Empowering Middle Managers: Nurturing Wellbeing and Cultivating a Positive Work Culture

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Hello, and thank you all for joining me today. Whether you’re joining because you’re a manager looking to support your wellbeing and energise your team, or from leadership and HR looking to know ways to support your management team as well. They serve a very critical function in a new workplace for business success, for managing wellbeing, for sustaining productivity.

However, current trends are indicating that management are struggling, they’re squeezed in the middle between leadership priorities.

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managing team wellbeing as well. So today we’re going to look at some concerning trends globally with management and look at ways that managers can manage team wellbeing and help prevent burnout. Look at ways that they can instill psychological safety in the workplace and also which is helpful.

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how they may be able to influence leadership to help change the workplace conditions, the work culture which is so important as well.

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see and some tips of how they can take care of themselves as well. So looking at some of the trends, reports are indicating that since COVID managers have been in high demand but are also struggling to juggle demands as well. A Gallup report,

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Last year, highlighted that managers are experiencing stress which is impacting their health and work-life balance.

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is actually worse than their direct reports. Another survey of 9,000 of the work for

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course, globally found that up to 35% of managers are saying that they’re burned out.

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very often are all.

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ways. And mostly this was attributed to working over time to accommodate for the work demands of their frontline as well. And a lot are feeling, you know, disengaged, unproductive and are essentially not feeling fulfilled in their roles at the moment.

And there’s a number of factors for this, you know, post COVID, the impact on mental health on their teams, high inflation and, you know, dealing with mixed working models.

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trying to manage remotely or through hybrid working.

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as well. So if you are a manager here today to maybe reflect on some of the demands you might be experiencing, whether any of this is relevant to you, whether you’re like the 50% of managers who are saying that their workload has increased since Covid as well and that they’re juggling a lot so just to take a minute to think about that.

Now middle management have been called the Squeezed Middle in a lot of recent reports and it’s because they’re tied in between those executing the work in their teams, looking after productivity and sometimes the unreasonable expectations of senior leadership doing more for less in the current economic climate.

And of course there’s the demands of managing teams with mixed working, some maybe on-site, hybrid or working remotely and it can be hard to see how your teams are doing you know beyond even the work even how they’re doing personally in their work.

There can be a lack of psychological safety which we’ll talk about in a bit, increased anxiety and insecurity and again that lack of fulfillment and low productivity.

However, managers have never been more important than now in business success and managing well-being and which is also important for business and company leaders need to show some empathy and enforce that switching off to help support the important managers as well.

Now, some of the systemic issues that are contributing to high burnout in management and high stress and exhaustion, there’s three main ones in the research. The first one is juggling role demands. So management at the moment are trying to manage team performance and output and completing and managing projects effectively.

And also, recently, there’s more of a demand on managers to look after team wellbeing and support mental health as well, which is another challenge to juggle. There’s also a lack of support, which impacts on burnout. A lot of managers become managers without training, without people management training, project management training, training on strategy.

And also, there’s a perceived lack of support from leadership. They really are lacking that mentorship and coaching from leadership, probably because leadership are lacking the time and resources to do that as well, but it does impact on wellbeing.

And also, there’s a lack of autonomy because they’re responsible for implementing directives, but without the key strategic decision-making involvement, which leads to disempowerment and disengagement. Autonomy is so important for feeling that your role is important and feeling connected to objectives as well.

However, it’s important to address these factors because of the importance in management in the current workplace, because number one, they’re supporting the team wellbeing. They’re the most responsible for building employee engagement, which is so important for productivity and business success, productivity, meeting strategic KPIs, and actioning leadership vision.

And what good managers do is create a good working environment, you know, led by their people skills and having high emotional intelligence.

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And management now is in the current working climate. Old school leadership styles don’t work as effectively, and in fact can be quite damaging. So management today should be more about empowering staff to be able to do their work instead of keeping tabs on productivity, to be able to mentor them, to ask them, how can I best facilitate you to do your job? How can I support?

Be there, be a listener, and to encourage innovation and shared innovation in the teams as well. So it’s so important now more than ever to be invested in your middle management because, and just a quote from a McKinsey report here, that top performing middle managers create strong relationships that enhance performance and drive effective operations, which is so important for business.

