Motivating employees in times of recession

HRM role in tough times

Recession is about the creative Human Resource Management. HRM function is asked to bring new ideas, to change the HRM process and to develop or change the procedures while reducing costs of the organisation.

In many cases, this means implementing a redundancy programme and for some companies this can be the only option. So long as a fair redundancy procedure is adopted with meaningful consultation, fair dismissals and managing 'survivor syndrome', a company can survive to meet ongoing needs. However, for some companies there could be other options to consider.

It is at times like this that HR needs to take charge and help both employees and the business work through challenging times through extra advice, training and support.

1) Strategic moves

In any change management programme,there will be the inevitable redundancies. A major re-structure of the business to anticipate future needs and cope with current pressures is a major strategic move. This allows the business to hold on to key talent who are slotted into key roles with an accompanying training and development plan, and is more effective than a mass redundancy programmes. A planned process allows a company to remain in control. Securing existing talent and investing in them will ensure that a company becomes more competitive so that when the economy picks up they are much better placed to move forward.

2)Nurture and reward talent

Talent management is key in these challenging economic times to ensure employee engagement. Talent needs to be nurtured and rewarded accordingly to ensure employees don't jump ship and join a competitor. Having clear HR processes in place such as succession planning and career paths are the basic building blocks together with appropriate training and development.

3)Ongoing Training and Development

This is often the first HR process to go when things get tough. Cutting back on training is a false economy because when key skills are needed in response to market forces in future, a company will struggle. Many companies see this as an unnecessary cost. However, there are low cost and even free options to consider such as work shadowing and developing coaching and mentoring programmes using existing talent to train developing talent.

Web based discussion boards can be hosted where any one can post questions or doubts and others will share their experience over the issue. This will help in sharing experience, solutions and best practices as and when required.

4)Total Reward programme

There is the need to look at creative ways to reward staff, where, for the time being, increased financial compensation is not available. Communication to staff about companies' actions in this area will help employees to understand the hows and whys.
Offering more tax-efficient benefits that can save the company money could release funds to offer motivational perks such as company days out or a paid-for social gathering to improve motivation.
Educating staff in the value of their total reward package can often be beneficial. This can be achieved through providing total reward statements either paper-based or online or by financial workshops, on key aspects such as pensions or financial benefits.
Flexibility is a major motivator and the introduction of flexible working, flexi-time, job sharing, and home working is surprisingly easy ways to improve the bottom line.

5)Open Communication

Many companies still believe it's best to provide employees with minimal information about layoffs to prevent them from talking about it. But just the opposite is true.

In the absence of information, people make up stuff and panic, there's resentment, and they get very paranoid. HR needs to stand up for those being laid off and continuously motivate those who survive the lay off. HR should listen to the employees, Keep them motivated and show them the long term vision.

The above steps will enable the employer to hold its team together during a recession, and will even make bond between all of you stronger. Employees should be motivated enough to stick to the employer during tough times and put in the extra effort required for the organization growth.

6)Improve effectiveness


Now is a good time to remind our workforce that providing quality service to customers and creating greater effectiveness and efficiency are the absolute best ways for employees to help the business through the difficult times.

Fear and the drive to keep your business up and running can unify an organization and become a great motivational tool for employees. A shared challenge enables team members to set aside their individual concerns and rally around a greater common cause.

Employees should be motivated enough to stick with their leaders during tough times and put in the extra effort required for the business to come out of the storm unscathed. To achieve this level of motivation, employees need to trust their leaders and the organisation.


7) Earn the Trust

Trust is the most important element in today’s world of business, at the personal, institutional and global level. There is a positive relationship between trust and team satisfaction and commitment within the team (relationship commitment). Although team satisfaction in some situation is more strongly related with perceived task performance than with trust, as we battle through the economically difficult times that confront us, the elusive quality of interpersonal trust will be a sustaining variable for the retention and motivation of our workforce.

Value added SHRM to Drive profits

Most people will acknowledge that the HR profession encompasses a body of knowledge, expertise and skill that add value to organizations. But intuition doesn’t cut in today’s business world. Executives want proof that HR is a profit maker and not just a cost center.


Fortunately more and more studies are coming out that demonstrate a remarkable correlation between specific HR practices and shareholder return. Furthermore an increasing number of individual companies are able to provide solid anecdotal evidence that HR is, if not a profit center, then at least an important contributor to their profitability goals. Executives are beginning to understand that the “human” resource is the most valuable resource they have and there is also proof available now to show that investment in human resource pays off.

