Productivity through relationships: Why manager-employee conversations are the productivity lever we ignore
By Kate Penney, TPI Research Fellow and Academic Lead for the North West Productivity Forum
As part of National Productivity Week 2026, Ripple&Co partnered with the North West Productivity Forum to deliver a workshop designed for senior leaders and HR professionals.
The session touched on something that sits at the heart of productivity but often gets overlooked: the role of wellbeing, engagement, and the quality of relationships at work. It’s also an area where TPI has done some particularly interesting research.
Why trust matters to productivity: A call to action for UK employers, a blog by Kevin Martin for TPI, makes the case that, while trust is good for people, it’s also essential for the agility and resilience of organisations too. Cultivating a culture of trust needs to be a strategic priority, not an afterthought.
The 2026 TPI Research Programme Report on Skills, Organisations and Worker Engagement (Grimshaw, O’Mahoney and Rafferty) puts people at the centre of productivity growth. It draws together the evidence on skills, technology, job design and engagement, and makes a compelling argument that worker voice, communication, leadership and motivation are core to building workplaces that actually perform.
TPI is clear that productivity isn’t the job of one team – it’s a shared responsibility that cuts across every part of an organisation. The report Strategic Productivity for the Leadership Team looks at the evolving role of HR and why it matters so much as organisations navigate hybrid and remote working, digital technologies, and everything else that shapes how people experience work and relate to each other day to day.
Productivity in Practice
Through immersive, actor-led scenarios, participants at the workshop in National Productivity Week didn’t just hear about productivity, they helped to improve it (and were invited to speak up when they saw the scenario going off course).
People in the room got to see, feel and actively shape workplace behaviours in real time; experiencing first-hand how small but deliberate shifts in managerial confidence and capability can make a real difference to performance. The workshop prompted participants to look differently at how productivity is built (or eroded) in everyday interactions, and to think about what lasting behaviour change might look like back in their own organisations.
A central theme was the quality of relationships at work. Discussions kept coming back to the role managers play in navigating difficult conversations – and the real cost, both to people and to performance, when those conversations are avoided or handled badly. Productivity, participants found, isn’t just about systems or processes. It lives in the everyday exchanges between a manager and the people they lead.
Key themes explored in the session included:
- The importance of confident managerial conversations: Developing the skills to address underperformance, workload concerns and sensitive issues early, before they escalate.
- Productivity as relational: Recognising that the quality of manager-employee interactions has a direct and measurable impact on performance outcomes.
- The cost of avoidance: Understanding how unaddressed issues can erode morale, weaken delivery and increase staff turnover.
- How conversations shape outcomes: Emphasising the role of preparation, clarity and alignment, and why even well-intentioned feedback can miss the mark.
- Listening as a core leadership capability: Creating space, staying curious and resisting the urge to immediately “fix” problems leads to deeper understanding and more effective solutions.
- The power of small behaviour changes: Demonstrating how consistent, intentional actions, such as asking better questions or committing to one improvement, can lead to meaningful productivity gains.
How can the workplace make improvements?
We followed up with Eileen Donnelly, founder of Ripple&Co and the leader of the session, to find out more about this innovative approach and what it means for the future of workplace productivity.
- What drew you to speak at this event, and what message did you most want the audience to take away?
Honestly? The conversations I keep having with HR and L&D leaders. They’re investing heavily in wellbeing strategies, Employee Assistance Programmes, mental health policies and then quietly telling me their managers still avoid the conversations that actually matter. The ones about a team member who seems off. A performance issue that’s been festering for months. A conflict no one wants to name.
And those avoided conversations are a productivity issue, not just a wellbeing one. Every unspoken performance concern, every unaddressed tension, every team member quietly struggling: that’s lost output, lost discretionary effort and often lost people. The Productivity Institute’s work makes this case powerfully at the macro level, and what we see at the coalface is exactly the same picture: organisations don’t change because of policies or platforms. They change because of what happens in the small, difficult conversations between a manager and one of their people. Get those right and almost every productivity lever – engagement, retention, safety, performance – moves with them.
- Talkworks champions immersive, conversation-led learning rather than traditional lecture formats. Why do you think this approach resonates with today’s learners and professionals?
Because people are tired of being talked at. They’ve sat through the e-learning modules, they’ve watched the webinars, and most of them will tell you very honestly that none of it changed how they behave on a Tuesday afternoon when a team member walks in looking flat.
What we know, and the evidence backs this up, is that adults learn by doing, reflecting and trying again. That’s the Kolb model that underpins Talkworks. So instead of telling a manager what to say in a difficult conversation, we put them in the conversation, with a trained actor, and let them experience it. They feel the discomfort. They notice what works. They try something different. And that’s what sticks when they get back to their desk.
It resonates because it’s honest about how humans actually change. Because organisations are increasingly aware that traditional training has a poor record of translating into behaviour, and therefore into productivity. If learning doesn’t change what happens on a Tuesday afternoon, it hasn’t earned its budget.
- Managers sit at the heart of how people experience work. They shape culture, performance and wellbeing day to day. Why do you think investing in managers is one of the highest-leverage things an organisation can do?
Managers are arguably the single biggest lever on workplace productivity that organisations consistently under-invest in. There’s a stat I find quite startling: research suggests managers influence employee mental health as much as a spouse or partner. Around 86% of our job satisfaction comes from our relationship with our manager, and roughly 70% of our motivation is shaped by them. That’s an extraordinary amount of power sitting with one group of people and most of them have had very little training, if any, to wield it well.