And it’s more important now in more financial, volatile times than ever before. And in a time where employees are expecting flexibility, expecting their mental health to be supported, expect to have, play a key part in the role and have some sort of rewarding work at the end of the day over any other factors.

And these are some tips for leadership or HR or what good managers need, or what managers need to be good managers, let’s say, is that their role has clear expectations and targeted training as discussed previously, whether that is what was considered previously the soft skills, which is now more important than people management approach as well.

Knowing and understanding why their work and their actions matter to the organization on a wider scale is so important. And to be inspired by leaders behaving similarly, prioritizing work-life balance and feeling cared for as well, which is important for employees and supported by role design and rewards at the end of the day.

With strong management, you have reduced attrition, which is so important and relevant right now, talent acquisitions, support wellbeing and increasing psychological safety. However, only 20% feel that companies help them to be good managers, so there’s a lot of room for improvement here.

Now that we’ve discussed the importance of management and how they can be supported in their role, I’m gonna talk a bit about how managers can help support team wellbeing to help increase productivity.

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and engagement amongst employees.

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Now a prevalent issue in the last couple of years amongst employees is of course burnout and the World Health Organization defines it as feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion, increased disinterest in one’s job, negative or cynical feelings about one’s job and reduced professional efficacy, which is of course what no business wants amongst their employees.

More than three of four employees feel burned out at some time. That’s another statistic as well, so it can be quite prevalent. And it’s prevalent because it’s so difficult to spot remotely or with hybrid working as well. You may have an employee or a team member who is saying in check-ins that everything is fine and they’re meeting deadlines.

However, they may be struggling to juggle, working home life and that you don’t see the struggle that’s really there. They may be quite hyper focused during the week trying to meet deadlines and then have difficulty switching off in the evenings. But as a manager, it can be hard to see when someone’s struggling compared to when you’re always on site and you can see when someone’s

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rushing around trying to meet demands as well.

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So there are ways that managers can help reduce burnout in their teams and some of them can be quite simple approaches as well.

First of all, having a human-centric people-first work culture, instead of focusing on the tasks or projects, it’s very important to get to know your team, what makes them think, what makes them tick, what way they like to work, which is so important to facilitate them to do their job the best they can.

Lack of control can really contribute to burnout as well and that might be that they might have too much responsibility and not enough control or that maybe they don’t appreciate being micromanaged that they like to have some autonomy about how they do the work that they do, which is just so important to have that flexibility.

It’s important also that managers listen to work-related problems, to understand where problems might be arising in work processes or people might be experiencing stress so that people, their team, feel listened to and that they feel that the manager really cares about the struggles that they’re experiencing in their work.

And also, teamwork is an important buffer against burnout, so it’s good that if a manager can get their co-workers together cohesively as a team or figure out ways even in hybrid that they can work best. And also to embody and endorse rest and recovery.

If you’re working overtime all the time, it’ll eventually, it’s not really sustainable, so it’s so important to be able to switch off the laptop at the end of the day and to do things, engage in hobbies or get out of nature or exercise, but it’s important that the manager is a good role model for those kinds of behaviours.

Essentially, managers are the first line of defence to reduce burnout and they can do this in a number of ways. Here are a couple of tips and that is to focus on the things that bring joy and inspiration to the team, whether that’s humour or GAA or reaching sales targets, whatever that is, to find that and try and build that into a positive work environment.

To be able to demonstrate high levels of trust in your colleagues as well is so important. People work better if they feel that they’re trusted and trusted to do the work the best they can. Again, flexibility and autonomy are so important and that the manager models what wellbeing is and to endorse self-care and switching off.

It’s important to check in regularly, not only in how the work’s been done, but how people are doing the work as well and to advocate for your team, if there’s conflicting demands from other departments, just to prioritise the wellbeing of your own team, as well as some important.

Of course, to encourage the use of resources, whether that’s mental health training, EAP, to take annual leave and to rest and recover as well. There are all ways that a manager can help to reduce burnout in the team. What’s also important is how managers can instill psychological safety within their teams. A bit about what is psychological safety, if you haven’t heard of it before.

Essentially, it’s a person’s perception of the consequences of taking risks and being vulnerable in front of their teammates.

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Essentially, it’s the belief that you won’t be punished when you mess up. If you’re in a psychologically dangerous work environment, if you see over on the left, you’ll have fear of making mistakes or admitting mistakes and a tendency then to not take ownership of what went wrong and a tendency towards blaming others.

