The People Holding Everything Together

When managing people is only part of the job

Frontline managers sit at the point where plans become reality.

Production needs to run, customers need their orders, quality and safety standards need to be maintained, costs need to be controlled and problems need to be solved. At the same time, people need managing.

Someone is absent, a new starter needs support, an employee wants a private conversation, overtime needs arranging, two people aren’t getting along, someone’s performance has changed and another employee wants to know when they will get their next grade.

None of these things stops the production plan do they?

For supervisors and frontline managers, managing people happens alongside everything else they are responsible for delivering, and much of that work is largely invisible.

From the Factory Floor

Imagine the start of an ordinary shift.

Two people have called in sick, the production plan hasn’t changed, so the supervisor starts working out how to cover the gaps.

An experienced operator is moved to another area, but that leaves a less experienced employee needing additional support – then an agency worker has arrived and needs showing what to do.

Before the first break, someone asks for a private conversation about a problem with a colleague. There’s also an absence that needs following up and a performance conversation carried over from yesterday.

Meanwhile, there’s a problem on the line and production is falling behind.

This is considered to be the norm where frontline managers absorb an enormous amount of complexity on behalf of the organisations they work for.

The Work You Don’t See on the Production Plan

We tend to measure what managers deliver – output, quality, safety, labour costs, downtime, overtime and customer service – just for starters. What is harder to see is the management capacity required to achieve those results.

Some people management will always be part of the job, but when managers repeatedly spend time chasing the same absence problems, resolving issues that have been allowed to escalate, searching for information or trying to work out what process to follow, valuable management capacity disappears.

The question is whether the organisation makes that responsibility easier or harder than it needs to be.

Clear processes, accessible information, sensible policies, appropriate authority and somewhere to turn when an issue becomes more complicated can make a real difference.

Five Questions to Ask About How You Support Your Managers

1. Do managers know where to go when they need help?

They don’t need to be employment law experts, but they do need to know when to seek advice and how to access it quickly.

2.  Are your people processes straightforward to use?

If managing an absence, probation or performance issue requires managers to search through complicated policies or multiple systems, the process itself may be creating unnecessary work.

 3. Do managers have the authority they need?

Accountability works best when people also have appropriate authority to make the decisions expected of them.

 4. What problems keep coming back?

Repeated absence issues, recruitment gaps, grievances, performance problems or excessive overtime may be consuming far more management time than anyone realises.

 5. Are you listening to what frontline managers are seeing?

The people closest to the workforce are the ones who spot emerging problems before they appear in reports or management meetings.

Employment Law Watch

The changing employment law landscape will make good day-to-day people management increasingly important.

Changes affecting areas such as unfair dismissal, probation and employee rights will place more emphasis on clear expectations, timely conversations, fair processes and good records.

That doesn’t mean every supervisor needs to become an HR specialist but it does mean businesses need to make it easy for managers to do the right thing by providing practical processes, clear guidance, appropriate training and access to support when they need it.

Good employment practice is easier to achieve when managers aren’t left trying to work everything out for themselves.

A Final Thought

Businesses spend important time thinking about whether they have enough people, enough skills and enough capacity to deliver the plan but there is another kind of capacity worth considering.

That is, the capacity of the people who organise the work, solve the problems, support the workforce, have the difficult conversations and keep things moving when the day doesn’t go according to plan.

Frontline managers are the link between business strategy and what actually happens on the ground and supporting them helps protect the time, capability and operational focus the business depends on.

The people holding everything together shouldn’t have to hold it together alone.