SHRM professional must – and can – do more to actively manage perceptions and promote the good work they do. Besides ensuring all personnel related activities operate at a steady hum, HR must design initiatives in line with business objective to add value to bottom line.

While HR doesn’t directly produce revenue, it doesn’t go out and find new business or open new markets – HR certainly improves the effectiveness of the organization, which allows the company to find new business or open new markets.

Various studies have shown that the 15 to 30 percent of the total value of a company can be correlated to specific human capital practices. The point is that the HR professionals have a choice in terms of how they spend their money and invest in the human capital of the firm.

HR has two ways of looking at building profit: 1) Cutting costs and 2) Helping to generate revenue by implementing right HR initiatives.

1) Cost cutting is a quick and relatively easy way to boost profits. It is typically HR’s first tactic. One of the most common way of cutting cost is utilizing technology to provide employee self – service. Self service technology enables employees and their managers to do such things as pursue e-learning, change benefit options, get answer to compensation questions, and manage performance without the help of HR professionals. When done well, measures that utilize technology to bring efficiency to administrative processes have the potential to reduce costs substantially.

2) Value added SHRM is the ability of HR to select and retain the right employees and help them to do their best work. This is where the real profit gains are to be found. Line and HR managers need to embrace the idea that investment in human capital can be a significant source of value creation for shareholders. When we look at companies that continue to be profitable despite today’s brutal economic conditions we find that there are many similarities in how the HR efforts at these companies help to strengthen the bottom line. However it is important to remember that none of these efforts can build profit in isolation. HR activities must work together to create an overall culture that is conducive to profit-making.

a> Communicate extensively: The vision, values and goals of the company are regularly communicated to employees. Not only that but bad news is routinely shared, and successes are celebrated. Company’s encourage free flow of communication and maintain open door policy. Knowledge based companies don’t believe in hiding any knowledge and information from their team members.

b> Employees are involved in setting goals: Instead of executives sitting down and devise a list of objectives for each employee to follow, employees are encouraged to identify the business drivers, set accountability measures and roll out the plan. Involving employees in goal setting has an impact not only on profits but also on morale. This substantially improves employee satisfaction and morale, belief in company’s vision and employee understands how their jobs contribute to the company’s business objectives.

c> Employees understand how their jobs affect the bottom line and how the bottom line affects their paychecks: When employees understand the impact of their work, amazing things can happen. But research proves that in addition to devising a clear line of sight between an employee’s job and company’s success, it’s vital for a company to share its success with employees. When employees understand the vision and how they contribute to it and benefit from it, they are much more inclined to help achieve it.

d> HR is not solely responsible for HR activities: HR acts like a facilitator of change and encourages others to do the actual culture change work. Experts say “Companies fail if they believe any one department should handle cultural responsibilities.”

e> Cost savings are important, but not the focus of HR: Saving money is an ongoing concern of HR bust cost saving should not be the primary focus of HR professionals who want to generate value for their companies. HRs focus on maintaining a culture that can ensure growth of business and that employee are creative and innovative enough to get the job done.

f> Employees are given what they need to be productive: It may go without saying that it pays to provide employees the tools they need to get the job done. But those “tools” are not always obvious and may include everything from training and work/ family initiatives to competitive compensations and corporate ethics programs. HR adds value to the bottom line by creating attractive workplace that helps employees stay and want to be productive. If your company is a good place to work, with good policies and procedures and a good environment, productivity- and profit - increases.

( Ref: Paper presented by Shari Caudron)

What money really mean to IT employees

The recent market recession has led firms to curtail costs wherever possible including cost on human capital. Most of the companies have curtailed benefits and put salary revision on hold, which makes this a good time to re-evaluate how we think about money. It seems our love affair with lucre has developed into a bit of a dysfunctional relationship.

Few issues elicit as much emotion from technical staffs as salary. For a bunch of folks who typically eschew emotion, we can get really worked up about money. We have seen more tears and screaming about it than about any other managerial issue.

The problem is that we've allowed money to become wrapped up with a number of other issues. We use it as a tangible symbol for other intangible values.

Status. We use money as an indicator of social status. As herd animals, we really like to know where we stand in relation to our peers, and money is one key measure.

Personal worth. We use money as a symbol of how much our organizations value us. The more they pay us, the more they must feel that we are good and valuable people.

Progress. We expect that income over a career should continually rise. As we progress, so should our value and commensurate compensation.

Fairness. Most important, we use money as a gauge of the organization's fairness. We compare the value we deliver and expect to be reasonably compensated. We estimate the value that we add compared with our peers and expect that each should be compensated according to his relative contribution.

