It’s not nagging to follow up a meeting with an email summarizing the discussion. It’s good meeting etiquette. It’s not nagging to drop a group chat in Slack or Teams for updates. That’s what those tools are for. It’s also not nagging to expect your team to report progress in many ways. That’s their responsibility.
Come on, get your head out of the past. Times have changed in so many ways, and there’s no reason we shouldn’t reconsider everything about how and where work gets done.
Most hiring managers have a short-term problem. They have work that needs to be done and not enough bodies to do that work. The easiest thing to do is hire another body just like the ones they have working for them. Many of them may understand the benefits of having a diverse team regarding broader life experiences with different voices and ideas, but that’s a long-term benefit. It’s not solving their short-term problem. Hiring another member of the team is a short-term solution.
If you were burned out, overworked, and struggling to keep up with the demands of the job, and a tool promised to save you 30 minutes or more to get your work done, you’d figure out how to use it, too.
Of course, most of them are trying to use these tools without training and instruction from the company, so this is risky. One, because you have no idea what they are doing and what results they’re getting. Two, they might become even more burned out trying to teach themselves before they get to the part where it helps them save time.
This headline seems obvious. If you have an employee who has set a goal of being promoted to the next level of your organization, you should be able to tell them what is required. Yet, in many companies, it’s not that easy. There could be several reasons for this, but these are the ones I’ve seen and heard in my years:
What I would like, however, is just once for someone not to feel the need to make a business case for treating your employees with kindness and empathy. This need to include the business case and the impact on the bottom line is an appeal to management in their self-interest and the financial interest of their business.
How about we make the case that being kind, thoughtful, and empathetic towards employees is the right way to treat a fellow human being, regardless of what it means for the bottom line? Is it too much to ask managers and CEOs to treat people like people? Or are we so far down the caste system at work that we have to convince managers to act as if they care about their employees to benefit themselves?