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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Isabel Berwick leads the FT’s Working It newsletter and is author of ‘The Future-Proof Career’
Many big employers now offer free food, a long list of perks and benefits, and a generous pension scheme. But if an organisation fails to nail the basics beneath the shiny surface of corporate life, then chaos will surely follow.
By chaos, I don’t mean actual chair-throwing, temper tantrums or other visible drama (those days are gone, mostly). I am talking, rather, about invisible enemies of knowledge work: disengagement, lack of productivity and general malaise. The chaos they collectively unleash results in staff not working anywhere near their best — and that has a big impact, at both team and company level.
What really makes a positive difference to the way that staff feel about work? Good managers. Unexciting team leaders. I am not just talking about the people who are seen as “rising stars” internally. A good manager, at heart, is just someone who is trained, competent, and unbiased and transparent in hiring and promotion decisions.
Why are these good managers so valuable? There are clues everywhere, starting with your own company’s attrition rates. How often have we seen a department with a “revolving door” because the boss is a tyrant/micromanager/plays favourites? Why would any company even want to tolerate that? It’s expensive to keep replacing people, and to lose the valuable institutional knowledge that keeps walking out of the door.
The flipside is that the best teams do well because they have a good manager. A whopping 70 per cent of a team’s engagement level is down to the manager. That figure comes from Gallup’s 2025 State of the Workplace report.
As Jim Harter, Gallup’s chief scientist for workplace management and wellbeing, and the report’s co-author, told me, some teams the company surveys have high engagement rates — as high as 70 per cent, for both staff and managers. What’s the secret of the super-teams? Harter says there are some common themes: “Managers who are setting expectations and communicating regularly with employees, having ongoing conversations. And that means having at least one meaningful conversation a week with the people that they manage.” Gallup’s findings come from 200,000 people worldwide, at every level of corporate life.
The magic combination appears to be having clarity, good communication and accountability in a workplace that does not overload managers but gives them the freedom to, as Harter put it, “focus on inspiring people and developing them”.
When managers have both the training and “someone at work who actively encourages their development”, 50 per cent of these team leaders say they are actively “thriving” at work.
All of these seems pretty straightforward. Obvious, even. And yet 44 per cent of managers in the Gallup survey say they have had no training at all. Zero. I bet, though, some of the companies skimping on management training also offer free food or lunchtime yoga classes. They are, to be blunt, putting their money in the wrong places. Or stomachs.
Perhaps it seems outdated to invest in the actual human resources of an organisation just as GenAI is starting to roll out. But, as Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index report shows us, human investment is crucial. It coins the term “frontier firm”, meaning one that integrates human and AI workers. Frontier firms are the companies, it believes, that will transition most successfully to the transformed future of work.
As Microsoft’s report points out, line managers will have to learn to run teams that consist of both humans and AI agents. This may also mean reconfiguring not only teams, but entire processes and the jobs that employees — and agents — do. It’s a huge structural, as well as emotional, shift. The hierarchical org chart, certainly as we have come to know it, may be redundant.
And while 53 per cent of leaders told Microsoft that “productivity must increase” (of course they did), 80 per cent of the global workforce surveyed — both employees and leaders — said they lacked enough “time or energy to do their work”. Fun fact from the report: “During the 9-to-5 [workday], employees are interrupted every two minutes by meetings, emails or pings.”
One solution to help managers deal with task overwhelm, people management, and the rapid pace of AI change, is to equip them with “coachbots”. These AI programmes offer management guidance, help with stress and workload and even learn an individual manager’s quirks. And while an expensive and highly-trained executive coach is almost certainly going to remain a must-have for senior leaders, for the ordinary managers among us, the coming transformation of our workplaces demands a speedy response, and at scale. This may be it.
I have no doubt that coachbots will help to train and support many thousands of managers. But how long, I wonder, before those undertrained, overworked human managers are replaced with AI agents? They never go off sick or expect a free lunch.