So frequently, when technical people, uncomfortable with squishy emotional things, feel undervalued, unloved, abused or unfairly treated, they complain about money. It's the safe, concrete way to express what they don't like. It's easy to say, "Bob does a worse job than I do but is paid better. That's not fair."
It's hard to say, "Why don't you respect me and my contribution as much as you do Bob's?" But they are really the same thing.

And that's where the problem comes in. Money's not really about any of those things.

In aggregate, how much we get paid is not a function of our moral worth but of supply and demand. The ups and downs of salary numbers are based less on the value we deliver to the organization and more on the fluctuations of the market for people with our talents.

As the market for technical skills continues to globalize, we need to get clear about what money really means. And perhaps more important, we need to get better at expressing our feelings about worth and values and fairness separately from the symbol to which we've grown so accustomed.

Career planning : HR perspective

Career Planning

Career planning is the process of setting and individual career objectives and creatively developing activities that will achieve them.

> Organizational Initiatives
1. A Job posting system
2. Mentoring activities
3. Career resource centers
4. Career counseling
5. Career development workshops
6. Human resource planning and forecasting
7. Performance appraisal
8. Career Pathing programmes

1> Job Posting system
1. Job posting is an organized process that allows employees to apply for open positions within the organization.

2. Employees can respond to announcements and postings of positions and then be considered along with external candidates.

2> Mentoring Activities
1. Introduce people to the inner network of the organization, which may assist them in their career advancement.
2. Help clarify the ambiguous expectations of the organization, provide objective assessment for the strengths and weaknesses of new employees and provide a sounding board for participants.

3> Career resource centers:
1. A resource centre returns the responsibility of career development to the employee
2. Offers self directed, self- paced learning and provide resources without creating dependence on the organization.
3. Career development works only if employees accept responsibility for their own careers.
4. Help facilitate career decision making, which helps to develop career exploration and evaluation competencies.
5. Primary services are: educational information, career planning and personal growth and job finding skills.

4> Career counseling:

Bring unique advantages to the career counseling role:
1. Make realistic appraisals of organizational opportunities
2. Realistic suggestions regarding career planning
3. Similar career decisions can be empathetic toward the employee.

5>Career development workshop

Is designed to encourage employees to take responsibilities for their careers
1. Employees can reflect on their present occupation in order to determine their level of satisfaction.
2. Excellent vehicle for orienting employees to career/ life planning, a major component of career development.
3. Seeks to address several basic questions :
• What are your goals, interests, values, choices, and skills?
• Where do you want to be in your career in the future?
• What knowledge and skills do you need to attain your goals?
• How do you plan to gain knowledge and skills?
• Is your plan realistic? What are the obstacles? What obstacles are self-imposed?

6> Human resource planning and forecasting:

The process of analyzing an organization’s human resource needs under changing conditions and developing the activities necessary to satisfy these needs.

From the analysis of needs, priorities can be determined and human resources can be allocated to satisfy existing future needs through career management.


7> Performance appraisal:

Appraisal is a very effective tool to guide and direct future growth opportunities for employees. This should aid in the development of a person’s career as well as enhance communications and understanding.

8> Career Pathing programmes:

Career path is the sequencing of work experiences, usually different job assignments, in order to provide employees with the opportunity to participate in many aspects of a professional area.

By experiencing each of these related but different occupations, the employee can develop a better understanding of the broad role.


Individual Initiatives in career planning :

1. Career planning
2. Career Awareness
3. Career resource center utilization
4. Interests, values and Competency Analysis.


1> Career planning:

HRD practitioner has an obligation to encourage as well as provide for the utilization of career planning on the part of employees. Employee can effectively contribute to the organizations’ overall human resource planning activity.


2> Career awareness:

Employees control decisions such as whether to remain in the organization, whether to accept specific occupational assignments, whether to perform at acceptable levels, and ever whether to engage in personal growth activities through training or professional continuing education.

Role of the HR is to provide the means and the information to assist in personal career decision making. HR must develop a climate and culture that is conducive for growth, one that encourages career development.

Employees take advantage of that climate and be aware of the important componenct of career development.

Employees need to construct plans that will enable them to accoplist their career goals, analyze potential career areas and determine if the posess the skills, competencies and knowledge necessary for such positions.

3> Career resource centre:

Career resource centers provide occupational guides, educational references career planning guides and computer programs aimed at assiting employees in determining their career interests, values and competencies. These materials increase the effectiveness and efficiency of career planning and provide employees with alternative approaches to career development.

4> Interest, values and competency analysis:

These interest inventories are designed to provide employees with important information about their career interest, values and competencies.