Communication, collaboration & innovation | Page 4 (623 items)

A growing number of employees are lacking motivation and feeling "stuck" at work, which calls for a back-to-basics approach from their managers, often with HR's help, a Gartner director says.

It's important to prepare for difficult conversations, but when managers do so with the wrong mindset it undermines their results, a behavioural specialist says.

Workplaces would be better if both leaders and employees paid more attention to how others are feeling, however certain types of empathy come with psychosocial risks, a leadership specialist and a neuroscientist warn.

Empathy has the power to transform hidden workplace resentment into constructive dialogue, but in many organisations it's still seen as a soft skill rather than a powerful leadership tool, a strategy consultant says.

It's true that including more voices can lead to better workforce strategies, but the quality of group decision-making is being undermined by factors at both the macro and micro level, according to an expert facilitator.

Setting a structure for conversations helps improve the quality of group decisions, but very few strategy meetings tend to do this, a specialist says.

Despite taking on more strategic responsibility, some HR teams are doing themselves a disservice by stepping in to "fix" issues that other leaders could solve, according to a coach.

The ANZ operation of a global organisation continues to slash the time employees spend on strategically unimportant work through a simplification project, but its HR director notes that every time an inefficiency is addressed, "something else rises to the top".

Loneliness might still be seen as a "personal" problem, but it reduces productivity and compromises psychological safety, so there's a strong business case for employers to "get interested, and intentional".

Too many employers are still trying to structure flexibility and remote work around their existing team organisation and leadership practices, when it should be the other way around, according to an advisor with 20 years' experience in the field.