How leaders can create a happier, more motivated workforce

There’s no doubt we’re currently facing a workplace crisis. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2024 report found that employee engagement has stagnated at a miserable 10% in the UK, while measures of overall employee wellbeing have also declined.

The government unveiled its employment rights bill in October 2024, which aims to upgrade workers’ rights, tackle poor working conditions, and boost productivity and engagement. While the bill contains some valuable legislation, it fails to tackle the root causes of workplace problems. All evidence points to a broader issue affecting organisations: people’s poor relationship with work. Offering initiatives such as a four-day week is merely papering over the cracks rather than solving these entrenched problems. To tackle this, leaders need to take a long, hard look at workplace culture and what makes work worth it for employees.

With Professor John van Reenen having established that at least a third of the variance in productivity between countries and companies is due to poor management, it’s clear that it’s to our overburdened managers we should be looking if we’re to transform the sorry state of work. Managers have the power to make a huge difference in motivating the workforce and creating happier workplaces.

Having hardly advanced beyond 20th-century practices, what makes for good management practice is in dire need of an overhaul if we’re to equip today’s practitioners with the modern engagement skills they desperately need to address the tectonic changes affecting our workplaces and the very nature of work.

The excellent news, though, is that there are several things that leaders can begin to address immediately to bring about this long overdue change.

Make work more meaningful

The first is to help employees find more meaning in their work. This is a fundamental part of a job – our work should matter, we should be valued, and we need to be part of something we can believe in and contribute to.

Unsurprisingly, in this post-COVID era, employees have higher expectations about how they’re treated in the workplace, what they want from their work and how they can maintain their wellbeing. These days, it’s expected that people get recognition for the work they do. So when that recognition isn’t forthcoming, they feel they’re not valued. Staff who aren’t prepared to put up with it are all too willing to walk, which leads to issues with engagement and retention.

It’s, therefore, crucial to cultivate workplaces where people want to be and instil a sense of trust and autonomy within teams. When staff feel trusted to get the job done and encouraged to take control over their work, their sense of fulfilment skyrockets and engagement increases.

Reduce stress in the workplace

Another often overlooked but crucial thing that managers can and should do to nurture happier, more motivated staff is to stamp out stress and incivility.

While stress is not a new phenomenon, left unchecked and unsupported it can quickly snowball into overwhelm and burnout for employees and leaders alike. Alongside this, one of the unfortunate side effects of rising stress is a rapid increase in incivility (or rude behaviour) at work, according to the latest Gallup State of the Workplace report. Worryingly, being on the receiving end of incivility can almost HALVE an employee’s effort, as well as making for a very unpleasant atmosphere.

The key contributor to stress within the workplace is, again, poor management. Indeed, those who work in companies with bad management practices are nearly 60% more likely to be stressed than those working in environments with good management practices. It’s vital that managers develop new skills to create a less stressful working environment.

Become ‘enquiry-led’ managers

This leads to the third thing needed for happier, more motivated staff – equipping managers with the skills to handle the ‘people’ side of their jobs to help make work more meaningful and less stressful.

Managers account for 70% of the variance in employee engagement, and research has shown that they have the same impact on people’s mental health as their partners, doctors or therapists. Staff happiness, perhaps unsurprisingly, is contingent on good management practices. And yet, in the UK alone, only 27% of workers rate their manager as effective, according to the Chartered Management Institute. So what can be done?

To look after the people in their team, managers need to develop the mindset of asking questions and actively listening to what their team are saying. This enquiry-led approach is the critical component of a new style of management called Operational Coaching®. Described as “the missing superpower”, asking purposeful questions intended to engage the thinking of others has been proven to generate hugely positive outcomes for organisations and their workforce.

This approach focuses on managers changing their behaviour instead of trying to change the behaviour of their team members. Undertaking a learning journey that is less about teaching and more about personal discovery, managers gain personal insights about themselves, how they’re perceived by others and how effective they are as managers and leaders before learning the advanced communication skills associated with using purposeful enquiry.

The benefits of Operational Coaching® as a management discipline have already been established by a large-scale randomised control trial funded by the UK Government and conducted by the London School of Economics and Political Sciences. The results proved (statistically significantly) that across 62 organisations in 14 sectors, managers were spending 70% more time coaching their team members in the flow of work than before adopting an Operational Coaching® style of management. Intervention group organisations also recorded a sixfold improvement in employee retention, and 48% of reported successes were related to increased engagement and productivity.

UK retailers have already warned that the government’s new employment legislation will lead to job losses, inevitably increasing the pressure on the staff left behind and the managers responsible for squeezing what little productivity remains. As such, it is imperative to equip managers with the skills to cultivate a happy, engaged, motivated and productive workforce.

The robust results of the study above pave the way for many more managers to learn how to adapt their management style for the benefit of their teams and themselves. If managers are better trained to handle the people side of their roles, everyone feels happier and more motivated. Operational Coaching® leads to more engaging, productive, inclusive and collaborative workplaces where everyone’s contributions are valued – the type of workplace we desperately need in the UK and globally.