We Spend a Lot of Time Designing for Employees. Not Enough for Managers

When HR designs a new process, the conversation usually starts with the employee experience. We ask how onboarding feels, whether performance reviews are intuitive, how easy it is to access learning, or whether employees understand their career opportunities. Those are all important questions, and they should remain a priority.

What we don't ask nearly as often is what the experience looks like for managers.

The more organizations grow, the more I think managers become the primary users of HR. They hire people, onboard new team members, approve compensation changes, conduct performance conversations, support career development, manage reorganizations, and communicate change. Almost every People initiative eventually depends on a manager doing something differently.

That makes managers one of the most important users of every HR process we design.

Yet many of those processes aren't designed from their perspective.

I've seen managers receive the same information from multiple HR teams because each function communicates independently. A performance cycle arrives with one set of instructions, compensation planning with another, learning recommendations from somewhere else, and organizational changes through yet another channel. Each initiative makes sense on its own, but managers don't experience them individually. They experience HR as one function.

The same happens with technology. Organizations often introduce new tools with the intention of making HR more efficient, but the cumulative effect on managers is rarely considered. Another system to learn, another approval workflow, another dashboard, another notification. Individually, none of these changes seem significant. Together, they can make people management feel unnecessarily complicated.

I don't think this happens because HR forgets about managers. I think it happens because we tend to design processes one at a time. Each project has a clear objective, a sponsor, and a delivery team. Very few people step back to understand what those individual initiatives look like once they reach the same manager.

That's why I've become increasingly interested in the idea of manager experience.

Not as another HR program, but as a way of evaluating whether the People function is operating as one connected system. If every initiative is successful on its own but managers still feel overwhelmed, there's a good chance the problem isn't the individual process. It's how all the processes fit together.

This becomes even more important as organizations continue investing in automation and AI. Technology can certainly remove administrative work, but it can also create more touchpoints if each solution is implemented independently. The goal shouldn't be to digitize every process. It should be to make managing people easier.

Managers don't think in terms of HR functions. They don't separate Talent Acquisition from Learning, People Operations, Compensation, or HR Technology. They simply need to lead their teams.

The closer HR gets to designing around that reality, the more valuable every People initiative becomes.