience of a multi-site leadership role knows that the difference between a good operation and a great one is the local leader, and how they carry out their duties.
What is getting in your managers’ way?
Yet so many businesses create barriers that prevent managers from delivering.
The gold standard is to measure how time is spent by those in leadership roles. When old time and motion techniques are deployed in a modern way, a work study analyst shadows leaders for their working day or week. When measured across different sites, the data creates a picture of how time is spent. Crucially, it also shows what prevents leaders from spending more time with their teams and customers.
It provides information on how much time is used on admin and emails. Is the manager in the office or with the team? How long is spent in meetings or preparing for them? How much time is spent on compliance checks and audits? Are team huddles happening regularly?
All these questions and more are answered by a management role study. Delivering results that are often surprising to central teams, there is always an aspect of manager workload that uses more time than expected. It also highlights technology issues, such as slow running systems, Wi-Fi issues, and printers or kits that are well past their prime. Even tasks taken home by managers – whether it’s to conduct work without interruptions or because it is easier to work from their personal computer – are all logged and the impact quantified.
Case study
Here is just one example of how role study insights helped an organisation produce more effective leaders. More examples can be found in our whitepaper; the link to which is at the end of this article.
Field leadership
A study of Area Managers showed that 15% of their time was spent responding to emails, Teams and WhatsApp messages, as the business thought it was a positive step to add teams channels for operational roles. But in fact, it had increased the number of messages and just gave managers another inbox to juggle. People had learnt that, if they needed to get a fast response, it was better to bypass all formal routes and send a WhatsApp. One Area Manager received 30 messages before lunchtime, interrupting coaching conversations with the Store Manager. The business is now considering their channels of communication and how these can be streamlined, enabling Area Managers to focus on coaching managers and driving the business instead.
Want to find out more?
For more information on role study and organisational design, together with how this helps produce more effective leaders, as well as more real-life examples, download our whitepaper.
To find out more about our role study service, as well as how ReThink can measure how your managers spend their time, get in touch.