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Improving line management

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Why isn’t line management better?

If we look at the areas where line managers are doing best and where they’re not doing so well, there’s a clear pattern that tells us a lot about why line management isn’t better.

Line managers’ strengths seem to lie in quite passive or instructional skills: trusting workers to get on with their jobs, and setting out clear expectations.

Areas that urgently need improvement are:

  • Helping to boost morale at work
  • Ensuring workers know their rights
  • Actively making sure that workers feel supported

These are tricky skills. They require training, time to spend with those you manage, and knowledge of workplace rights. The problem is that line managers likely aren’t receiving this training or time. Too many employers aren’t investing enough in their line managers, and this is likely to have a negative impact on all workers.  

Training line managers

We saw in the first section that there’s evidence that plenty of line managers aren’t receiving the training they need. This is reinforced by the findings of the UK Employer Skills Survey. The survey is one of the largest business surveys in the world, with responses from the over 87,000 employers. Conducted every two years since 2011, the most recent findings are from 201743 .

One of the areas it asks employers about is training. When asked in mid-2017:

  • Two-thirds of employers (66 per cent) had provided training over the last 12 months, meaning that a third of employers admitted to providing no training to any staff in the previous year
  • The incidence of training increases in line with the size of the organisation, with a very big difference between small and large employers (53 per cent of employers with fewer than five staff members provided training in the past 12 months, compared to 96 per cent of those with over 100 staff members)
  • 62 per cent of the workforce has received training in the past 12 months

These figures have stayed largely similar since 2013.

In terms of the overall picture, therefore, it’s not great. A third of employers provided no training to any of their staff in the most recent 12 months.

However, even this not-so-great overall picture masks the much bleaker situation when it comes to training for managers. When we look at the type of training provided in the past 12 months, only 35 per cent of the employers that provided some training had provided management training, down two percentage points from 2015. 

 
Types of training provided over the last 12 months
Source: 2017UK Employer Skills Survey

Occupational level data is also worrying. The occupational group ‘managers’ is the least likely to have received training in the 12 months before employers were surveyed, and the only occupational group where less than half received training (49 per cent).

Almost half of those who did provide training would have liked to provide more than they were able to. The two biggest reasons given for not being able to do so were not having the funds to pay for it, and not being able to give up more staff time for training.

The survey also found that when employers were asked about what skills were absent in their workplace, 37 per cent of those with a skills gap said that there was a lack of those able to manage or motivate other staff. Over half (53 per cent) said that the skills lacking were related to management and leadership.

There’s also problems in recruiting those with the skills to manage. 22 per cent of all vacancies are skill-shortage vacancies, which are vacancies that employers are struggling to fill due to a lack of skills, qualifications or experience amongst applicants. Employers commonly reported that these skills-shortage vacancies related to management and leadership. 35 per cent of skills-shortage vacancies, for example, were at least partly attributed to a lack of applicants who can manage or motivate other staff, and 33 per cent were at least partly caused due to no applicants being able to persuade and influence others.

There’s a link between skills and productivity, with the OECD arguing that skills are is one of the key determinants of productivity:

By increasing worker productivity, skills can strengthen incentives for firms to create jobs, offer higher wages and provide better non-wage working conditions. Skills can also make work more attractive to individuals as a result of better productivity, wages and working conditions.44

It adds that to improve labour market outcomes, both in terms of job quality and quantity, it’s essential that workforce skills are invested in throughout the working life.

Management culture in the UK

The lack of training for line managers fits in with common criticisms of the UK’s management culture.

In their research into management practices and productivity, Bloom and Van Reenen (2012) have found that Great Britain lags behind other countries, such as the US, Germany and Sweden, when it comes to management. In terms of these management scores, Great Britain is part of a group of second-tier “mid-European” countries, alongside France, Italy, Ireland and Poland. It explains that a big factor in cross-country variance in management “appears to be due to the presence or absence of [a] tail of bad performers”45 . Other research by Bloom and others has specifically mentioned the UK’s long tail of badly managed firms46 .

The CMI has similarly criticised the UK’s management culture, explaining the UK has too many ‘accidental managers’. Accidental managers are those who were good at the job they got hired to do, and therefore got promoted into management. Unfortunately, once in management, they were left to sink or swim with little training or support. The CMI estimates that the 2.4 million of the UK’s managers are ‘accidental managers’ who require upskilling and training. It therefore calls for a “national focus on replacing ‘accidental managers’ with confident, competent, qualified managers”47 .

Algorithmic management?

There’s a temptation to believe that the future of management lies in algorithmic management. Algorithmic management is the use of data and algorithms to “allocate, optimise, and evaluate work”. In the case of some companies, this allows a few human managers to oversee hundreds of workers, with very little contact between these human managers and workers subject to algorithmic management 48 .

It’s commonly used to describe how management works in companies in the gig economy, such as Uber. But this type of management by algorithm is also used in Amazon warehouses 49  and among staff who pick the items for online supermarket shops50 . As we’ve seen from Amazon and Uber, these are used to control and micromanage working people, pushing them to work harder and harder, often to the detriment of their health. There’s evidence from a US Amazon warehouse that the company uses automated tracking to decide which workers aren’t keeping up with productivity quotas and will therefore be sacked 51 . Workers in warehouses in the UK have been known to urinate in bottles to avoid a toilet trip damaging their data. And Uber drivers’ livelihoods are dependent on the whims and positive ratings of customers52 .

Not everyone is concerned about algorithms. Some argue that algorithms and data in the workplace can help to strip away line manager bias and the subjectivity of human judgement, therefore reducing the likelihood of discrimination53 . There’s truth in this, and there’s a role for the use of data and algorithms in employer decision making. But the reality is, as we see in Amazon and Uber, data and algorithms can also be mis-used, especially when managing workers. There’s also been cases of algorithms simply reflecting existing biases54 .

Our findings suggest that algorithmic management is unlikely to provide companies with all the answers. There’s plenty of workers out there who don’t feel like they’re being supported at work, and a worrying amount that think their line manager damages morale. It’s difficult to see how an algorithm can solve this when, what’s needed, is well-trained line managers who have the capacity and ability to support, encourage and manage workers.

As Michael Luca, Jon Kleinberg and Sendhil Mullainathan point out in an article in the Harvard Business Review55 :

In our work designing and implementing algorithms and identifying new data sources with a range of organizations, we have seen that the source of difficulty often isn’t bugs in the algorithms; it’s bugs in the way we interact with them. To avoid missteps, managers need to understand what algorithms do well—what questions they answer and what questions they do not.

When we use algorithms in the workplace, we need to realise what they’re for. Ultimately, algorithms might have some use, but employees won’t feel like an algorithm has their back. The current examples of how algorithmic management is used suggest the opposite. Algorithmic management is too often used as a substitute for a line manager – adopted by powerful employers to micromanage, overwork and mistreat low-paid staff.

 
Contents
01
Summary
02
Why line management matters
03
The current state of line management
04
Why isn’t line management better?
05
What we want to see change
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