It’s a frequently heard complaint that senior management are distant and out of touch. The problem is that so much has changed in the work place in such a short space of time that the experience that senior managers draw on “when they did your job” is no longer relevant. This wouldn’t matter if senior managers recognised this and weren’t responsible for ideas on how to improve efficiency or promoting the benefits of AI.

However senior managers make a lot of decisions that effect others but not necessarily them, the new computer system they don’t themselves use, changes to working practices that don’t effect them,  the introduction of hot desking and hybrid home working which don’t apply to them.

Often it’s not the big strategic decisions that upset employees most and result in claims that senior managers are out of touch but minor decisions such as the introduction of charges for office car parking which disproportionately impact the low paid staff or the decision to reduce the lunch  break to half an hour because senior managers don’t do lunch!

The work environment has changed a lot post Covid. Prior to this senior managers kept in touch by being visible and working on corporate communications. Visibility was road shows, in house conferences, making an appearance at the end of workshops to get feedback. Getting back to the shop floor was where a senior manager visited a work place shook a few hands and asked an employee,” and what do you do here? ” much like a royal visit.

Shadowing was a thing for a while, an employee shadowed a senior manager for a day to see what they do and a senior manager shadowed a front line worker to get a better understanding of what they do. It was often the informal chat that occurred during the day that provided both parties with some real insight.

Post Covid with slimmer management structures, managers with bigger spans of responsibility and the introduction of  home working, these initiative have fall by the wayside. However the wider spans of responsibility have thrown up the need for managers to quickly get to grips with their new areas of responsibility in which they have no previous background. Often on taking on these new responsibilities a senior manager is given an induction program consisting of visits and meetings to get to know their new staff and learn what they do. Why not build on this idea as away of improving senior managers visibility, an opportunity to learn what your employees actually do and possibly an off the cuff chat about what would make the job easier to do!