Leaders in today's business world are facing interesting times. For the first time since the industrial revolution we face a period of time where we are re-thinking work and its place in our society.

A recent CIPD study of 30,000 employees found that mental ill-health is now the second largest cause of time lost to sickness. This costs UK businesses £13bn a year in lost productivity. Everyday more employees are literally becoming sick and tired of work.

Being ‘busy and breathless' and ‘having no time' is, it seems an indication of productivity and adequate performance. The truth is, the way we are managing our businesses is having a detrimental affect on people and if we ignore this we disregard the impact it has on our bottom line.

Ultimately in business you don't manage performance, finance, change, projects, process, operations or anything else for that matter. The only thing you manage is people. Your competitive advantage ultimately comes down to your people. The most effective way to manage people is through conversation.

But conversation, it seems, is sadly lacking in most organisations today. Sure, we email, voicemail and conference call, but these should be secondary means of communicating rather than first choice. What has happened to conversation in business today? With less face-to-face conversation we are negating our vital human need, the need for connection.

It's through conversation as a leader that we influence our organisational culture and performance. In fact, I would suggest the quality of your dialogue with your employees is directly related to your people's performance. The better the conversation, the better your employees feel, the better they perform.

We have a tendency to over complicate development in organisations: 360 degrees, assessment centres, e-learning, training programmes, competency frameworks, mentoring, teambuilding, outdoor activities, retreats and so on all have their place, but too often learning from these activities does not transfer into tangible performance improvement back at work.

One of the emerging themes running through The Sunday Times Top 100 Companies is that they create places of work where there is a higher level of engagement, commitment and therefore performance. These are places of work where there are fewer people leaving and a higher number of talented individuals wanting to work there. Think how valuable it would be for your business if you had the pick of the talent pool.

The difference between a high performing organisation and a mediocre one often comes down to how your employees feel and their ‘discretionary effort', their willingness to ‘go the extra mile'. In many organisations this effort is carried by only a few individuals, leaving them with a heavy burden. By spreading the discretionary effort you naturally raise performance in a sustainable way.

Leading-edge thinking, backed with scientific studies are starting to show us that people perform and function when certain conditions are met. Leaders that run highly successful companies know how to tap into this source. It's not rocket science or a training course; it's simply how you hold the conversation with your employees.

The six conditions that need to be met are:

Attention: how much attention do you give your employees? Do you listen; really listen to their concerns and opinions?

Autonomy: how much do you trust your employees to do a good job? Studies have found that people function and perform better when they have a level of autonomy in what they do

Meaning: how much meaning is given to your employees so what they do has a level of transparency in terms of your bigger strategic picture

Authenticity: how much can your employees be themselves and how secure do they feel in expressing their thoughts and opinions

Connection: how much of a social network have you built in your company or team? Do your people feel like they have friends and belong at your workplace?

Achievement: how honest are you with them about their performance? Do you celebrate and recognise achievement and address poor performance? When did you last praise your employees?

When your conversations start to meet your employees' needs around these six conditions, you will start to see an increase in discretionary effort, a willingness to become even better, along with more optimism and engagement.

All it needs from you is the intention to change the nature of conversations through a positive intent. But if it is done with manipulation in mind employees will see through the lack of integrity.

Create a greater place to work through holding conversations that count and the next time an employee asks ‘have you got a minute' think about the implications in your response.

Steve Hurst is performance consultant at MPoint Consulting. For more information email shurst@mpoint.org.uk [1]