Building Engagement, Strengthening Teams, Addressing Conflict

By Dr Mike Talbot

An interesting report came out in the last few weeks concerning the priorities for HR strategy in European organisations in 2025. It got me thinking about where mediation, dialogue-building, and conflict resolution would fall into such a strategy. The report, from Lattice, was asking questions about the relationship between management and HR, and was also wondering what a progressive, effective HR strategy should be.

According to the report, diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) has now become one of the top five priorities for the HR-based respondents, who were drawn from a selection of European organisations. Learning & Development is at number three, and performance management takes second spot.

Top of the priorities for HR, however, is employee engagement. Furthermore, what is highlighted as a means of building that engagement is for managers to concentrate on building a good connection with their team members. So many times, we receive mediation referrals in which a team will say their manager is remote, he/she communicates mostly by email, they are too process-driven, with too little attention on people, etc, etc. What the Lattice report confirms - and in a sense what we already knew - is that managers who focus on connecting with their reports will build teams who feel more engaged.

The actual figures are that, amongst the respondents, most managers (78%) have daily or weekly check-ins with direct reports. Of those, 97% say they feel somewhat or very connected to direct reports. Perhaps unsurprisingly, managers who have far fewer check-ins feel far less connected.

Of course, frequent check-ins are only part of the recipe for building highly engaged teams, but a culture in which people have frequent dialogue and who trust each other enough to raise difficult topics, is a culture that can manage conflict well.

And what of the relationship of HR to managers? One finding in the report is that, ‘…when HR supports managers, managers can support their employees and help the whole organisation achieve its strategic goals’. And where is that support lacking? Interestingly for us, although manager-employee relationships are reported as being strong, nearly half of managers (46%) report that what they get asked for is to toughen up their approach to feedback and to provide harder, more constructive criticism. Having said that, only 28% report that HR has met all their training needs in this area.

So, if the question is what do European managers need in 2025 to further improve how well they relate to their teams, the answer is more support and training to have what we would call Confident Conversations: learning not just how to build supportive and affirmative relationships with reports, but also acquiring greater confidence in giving developmental feedback, addressing issues in conduct and competence, and feeling just as inclined to challenge positively as to offer support.     

Frequent check-ins, prioritising people over processes, and affirming team members’ efforts clearly have their benefits, as this report confirms. But let’s not shy away from the fact that employee relations are not always rosy, people don’t always give of their best, and neither do they always get along with each other, or with you! How about learning in 2025 how better to restore collaboration and to resolve conflict when things aren’t going so well?