A company get rid of all managers. The employees are now 20% more productive, and much happier

Amid all this debate, in a contrasting approach, a company recently introduced a new innovative approach in order to boost productivity of employees and engage them in a healthy manner. In a report published on Fortune, a virtual assistant company, Time Etc, recently decided to replace all its managers with coaches, with a ratio of one coach per six employees. As per the company the results were impressive.

The report said that the coaches’ job was to help employees maximise productivity by offering close mentoring and feedback, encouraging them to identify how they work best, and making sure they are offered training and support to develop professionally.

“We started asking the people we were hiring what they needed from a manager. What stood out was how the list they gave us – goal-setting, feedback, personal and professional development opportunities, autonomy – sounded much more like they needed a coach, rather than a manager,” Time Etc. said.

“Like managers, coaches are still there to act as a first port of call when challenges arise. But instead of directing from above, the focus is on empowering and supporting the employee to find their own way forward,” the team added.

The company said it adopted the new approach after an annual survey by Gallup showed that employee engagement dropped to a seven-year low in 2022. Only a third of workers reported feeling engaged at work, while almost a fifth (18%) described themselves as ”actively disengaged.”To overcome this problem, the company came up with this radical experiment, and it witnessed an immediate and significant impact on employees in terms of engagement and productivity.The company noted that the since the implementation on this approach, they have experienced a drop in employee turnover and the employees are taking less sick leaves. It also said that it successfully weathering the storm of the great resignation and most importantly, performance on key goals improved by up to an impressive 20 per cent, and the employees were much happier.

It also said that the company is now consistently ranking in the top 1 percent of teams worldwide in Gallup’s employee engagement survey.