Team members are less likely to share different views, and then that’s going to affect team dynamics. There might be a bit of resentment that’s hidden beyond there, and it’s not the way people work best.

On the other side, if you’re creating a psychologically safe environment, people are more comfortable admitting making mistakes so that they can learn from failure, the team can learn from failure and address those. Everyone openly shares ideas, and it’s better for innovation and decision making. and where psychological safety came from.

It’s an evolutionary and biological psychology perspective and it’s all about how our brains process work challenges such as competition from a colleague or something from your manager that you’re uncomfortable with that your body perceives as something that’s actually a life-threatening situation.

This stimulates our amygdala which is associated with anxiety and kicks into overdrive taking over all or other brain centers as well and the problem is that this fight or flight response shuts down other cognitive processes in the brain which is not good for working well either.

So if our workplace feels threatening our primal instincts and protective instincts take over leading to poor decisions, communication problems, stress and burnout which is essentially not what we want.

So some tips for building habits for psychological safety in your teams is again checking in your team how are you doing, also addressing emotions in teams if it’s evident that there’s high stress meeting demands amongst the teams it’s important to call that out.

It’s been shown that this is correlated with lower stress in teams it allows teams to process emotions whether that’s disappointment or frustration it’s best to always call it out and go from there.

What helps with psychological safety is ensuring that everyone in the teams has their say equally taking turns that component of an authentic inclusion and then just constant reflection on how collaboration is going and adapting accordingly and what’s also important is positive feedback and that’s not blind positivity it’s a constructive critique as well and it helps with innovation and increased connection and motivation which is what you want in your teams and we’ll just talk on the next slide about this positive feedback and what it is.

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So US billionaire Warren Buffett said he’s a quote he said praise specifically but criticized generally so it’s important to be able to give feedback to your colleagues to your team to know to highlight any key issues that are going on if there’s customer dissatisfaction for example or for a component of a project isn’t working it’s better to have that said but if you say it and you know you have money you highlight the praise wordy qualities in performance and then bring in the negative it is quite effective and also expressing gratitude as a manager for the work the team is doing of course goes a long way so working in this way you know creates a better communication it’s better for business but also creates greater emotional intelligence and innovation and greater interaction outside of meetings so people are collaborating a lot more which leads to stronger team cohesion as well.

And another expanding on team emotions again it’s important to check and acknowledge negative moods but non-judgmentally you know use the mindfulness approach that you know it’s it’s neither good nor bad but just allowing it to be present there and acknowledged is so important and it’s helpful as I said previously in reducing stress and addressing it in a helpful way.

And another important trait in management and leadership is being able to lean into the discomfort of uncomfortable conversations or giving feedback instead of experiential avoidance because you know your team’s recognised when you’re not being authentic about what’s going on and you know it leads to that lack of trust as well so it’s an important mindfulness guilt again to lean into this discomfort it works out so much better.

So now we’ll have a look at leadership style approaches in management that are effective in the modern working world. So traditional leadership would have been all about power and control all about the manager or the leader exerting control and had all the decision-making power and where there is no shared responsibility or critical thinking or shared innovation.

in this type of leadership which may be important for certain types of jobs. What is about micromanaging, keeping everyone in check, keeping reports in check. However, this is more conducive to a high stress environment and prevents growth and thriving as employees can become fearful, disengaged, unproductive and even resentful.

So it’s not necessarily the best way to work, particularly in the current mixed model work or the work as well. A preference is really for more empathic situational leadership. So showing empathy and understanding your team works better for a well-being, which is also great for productivity.

And there’s a connection between emotional well-being and productivity at work and there’s lots of evidence for that as well. And situational leadership is all about having not a one size fits all approach in managing your team.

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People are different, they work different ways. So it’s about having that flexibility as well instead of being rigid and traditional. And that empathy piece then drives performance. So a skilled empathic leader can read how people are feeling and address issues before the escalate as well, which is important, and tends to show higher performance and lower turnover in teams.

Authenticity is also really important. It enables psychological safety, whereby embodying this authenticity to be as yourself allows your employees to show up to work being themselves as well. It’s important to have transparent communication. If there are uncertainties that there’s no sugarcoating because people can really see when you’re being genuine as well.

