As a manager, you benefit from understanding what your employees are doing and how they are approaching tasks.
However, there can sometimes be a divide between management and employees that results in a breakdown of communication and inefficient workflows.
Rather than trying to overcome this with conventional means, new technological advances seek to improve the flow of information between managers and employees.
What is the main barrier that exists between management and employees?
Due to the difference in work style and expectations, it can often be difficult for managers and employees to truly understand the role each other plays within a team.
Managers have expectations for employees to approach tasks in a specific way, but employees may innovate or change approaches to better suit their unique talents.
For some employees, the ability to elaborate upon these decisions is something they cannot do easily and this has come to be known as a lack of ‘discursive competence’.
Rather than relating to the skill of an employee, discursive competence refers to the ability to communicate effectively the work that they do and the logic that fuels their decisions.
Recent research from the University of Oxford determined that where employees struggle with discursive competence, the output of their work fails to adequately “link corporate and local themes”, meaning that the result is often not what is desired by senior management.
Failing to address concerns of discursive competence results in “limited experiential learning” as senior management finds it challenging to understand how best to impart ideas to employees.
This forms a barrier where employees are acting on their own volition, doing what they believe needs to be done, and senior managers struggle to enact their vision as they do not understand the processes being followed by employees.
This can be a source of frustration for both employees and senior managers, as both believe they are approaching tasks in the optimum way and neither understands the perspective of the other.
How can technology remove barriers between senior management and employees?
As technology serves to streamline workflows, it is often simpler to understand each step being taken due to greater transparency over the process.
Rather than having each employee work in isolation, a single unified system can be implemented wherein senior management can view the work being done without being compelled to actively make adjustments unless it is necessary to do so.
Glasscubes presents the ideal solution for breaking down the barrier created by the discursive competence gap due to its simple yet effective design.
Everyone on a team can witness the work that is being conducted and the intelligent automations of Glasscubes allows an understandable approach to be taken when dealing with tasks.
This means that senior management can easily view the work being done by employees and offer them gentle coaching and guidance when they see an opportunity for their skills to be improved.
Rather than allowing discontent to fester in the team, Glasscubes can align the approaches of employees and senior managers to ensure that the best solutions are determined at all times.
Book a demo today to find out how Glasscubes can increase cohesion between employees and senior management.
