Reporting To A Virtual Manager Or No Manager?

Pick your choice

Imagine attending an online meeting to learn about your employer’s plans for the coming year. Following the ‘all hands’ meeting, every one of the 5600 in your division’s frontline customer servicing role was invited to stay connected to learn about a new corporate programme – a management experiment for which the division CEO volunteered her organisation.

Naturally, generating the most online chat was the email sentence saying ‘anyone who volunteers to participate in this experiment will personally receive an additional 28% of their regular compensation in their pay checks throughout the year or for as long as they remained in the one-year programme.’ That alone was sure to make this the best attended ‘all hands’ meeting ever.
 

The presenter did a great job of laying out the programme simply. Yet the high number of similar questions suggested that many people could not understand or otherwise doubted what they were hearing. Really, it just was not that difficult to comprehend.

Restated simply for you, the reader, everyone in the frontline customer service role, regardless of their location or tenure with the company, is being invited to participate in a one-year pilot programme to automate management – essentially to replace their role’s supervisors and managers... that means all levels, or 280 supervisors, 28 managers, and 4 directors... with a one level artificial-intelligence (AI) automated management system that will communicate through all of the employees’ Internet connecting devices. Each person is given three possible options for how they, individually, want to be managed in the coming year:

1. Virtual Manager – This option means anyone or everyone in this frontline customer service role can choose to ‘report’ to a Management Virtual Assistant that is programmed to be their business manager... to answer their questions, provide them with direction and coaching when needed, and to enforce performance and business policies, also when needed. Each person selecting this option will choose from eight personas (ie, simulating voice, personality, and management style) for their Management Virtual Assistant. And, because research confirms that high-quality leadership is the most effective significant discretionary variable contributing to an employee’s high performance in business, each persona will simulate a different locally recognised superior CEO who is especially popular with their organisation’s employees:

a. Craig Donaldson, CEO of Metro Bank and employee-rated at 98% on Glassdoor.
b. Liv Garfield, CEO of Severn Trent, employee-rated at 91%, and at 44 the youngest CEO of a FTSE 100 company
c. Andrew Haines, CEO of Network Rail and employee-rated at 98% on Glassdoor.
d. Carolynn McCall, CEO of ITV and #3 in FTSE Top Female CEOs in the UK in 2020.
e. Bill McDermott, CEO of Service NOW (previously CEO of SAP), and employee rated at 96% on Glassdoor.
f. Pam Nicholson, CEO of Enterprise and employee-rated at 91% on Glassdoor.
g. Peter Simpson, CEO of Anglian Water, and employee rated at 99% on Glassdoor.
h. Emma Walmsley, CEO of GlaxoSmithKline, and selected as the Top Woman CEO in the UK for 2020. 2. No-Manager – Alternatively, anyone can choose to Self-Manage if they wish to work more independently (ie, prefer to work with neither their current manager nor a Management Virtual Assistant). In effect, individuals selecting this option will report to no one and look only to themselves regarding direction, advice, and enforcement of performance and business policies. However, to provide a limited level of camaraderie, coaching and support, Self-Managing participants will have a further option to commit no more than one day per month to staff a ‘Virtual Help’ service to provide other Self-Managing participants with a limited level of biopsychosocial and business support by phone, text, and email.

3. Current Manager – This option represents the least change. Individuals choosing this option will continue to report to someone like their current manager in essentially the same manner as they have in the past, yet this experiment will require a reassignment of managers. Furthermore, individuals choosing this option will NOT receive the 28% pay premium.

Experiment Debrief

Which option would you choose if presented with this choice? Why? What insight does your choice and reasoning reveal about your general perception of current management practices?

What is your guess for how the individuals presented with this choice responded? Perhaps 10%, 30%, and 60%? Or would you estimate 50%, 10%, and 40%? Is your perception the reality, or would other knowledgeable people like you perceive the situation differently?

The rationale for live experiments like this is that the only way we can know what these individuals will choose is to give them the choice. Not a survey. A real choice with consequences. Yes, it requires work, and it exposes ideas to rejection, both of which many business people naturally avoid. If the hype about human traits and human behaviour being predictive were true, experiments would not be necessary. We could just read the signs and know what people will do. The fact remains that the only way to know how any individual or group will choose is to give them the opportunity to choose. Therein lies the rationale for experimentation, which is quickly becoming the gold standard to support risk-laden business decisions.

Show Me the Experiment

Business decision-makers are flooded with convenient information, and rarely ever get past the first page of Google search results to discover the full story. The obvious problem with relying on Google and other convenient information is its incompleteness. For example, Google search results are based on a myriad of unknown factors obscured in a proprietary algorithm based primarily on popularity to optimise Google’s primary goal, advertising sales. Gaming Google’s algorithm is itself a multi-billion-dollar business (ie, search engine optimisation or SEO).

In addition to a manager’s experience, intuition, and beliefs, management decision-making relies primarily on transaction data (ie, past behaviour), confirming stories and data lifted from the business press and, of course, Google search results. This approach can be expected to support current and best-practice methods and make it more difficult to change methods when management needs to for facing an increasingly complex, fast changing, and utterly surprising reality.

Managers can dramatically improve their decision effectiveness with experimentation. Just as pharmaceutical companies would not introduce a new drug without subjecting it to a series of ‘live-trial’ experiments, managers can discover in advance the performance of a change in business model, service, product, policy, procedure, job design, organisation design, compensation plan, management style, performance management design, training programme, and much more. 

