7 HR Skills Line Managers Must Hone To Build a People-Friendly Culture

Integrating new members to the team:

As a manager, trying to build a harmonious and productive team can be a great challenge. In particular, integrating new employees into an already well-functioning team can be tricky as it caning a great deal of risk. Sometimes, besides your best efforts to ensure a smooth transition, some new hires do not integrate and can disrupt the entire team; and even derail projects.

Proactive measures:

1. Hire employees with a shared vision and value system.
2. Arrange for less formal interviews between candidates and team members.
3. Make sure you are accessible and receptive to feedback from the teammates.
4. Have a pre-defined protocol for integrating new hires to ensure that they get an appropriate introduction to their new work environment.
5. Interact with new team members outside of the workplace with an objective to genuinely know them and develop a connection

Identify training needs: 

Knowing how to identify the training needs of employees is the foundation on which your entire training is built. It is important to assess the knowledge, skills, and abilities of employees to determine what types of training they need to achieve company goals.

Proactive measures:

1. Decide department goals and objectives before gathering employee data to decide where to spend your training time
2. Identify skill gaps based on future needs
3. Provide employees with an opportunity to express themselves, know where they stand and where they would like to go before designing learning programmes.
4. ffer employee counselling

Ability to resolve conflicts:

Avoiding conflicts can come at a high cost and knowing how to manage such situations will help you keep a work environment conducive to productivity as well as morale high. While the HR teams usually manage the training of employees, it falls on the manager to deal with conflicts directly. Managers have to learn to resolve conflicts on their own and involve HR only when absolutely nothing else seems to be working.

Proactive measures:

-Managers need to be made self-aware and understand their own biases.
-Focus on the behaviour of an employee and correcting it rather than calling in their values and beliefs.
-Be clear at what stage you want to involve HR.

Ability to have difficult conversations without mediation:

Team members interact closely with their managers and expect a solution or support when they are stuck. So, when the manager takes a hands-off approach by not confronting a problem, such a manager may be perceived to be unapproachable or even as someone who avoids problems. It is therefore important that a manager not only learns to have difficult conversations with his team, if required but also take the right approach, suitable for the team member. One-size-fits-all never works.

Proactive measures:

-Check your understanding of the team member and situation before you start.
-Impact does not equal intent. Never assume an employee’s intention without asking.
-Check on how emotional the situation makes you. Seek support from HR to help you be neutral
-Reflect on how you may have consciously or subconsciously contributed to the problem. Don’t make it about yourself or the person, identify a problem statement which the team member agrees with and focus on the solution together.
-Discuss disagreements respectfully, listen to the person’s point of you and then look at a realistic solution

Be vigilant about how everyone in the team (including yourself) are conducting themselves:

Harassment and especially sexual harassment can be a unique issue to tackle in the workplace. Even when you know that what’s happening isn’t right, it can be intimidating to try to understand if it crosses the line into something legally wrong. And deciding what to do about it can be overwhelming. Especially while you’re stuck in an emotionally draining situation and interpreting behaviour becomes difficult. These may include intimidation, inappropriate tone or body language, sexual advances, innuendos, and comments as well as any other form of unwelcome conduct.

Proactive measures:

-Managers should undergo training in understanding harassment, especially sexual harassment instances.
-Be familiar with the company’s code of conduct and employee policies around bullying, harassment, sexual harassment.
-Be familiar with what steps to take if a team member comes to you with a complaint.

Listen and empathise with team members:

Understanding other people’s emotions are key in the workplace. It can enable us to resolve conflicts, to build more productive teams, and improve our relationships with co-workers, clients and customers. Showing empathy may not come naturally to you initially, or you could be nervous about committing yourself. But this doesn’t mean that you’re doomed. You can always hone these skills.

Proactive measures:

-Pause and see things from others perspective.
-Be an active listener; look out for verbal and nonverbal clues to help you fully understand their situation.
-Don’t stop at listening. If the situation requires you to take action or escalate don’t hesitate to do so.

Become custodians of the organisational culture:

A manager must serve as a role model for other employees to emulate. For example, a small-business owner wishing to see more employee teamwork must have a manager who can work directly with employees and foster a team atmosphere. Since the culture of a business may shift over time, this also requires a manager to be versatile and easily adaptable to change. The quicker a manager can illustrate the proper model of a company’s desired culture, the faster employees will adopt it.

Proactive measures:

-Don’t simply focus on timelines, budgets, organisational structures, metrics, controls, and numbers. Also pay attention to vision, buy-ins, motivation, and people.
-Encourage employees to take ownership and responsibility.
-Keep track of employee expectations.
-Align the team by clearly outlining acceptable and non-acceptable behaviours. Take action in case of non-alignment to send out a message, even if it means pulling up your best performing team member.