Managers are also where strategy meets reality. You can have the most beautifully designed wellbeing or performance strategy in the world, but if a frontline supervisor doesn’t know how to respond when one of their team says “I’m struggling,” none of it lands. Equally, if a manager can’t address a performance issue early and humanely, it escalates into something far more costly – grievances, sickness, attrition, and in safety-critical sectors, real operational risk.
So, when HR leaders ask me where to put their budget, my honest answer is: build the conversation capability of your managers. Pound for pound, it’s the highest-return investment you can make in productivity.
- Can you share a moment, from the event or your wider work, where you saw an immersive experience shift a manager’s thinking or behaviour in a way a traditional training couldn’t have?
Yes, and it’s one of the reasons I’m so committed to this work. We’ve been running Talkworks for Cadent Gas, where we’re training team leaders and supervisors who manage frontline operatives in a high-risk, safety-critical environment. Many of them have come up through the tools, and they’d be the first to tell you the “human side” of management isn’t where they feel most comfortable.
In one session, a manager rehearsed a conversation with an actor playing a team member whose performance had dropped. His instinct, like a lot of managers, was to jump straight to fixing – give advice, set actions, move on. Through the role play and the reflection that followed, he realised the team member just needed to be heard first. He tried it again, differently. He bravely became more human and more present in the conversation. You could see it land.
What’s powerful is that the same manager told us afterwards he’d had a real version of that conversation back at work the following week and it had gone completely differently to how it would have done before. That’s not a soft outcome. That’s a performance issue handled early instead of festering, a team member feeling supported instead of dismissed, and a manager spending less time later cleaning up something that was never tackled properly. Their Head of Occupational Health and Wellbeing put it beautifully: she said the training “feels like our own” and that managers “loved it and want more.” That’s the shift you don’t get from a slide deck.
- What does “immersive” actually mean in a learning context, and why is it especially powerful for developing managers, who learn so much through lived experience and conversation?
Immersive, for us, means you’re in the moment not observing it from the outside. It’s the difference between reading about how to swim and being in the water with someone who can coach you through it.
In Talkworks, that means specially trained actors playing real-feeling team members in scenarios built around your actual workplace. Not generic case studies – your pressures, your dynamics, your dilemmas. Managers get to try a conversation, get it slightly wrong, pause, reflect, and try it again, all in a safe space where the only consequence is learning.
It’s powerful for managers specifically because management is conversation. It’s not a body of knowledge to memorise; it’s a craft you build through practice. And almost no one gets enough practice in the conversations that matter most – the difficult ones. Immersive learning gives them that practice before the stakes are real, which means when they have those conversations for real, they’re more likely to land well the first time. That’s where you start to see the productivity dividend – fewer issues escalated, fewer problems left to grow, more people doing their best work.
- What’s a common misconception about manager development, or about immersive learning, that you’d like to challenge?
The biggest misconception is that role play is awkward or “fluffy” and by extension, that conversation skills are a soft, hard-to-justify investment. I understand why people think that. But when it’s done well, with skilled actors and proper facilitation, it stops feeling like role play and starts feeling like rehearsal. It’s the same principle pilots and surgeons use: you rehearse the difficult moments before you face them for real. Why would we expect less rigour for the conversations that shape people’s working lives and, ultimately, the productivity of the businesses they work in?
- How do you measure whether an immersive learning experience has genuinely changed how a manager shows up at work?
A few ways. We track confidence before and after and in our Talkworks sessions we typically see large majorities of delegates reporting they feel “true” or “very true” confidence about having a supportive conversation with someone in their team afterwards. That matters because confidence is the thing that determines whether a manager actually starts the conversation in the first place.
But the more interesting measures sit further downstream, and they’re often where the productivity story really plays out. With clients like Cadent, we’re looking at things like: are issues being handled at team level rather than escalated unnecessarily? Are people speaking up about hazards and concerns earlier? Are managers having the wellbeing or performance conversation in week one instead of month six? Each of those shifts saves time, reduces risk, and keeps people contributing rather than checked out or off sick.
And honestly, the qualitative signals are often the most telling. When a manager comes back and says “I had that conversation I’d been avoiding for two years, and it went well”. That’s the measure that matters. It’s also, quietly, where a lot of lost productivity gets recovered.
- For an organisation that wants to take manager development more seriously, what’s the first step you’d suggest and how might immersive experiences play a role?
Start by being honest about where the gaps actually are. Talk to your managers about the conversations they’re avoiding – the performance ones, the wellbeing ones, the conflict ones – and you’ll get a very clear map of where to invest. Most HR leaders I speak to are surprised by how consistent the answers are. And once you see that map, you also see how much productivity is currently leaking through those gaps.
From there, my advice is to design something that gives managers genuine practice in those specific scenarios, in a safe environment, with expert guidance. That’s exactly what Talkworks is built for – bespoke, immersive sessions where managers rehearse the conversations that matter most to your business, with trained actors, in scenarios drawn from your real workplace. Whether that’s a wellbeing concern, a performance dip, or a difficult team dynamic, we build it around you.
If any of that resonates, I’d genuinely love to talk. You can find us at rippleandco.com, or just drop me a line. We always start with a conversation about what’s really going on for your managers, and what “good” would look like in your business.