Managers reluctant to run experiments may experience either the initial dopamine rush from giving people orders or subsequent neurological dysfunction caused by the high levels of cortisol associated with uncertainty. Are the extra risks taken worth the hardships of failure? Rarely is the answer yes, particularly when someone shows them how a non-destructive, low cost and low risk experiment can provide unimpeachable evidence upon which a final decision can be made. Do not be surprised in the future when you first hear, ‘Show me the experiment!’ when someone seeks approval based only on conventional wisdom, historical transaction data, or a home grown organisation survey. [Source – See Stefan H. Thomke, Experimentation Works: The surprising power of business experiments (2020) Harvard Business Review Press]

The Gate Is Open

Did you realise that, among other records set, the COVID-19 pandemic unleashed the single largest management experiment ever? Virtually every organisations in the world is now experimenting with changes to how their people work and are officed and managed.

Many of the alternatives being explored had been identified and studied before, yet despite the substantial benefits in theory, nothing changed until these organisations were forced to abandon, at least temporarily, their standard practices. For many, the experiment results have been so positive that dramatic changes are now finally being considered and enacted. For example, BP, with its 70,000-person workforce across 79 countries, including 6500 office-based workers in the UK, is contemplating the shift of almost 50,000 employees towards remote working and flexible workplace layouts in the wake of the pandemic. BP’s final decision could almost halve its workspace footprint, representing the most dramatic downsizing of BP’s overall property portfolio in its 111-year history. [Source - The Guardian, 12 Aug 2020, Jillian Ambrose]

Interest in working from home (WFH) is off the charts, as is the pursuit of better use of facilities and technology, and of more effective organisational solutions. According to Mark Dixon, Chief Executive of workspace provider IWG, formally known as Regus. ‘People have tasted the relative luxury of not having to commute.’ [Source – The Guardian, 5 Aug 2020, Julia Kollewe] Until recently, suggestions that executives and salespeople hold business meetings virtually (ie, digitally, via Zoom or Go-to- Meeting) were given low priority, despite the obvious travel cost and time savings. Now, the travel risks and extra inconvenience have tipped the scale to make virtual participation the better business alternative.

Artificial Intelligence Drives Innovation and Experimentation

The expansion and development of human society throughout history has depended on the discovery, development, and application of new technology. At every point, the available technology determined the work performed by people, even though society performed a wide range of work, with each of us performing work that most suited our situation.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is among the many advanced technologies now influencing today’s human work. According to Paul R. Daugherty, the CTO and CIO of Accenture and H. James Wilson, MD of IT and Business Research at Accenture Research, ‘Thanks to recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), we are now at the cusp of a major transformation in business. It’s a new era in which the fundamental rules by which we run our organisations are being rewritten daily.’

‘AI systems are not just automating many processes, making them more efficient; they are now enabling people and machines to work collaboratively in novel ways. In doing so, they are changing the very nature of work, requiring us to manage our operations and employees in dramatically different ways.’ [Source – Paul R. Daugherty and H. James Wilson, Human +Machine: Reimagining work in the age of AI (2020), Harvard Business Review Press]

Popular culture more often portrays machines facing-off against people in competition for today’s human work. There are small examples of this, yet the larger effect is a collaboration where machines and people each do what each does best. A more typical example is where people and AI-controlled machine systems are partnered to reinvent work processes into more adaptive means for serving customers. Each partner brings their unique capability to the collaboration; and once again we witness human work evolving due to the development and application of new technology.

As a case example, the application of AI that is central to the experiment outlined at the start of this article has everyone participating to evolve the work and increase their individual human capital value. The customer service employees who participate will learn in a new and more effective way how to increase their responsibility, performance, and accountability, while immediately increasing their wages by 28%. The existing managers will become experienced management system designers and developers capable of creating much greater value for their current and future employers. And, depending on any direct involvement they pursue, the selected CEOs could increase their value as even-more widely recognised superior executives.

Furthermore, everyone involved is, in effect, enhancing the performance of the company’s current and future operations by updating the popular yet outdated concept of ‘managerial span-of-control’ (ie, conceived a century ago to manage task labour). ‘The top-down autocracy where managers would give orders to get work done is increasingly seen as a relic of another era. Today, managers are expected to provide guidance, apprenticeship, and expertise.’ [Source – McKinsey & Company (December 2017) How to Identify the Right ‘Spans of Control’ for Your Organization]

Humaneering

Humaneering technology obsoletes managerial span of control by improving the design of human work (ie, DesignedWORK™) and jobs (LoveableJOBS™) to a level of sophistication that does not need direct managerial control to achieve high levels of employee engagement and performance. Analysis of the managerial transactions in companies consistently reveal problematic situations that could easily be prevented with clearer description of the results required and better training on the work methods required. Even further performance improvement and employee retention is possible with a clearer representation of the substantive job features. [Note - See https://humaneeringtech.com/designedwork  and https://humaneeringtech.com/loveablejobs]

In effect, much of the current organisational dependency on managers is designed into organisations even though businesses can operate more effectively and efficiently when such dependency is not required. This is a common result of using outdated technology and using design parameters conceived for an earlier generation of technology.

Though still in development, the new applied human science (ie, technology) of humaneering is now available free in beta form for application experiments large and small. This programme is managed by the Humaneering Technology Initiative and equips business leaders to experiment with humaneering prior to its yet unscheduled public release.

Dr. James (Jim) Pepitone is Director of Technology Transfer for the Humaneering Technology Initiative (HTI). His career includes industry positions as VP of Sales for a division of Automation Industries (now Honeywell) and General Manager for Cybertek Computer Products, both public companies, and continued as a management consultant. Jim’s education includes a BBA in Industrial Management and MBA from the Univ. of Texas at Austin, and an MS in Organization Development and Ed. D in Organization Design from Pepperdine Univ in California. Connect Dr James (Jim) Pepitone