‘Managers need to put their own oxygen masks on before helping others,’ says Culture Amp’s CPO

Businesses are slowly learning that managers can’t do it all. Yet there’s often an unfair expectation on managers to bear the brunt of workplace strains, which can cause unnecessary stress.

In fact, 42% of leaders expressed that their workload caused a significant source of stress, according to a Workforce Institute report.

Justin Angsuwat, Culture Amp CPO

This is an issue that Justin Angsuwat, Chief People Officer at Culture Amp is particularly passionate about.

Although he “loves the unpredictability of humans”, he was keen to use his background in computer science and analytics to gain a deeper understanding of how to tackle the undue burdens that managers face. 

In an exclusive conversation with UNLEASH, Angsuwat discusses how businesses can safeguard managers from burnout while increasing employee retention, and utilizing AI to its fullest potential.

Providing the importance of providing the right support to managers

Managers are seeing increasing pressure to support employees wellbeing, yet often this is coming at their own detriment. 

Angsuwat draws attention to the fact that 55% of people in organizations globally are stressed – including managers. Businesses therefore need to better support their managers, while still ensuring they’re providing support for their teams. 

“Managers need to put their own oxygen masks on before helping others,” he says.

To better explain this, he used the analogy of a cycling Peloton. 

“Imagine – there’s one person at the front of the peloton that takes the brunt of the wind to create a slipstream to make it easier for the rest of the team riding behind,” Angsuwat says.  

This, in our case, is the role of a manager or a high performer, who, historically, takes more and more pressure, but will undoubtedly reach a breaking point.

“This is when other leaders need to step in and work out how to move the peloton leader back into the pack and cycle out a new leader. That workload rotation is incredibly important.”

To address this, Angsuwat suggests that some companies roll out larger programs and initiatives, whereas others create more light-touch points to detect when the burnout is happening. 

He explains that at Culture Amp, employees are given a slider in their 1:1s to help them think about where their wellbeing is in any given week.

At the beginning of 1:1s, managers can see where employees fall on the scale, and discuss with them to learn more if necessary.

“This gives employees the opportunity to open up if they wish, to share that their workload is too heavy, or that they’re having challenges at home, for example. 

“Relating this back to the peloton analogy, leaders can identify potential areas where wellbeing is suffering by picking up signals and act accordingly from there – or, in other words, sharing the load of the cyclist at the front,” Angsuwat adds. 

“Although there’s no pressure for employees to share how they’re feeling, this allows them to have their wellbeing regularly monitored, rather than waiting for a big one-hour conversation once a quarter or for it to become a larger issue.” 

Understanding the difference between leaders and managers

To understand the impact of leadership in greater detail, Culture Amp measured companies before and during the COVID-19 pandemic to understand how their company cultures have evolved.

“We wanted to know what their experience was,” Angsuwat explains. “We actually discovered that people felt better about work during COVID as we saw a global engagement lift. 

We saw confidence in leaders and confidence in companies increase, as well as people’s likelihood to stay in companies – so there were many positives for the workplace.”

However, Angsuwat also notes that since the pandemic, there has been a decline in engagement, confidence and commitment to stay in an organization.

In fact, right now Culture Amp found that one in five people are looking to leave their current organization within the next 12 months. 

This being said, less people are actually leaving than before, particularly because of the uncertainties in the job market.

Angsuwat therefore predicts a backlog of people that are looking to lead in organizations, which is going to shift the market as there will be a good time to leave.  

“Companies have this moment right now as an opportunity to impact employee retention, because people are staying and companies shouldn’t take that for granted,” Angsuwat says. “We’re encouraging companies to focus on that right now.”

 Another fundamental highlight of the study was the difference between a leader and a manager. 

Angsuwat explains: “We looked at the data of a quarter of one million managers and more than one million data points to understand retention. From this we saw that if you have a good manager but poor leader, employees are 38% likely to stay. 

“Flipping this on its head, employees with poor managers but good leaders were 60% likely to stay. So they’re more likely to stay for a good leader than a good manager.”

A glimpse into the future of HR and AI

As AI becomes more integrated into HR processes, companies must balance the benefits with the need for the ‘human touch,’ although this can be a tricky task to navigate.

“One big risk that I see with AI is businesses integrating it for the sake of it, and not really thinking deeply about what AI should be doing vs. a human,” Angsuwat states.

He gives the example of organization’s engagement surveys that usually ask 50-60 questions. These questions will generate comments, so management teams have a rich amount of data, sometimes with upwards of 50,000 comments.

AI can be used to sort through these to make them easier to understand, making it a powerful tool as it is able to digest large amounts of data – as well as the context of that data – in a very short space of time. 

This, however, doesn’t take away the human touch, because an important part of AI is the human being able to understand how it’s come to that conclusion and be able to go into the data themselves to validate and understand it,” Angsuwat inputs. 

“AI will help them summarize 50,000+ comments into a few key points and topics, but it’s really a starting point for leaders to talk to their people and learn more. 

“Even then, business leaders still need to approach this with caution,” Angsuwat warns.

“We have seen leaders collect data and input it into their own AI. In some cases, AI has had hallucinations and created comments that actually didn’t exist in an original dataset. 

“People won’t notice that unless they really dig into it, so it’s really important to still approach AI thoughtfully.” 

Businesses therefore need to be clear on what AI is being used for, as it can become risky if it’s not used responsibly. 

Yet when sharing his concluding thoughts, Angsuwat was very clear on his biggest point: driving people and culture intentionally by looking through the windshield, rather than the rear view mirror.

“By this, I mean moving down the maturity curve for analytics – from descriptive data, to diagnostic, to predictive and ultimately to prescriptive insights. If you’re looking for a place to start, it’s to make sure your data, systems and processes are set up well.”

Additionally, he highlights that leaders need to increase the fluency of their own HR organizations around the power of data analytics and insight in the people space. 

“You don’t have to jump all the way to the end of the maturity curve, but it should be a focus that you continue to build upon. That puts you in a great position to look through that windshield, rather than the rear view mirror.”