Employees Don't Trust Their Managers, and It's Hurting Your Bottom Line

A survey from Ultimate Software and the Center for Generational Kinetics (CGK) found 80 percent of employees said they could do their job without managers, reports Forbes . Many modern human capital management technologies are designed to tackle common breakdowns in the employee-manager relationship. CGK calculated 80 percent of managers said they are transparent with teams, but only 55 percent of employees agreed. Furthermore, just 53 percent of employees felt their managers cared about their well-being. Survey technologies can help address employee-manager disconnection, using natural language processing and machine-learning algorithms to analyze open-ended text and identify human emotions and workplace themes in real time. The feedback from sentiment analysis tools can help managers proactively address their own weaknesses and initiate honest conversations with employees. CGK also found less than half of today's managers have a mentor, while 45 percent of managers have never received any training. Formal leadership programs from learning academies offering flexible, personalized, and easy to use courses can help in this regard. Meanwhile, the CGK poll found 47 percent of managers use any type of data when making salary or promotion decisions, and predictive and prescriptive analytics could be a boon in forecasting all aspects of employee behavior and recommending remedial action.