Communicating With People Managers

It’s not easy being a people manager. Managers receive pressure from both the teams they support and the leaders who hold them accountable. Information and responsibility flow through them in all directions, requiring them to understand and act on a broad range of variables. All of this is on top of whatever responsibilities they have as individual contributors.

In today’s workplace environment of relentless pressure and constant change, managers struggle with 51% greater responsibility than they can handle, according to a Gartner report, with 54% of them buckling under the stress and fatigue. It’s no surprise the report reveals that one in five people managers would rather not be managers at all.

This reality presents a challenge for communicators. A recent joint study by USC Annenberg and Staffbase reaffirms a long-standing truth: people managers are the primary internal communication channel for most employees, with 55% of employees preferring it that way. Yet, only 49% of employees who receive messages from their managers feel familiar with their company’s goals, objectives and vision. This means that despite conveying company messaging is one of many responsibilities managers hold, it often gets deprioritized.

How can communicators better help managers relay company priorities amid high workloads?

One drawback of viewing managers as a communications channel is that it’s easy to forget they’re still people. Unlike a digital employee communication platform, managers don’t run on demand 24/7. They have individual lives and limited bandwidth like anybody else.

Managers are constantly expected to express empathy, both “downward empathy” for their direct reports and “upward empathy” for the leaders who are working hard and making difficult decisions to do the best for the company. As such, they deserve a large measure of “lateral empathy” from the communicators who require their help.

By foregrounding managers’ perspectives, you as a communicator can make more effective strategic decisions that potentially ease managers’ burdens rather than adding to them. Before making a demand of people managers, consider your ask from the manager’s point of view. What company initiatives are managers currently responsible for carrying out? Can they handle another responsibility, or can the timing of a communications push be adjusted? Is it something that can be bundled with another topic or even bypass managers altogether?

The line of transaction between managers and communications teams can’t be one-way. While you may rely on managers to share corporate messages, you also need to proactively seek out feedback and insight that can help improve the relationship.

Focus groups and polling are two more formal methods of soliciting feedback, but they run the risk of putting another task on managers’ already overfull plates. Any efforts on that level should be carefully planned to make the best use of their time. Meanwhile, to supplement organizational efforts, communicators can benefit from establishing personal relationships with as many people managers as possible to get direct insight on their needs, concerns and experiences. Be sure they know your own virtual door is open if they would like to share ideas or simply vent. Being there for them on a personal level can deepen your understanding and build stronger connections across the organization.

Whatever you might learn from listening to managers, you can get started by streamlining the way you interact with them as a group. Prioritize simplifying the process of providing managers with key communications information, and make sure that information is as easy as possible for them to digest and disseminate. Clear directions, short sentences and limited touchpoints can all help managers adapt your messages to their own personal styles and the needs of their teams.

On a broader level, do everything possible to consolidate all communications resources in a single intranet page or playbook, and reliably keep it up to date for managers to easily find and access. Going deeper, you can also advocate for manager communication training within your organization, which can impact managers’ skills and priorities right at the base.

Anything you can do to make managers’ lives easier is worth doing. This also applies to the people managers on your own internal communications team — which might include yourself! Treating people managers like the precious resource they are will help improve communication across your entire organization.

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