Digital Enablement and the Manager's Role in Employee Experience

Digital Enablement and the Manager's Role in Employee Experience

This IDC Perspective discusses digital enablement and the role of the manager in the employee experience. A return to a balance of power between employees and employers for organizational resource design in support of OKRs is renewing pressure on managers, who are at the center of preserving that balance. Managers must be sufficiently enabled to connect with and empower their employees beyond the directives handed down to them from the organization's leadership team. Rather than answering to executive asks, managers must be enabled to answer through the ask: Breaking down directives into what they mean for the workforce, communicating that meaning to working groups and teams, charting the interconnected progress of each team back into the specified OKRs, and establishing a separate ecosystem to assess and manage through MX considerations will help enable managers to adapt and develop to the changing needs of the workforce. "Manager experiences are different from everyday employee experiences," said Zachary Chertok, research manager, Employee Experience at IDC. "Managers preserve the balance between employee needs, wants, and asks and organizational directives crafted and handed down from the leadership team. Digitally enabling manager experiences must support manager skills development, emotional intelligence best practices, risk measurement, objective translation and delegation, and more to facilitate the manager as the translator and facilitator between employee goals and needs and organizational OKRs."

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