And it instills and builds trust if you’re being as honest as you can be about situations. It creates greater trust and confidence if the human side is shown. But of course, in times of uncertainty, you also want to be calm and confident so that employees will instill that or your team will embody that as well.

And now to talk about a very significant factor that influences all of this is the wellness culture. And it’s reported as one of the main things globally in our recent 2023 reports that people want to change in their organization over wages or any other factor. So there are many critical success factors involved in creating a wellness culture.

And the first of these is leadership buy-in and endorsement of wellbeing initiatives, which drives all the rest of the components. It’s also important to have good communication about wellbeing initiatives, wider there, and communication top down and bottom up a bit of feedback about how things are running.

You could use wellbeing surveys to assess this or success stories as well, where things have worked. And a third component, which is what we’re talking about here is management support, so that they’re supported by relevant and targeted training and are supported in their role and are trained to support their teams.

So that’s one quarter of the critical success factors of wellbeing in an organization. And another culture component is employee engagement, that employees know why certain initiatives are in place and they feel involved and can communicate and participate in initiatives as well.

And just an overview framework here on the left, you have those cultural aspects of leadership commitment, management priority, employee commitment, and organizational communication.

And these act as buffers against job demands, work demands, deadlines, conflict, and help support job resources, colleague communication, and job control and engagement, and in a sense then help to reduce the impact of job demands on psychological distress, such as stress, burnout, and depression, and buffer against physical health impacts, such as high absenteeism, which is not good for a business and bottom line as well.

Now, why should an organization invest in wellbeing, particularly now when there’s a lot of financial uncertainty?

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First of all, there’s a loss in productivity, absences related to poor mental health, there’s the cost of recruitment and retraining costs if there is high attrition. So wellbeing is good for both employees and business, it prevents stress and creates a positive work environment where individuals and organizations can drive.

Good health and wellbeing equals employee engagement and organizational performance. Some other findings, strong employee wellbeing companies outperform to stock market by two to three percent over the last 25 year period. And that’s from London Business School.

These are higher than average shareholder return and results in reduced staff turnover and employee vacancy, which is so important in terms of cost of business. And also some statistics on return of investment. So it’s four to one is the average ROI for having a well being program or six to one for having preventative strategies in employee well being.

This could be mental health awareness training or leadership and management training, workshops, coaching, health testing, as opposed to reactive interventions such as EAP or counselling. And finally to wrap up this webinar are some self care tips for managers in juggling demands of work that we’ve discussed.

So what’s important is firstly having self awareness of how you are around others, your strengths and weaknesses, constantly reflecting on that. Also, it’s important to think of ways you can set boundaries, clear boundaries of your preference for work or your capabilities or when you’re being strained, how you can communicate that with your own managers.

How to encourage that amongst your team as well about setting boundaries between work and home life. And it’s also of course important to look after your mental and physical health in any way you can, if that’s just going for a short walk at lunchtime and any way to help disconnect. And it’s important to be compassionate about the demands and that you can only do so much as well.

You can’t please everyone all the time and that you can only try your best and try to be as flexible as you can. Gratitude also is very good at switching your perspective from a negative mindset. So even if it’s just in times of high pressure, just thinking of two or three things that you’re at least grateful for. And the signs of happiness, say the four key components of building your own happiness.

And first of those is to try meditate or try some sort of meditative practices, whatever that might be. To journal or reflect, to exercise and to try a random act of kindness during the day or during your week as well. And it’s important to schedule downtime to allocate, right, this is my work time.

Now I’m going to spend my evening connecting with friends and connecting with family, engaging in my hobbies just to switch that mindset from work wherever possible. And then of course to seek support from colleagues or family or with a therapist or with a coach or with our colleagues, anything to seek that support and express.

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Thank you.

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how you might be doing or the demands that are currently ongoing to help support you emotionally. So as a final part, maybe, you know, just to reflect on any component here, any skills that might have been described that you might be able to incorporate in your work in managing teams or supporting managers.

Of course, there’s always those external constraints such as culture that you can start to tackle as well, or maybe quite a hierarchical work structure or your team needs to be micromanaged because of the type of work. But is there anything in this webinar that you might be able to take home after this to deploy? So thank you so much for joining me in this webinar today.

I hope you found it helpful and insightful. If you would like to know more about our manager trainings, please send us an email to hello at zebohalt.com. Thank you.