The Shift - June 13, 2024

Hello and welcome to The Shift, Blink’s bi-monthly newsletter for frontline leaders. Coming up in this issue:   

• 5 ways to build vital trust between healthcare employers and employees
• The manager blind spots getting in the way of employee engagement
• Blink for Everyone: why our employee app is now free to nonprofits

An injection of trust for healthcare organizations

Trust between patients and medical professionals is the foundation of any healthcare system.

And — says Jacob Kupietzky, President of HealthCare Transformation — trust between healthcare employees is just as crucial. It impacts team morale, employee retention, and patient safety.

In a recent Forbes article, Kupietzky reveals that just 56% of employees say they trust their employer. A similar proportion of employers say the same about the employees they lead.

To close this trust gap, he lists five actions for healthcare leaders.

1. Encourage feedback

Ask those frontline employees what works — and what doesn’t. Seek out their ideas for making operations smoother and ask for feedback regularly.

2. Be visible

To build trust, leaders and managers need to interact with frontline employees. That might mean taking your lunch break in the staff room or replying to posts on the social intranet.  

3. Lean on middle-level managers

Middle managers are trust-builders. They have direct contact with both leaders and employees. But we know that many frontline managers are already overworked and undervalued. So don’t expect them to do more without providing the right tools, training, and support.  

4. Demonstrate empathy

When leaders are empathetic, employees are more trusting and transparent. Show genuine interest in employee needs and concerns. And respond to mistakes with compassion.

5. Promote mentorship

Employees value learning and growth. Implement a formal mentorship program to help employees progress in their careers. You’ll build trust between managers and employees in the process.

Uncovering (and eliminating) manager blind spots

Ready for an eye-watering statistic? Gallup says that poor management and lost productivity amounts to $8.8 trillion or 9% of global GDP.

To find out how we can reduce these startling figures, they conducted a study into the strengths, weaknesses, and blind spots of managers.

They compared the views of 2,729 managers to the views of their 12,710 employees. They then separated their findings into four categories:

• Strengths: skills rated highest by both managers and employees.
• Unrecognized strengths: skills employees rated high, but managers rated low.
• Known weaknesses: skills rated lowest by both managers and employees.
• Blind spots: skills managers rated high, but employees rated low.

The study found that managers are good at responding promptly to calls and messages. They’re also better than they think at creating accountability for high performance.

But…onto weaknesses and blind spots.

Managers aren’t great at providing meaningful feedback or motivating their teams. However, they do show good self-awareness with regards to these weaknesses. Both managers and employees say these skills are in need of improvement.

Blind spots are areas where managers don’t realize they’re falling short. Gallup found big gaps in manager and employee perceptions when it came to recognition and regularity of feedback:

• While 59% of managers think they’re good at recognizing their team’s hard work, only 35% of employees agree
• While 50% of managers think that they provide weekly feedback, only 20% of employees agree

Clearly, manager efforts in these areas aren’t registering with their teams.

We know that recognition and feedback help to drive employee engagement. So raising awareness of these blind spots and improving performance in these areas is crucial to a company’s success. 

A tool like Blink can help. Blink makes it easy for managers to build recognition into team communication and to get employee feedback on any topic.

Leaders can also use Blink to compare employee and manager feedback. They can identify and eliminate manager blind spots to improve employee engagement.

Blink for Everyone: why we’re gifting our app to nonprofits

We’ve launched “Blink for Everyone”, a program that lets non-profit organizations use our employee super-app for free.

We’re giving nonprofits all the essential tools they need to keep their workforce connected and engaged. And — with Meta’s Workplace for Good due to close — Blink is providing a much-needed alternative for organizations that do vital work with limited budgets.

Here’s what our CEO, Sean Nolan, said on the topic:

“Nonprofits are essential to society and our communities, and we want to enhance their impact by offering access to an all-in-one people engagement platform […] We believe in equality of access, where every worker, whether desk-based or deskless, has the tools they need to thrive.”

Blink is already making a difference.

At St. Amant — where workers support people with developmental disabilities, autism, and brain injuries — Blink is helping foster a sense of unity and collaboration amongst dispersed teams.

Over at another nonprofit, Destiny Rescue, board member Chris Lawley said:

“As a globally dispersed team, we were struggling with keeping our teams connected in real-time. Blink's support for non-profit organizations allowed us to adopt their world-class technology without a license fee. Important information is now being shared seamlessly across continents, making our operations safer and more efficient.”

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