Description: In a work environment with clear leadership and expectations, employees know what they need to do, have confidence in their leaders and understand impending changes.
Use our free workshop materials to lead a talk with your team about expectations.
Clarify expectations for both processes and outcomes.
- Employees might become demoralized when they work hard on something that doesn’t meet expectations. Developing employee plans for leaders helps you create a clear agreement about expectations for individual employees.
- Break down job expectations and responsibilities into more manageable and clear components. The Task improvement process | PDF can help you talk to employees about improving specific tasks.
- Improve clarity about how much work there is and the time to allow for each task.
- Supervisors can be unaware of exactly how employees complete tasks. Also, they may not understand the entire scope of an employee's work. Employees may do work that's no longer needed because their supervisor hasn’t asked them to stop.
- One approach to address these issues is to have employees keep a log of their work every 15 minutes for 2 weeks. Employees aren’t likely to appreciate the extra task. But, it can help the supervisor clarify and reprioritize work. You can explain to employees that their supervisor's expectations may have been unreasonable. Help them understand this may be because their supervisor may not understand the extent of their work. This will help them to keep expectations reasonable.
- Help all employees to prioritize their tasks on a regular basis. This is especially important when there’s always more work than they can do in a day.
Take employee mental health into account.
- Ensure you’re protecting employee mental health at different stages of their workplace plan. Refer to Performance management.
- Ensure job descriptions are current, specific and agreed upon by relevant employees.
- Ensure your change management process considers the impact on psychological health and safety. This is important when the decision-making process begins, and throughout the change.
- Change is often difficult, but even more so for employees who deal with mental health issues. Helping employees to manage change can guide you as you support employees in a psychologically safer way. Use this resource for organizational and job changes.
- Supervisors may join their employees in complaining about those who make decisions. They may be trying to create a sense of equality. Yet, this behaviour can increase stress in the workplace. Employees may feel more victimized or hopeless about their situation. Instead, leaders should talk to their employees about the best ways to respond to difficult or unwelcome situations. Bonding around solutions instead of problems creates a more resilient team.
- Sometimes the emotional or psychological state of one or more employee(s) can contribute to a difficult situation. It's important to train supervisors and leaders on when and how to effectively and respectfully intervene. You can use Communicating with emotional employees to help guide you in this conversation.
- Some difficult situations may be outside the scope of the workplace. Personal, family or health issues are among these situations. In this case, it’s important to know what resources are available and how to refer employees to them. This lets supervisors focus on supporting employees with work-related issues. Referring employees to resources can help.
Discuss effective communication with your employees.
- Organizations can spend a lot of time and energy on communication and find their employees don’t feel it’s effective. We’re living in a time of information overload. We need to rethink traditional means of communication and put in place a strategy that meets employee needs.
- Ask employees to share the type and format of communication they prefer, like:
- Critical feedback
- Organizational change
- Organizational events
- Performance review
- Recognition or reward
- This could include:
- Type of communication: Email, text, conversation or other
- Format: Interactive, requiring confirmation or training
- Setting: Face-to-face, team meetings or a town hall
- Content: How it will impact their job, the decision-making process and when it will begin
- Training in respectful conflict resolution can benefit everyone in the workplace. Conflict response for leaders and Resolving personal conflict are both effective approaches.
- Employees with greater levels of emotional and social intelligence can address difficult situations more effectively. Fortunately, employees can learn these skills with Emotional intelligence in organizations.
Ensure approved leadership strategies are psychologically safe.
- Assess and improve leadership strategies using the Psychologically safe leader assessment.
- Being an effective leader is a process of continual improvement. This is especially true in the area of self-awareness. Leadership skills offers a variety of tools and resources to help.
Train all leaders in effective conflict resolution.
- Make sure all employees know who to turn to when they’re dealing with a difficult situation. It's essential they know who to talk to if the difficulty is with their supervisor.
- Encourage face-to-face communication, particularly for difficult issues.
- Hold all members of the organization accountable for their actions. Always hold managers and leaders to the same, or higher, standard.
- Conflict response for leaders is an effective approach to resolving conflict in a psychologically safe way.
Additional actions and resources
- Create explicit measurements of success for psychologically safe leadership. These measurements should apply to the supervisor level and up.
- Review the Psychologically safe leader assessment. You'll get guidance on creating expectations for all managers and leaders.
- Review accountability agreements as part of the leader performance assessment every year.
- Recognition and rewards for leaders should consider their impact on the psychological health and safety of their employees.
- Review Psychological health and safety policy recommendations. Find ways you can improve psychological health and safety.
- Review Evidence for psychological health and safety for a review of studies that show how factors that impact psychological health and safety also have a positive impact on business goals and objectives.
Use Putting clear leadership and expectations on the agenda for materials to support a team discussion on approaches to clear leadership and expectations. You'll also get materials to support policy review and development.
Adapted from Guarding Minds at Work™
Guarding Minds at Work was commissioned by Canada Life and additional resources are supported by Workplace Strategies for Mental Health.