How To Motivate People To Stay During A Crisis: The Simple Answer


During a crisis people turn inward. They revert to their strengths—what they know best. They try to protect and preserve what surrounds them. Sometimes this even includes building psychological barricades around the problem to avoid dealing with it. But often in a business crisis, there is a need to reach beyond the old ways of doing things to create a new plan. This is not easy.

Taking costs out of a company to restore profitability may mean resorting to extreme measures, sometimes over a protracted and painful period of weeks and months. Some employees may be asked to leave. Others will be assigned to new jobs or told to assume new tasks. The simple solution to maintaining morale and motivating key people in a crisis is to align everyone’s current and future interests. Alignment is the necessary first step. It can best be defined as the mutual understanding among managers and employees of their shared benefits and incentives to work together in the face of crisis and adversity. Additionally, all this must be achieved in an environment where layoffs, separations, and many other milestones and changes will occur.

There are four steps to motivating employees in a business crisis:

  1. Assemble a capable and credible leadership team. Senior leadership must be capable of leading the company through the crisis. In certain cases work will need to be done to remove individuals who will be roadblocks to a turnaround.

  2. Lead people on a direct and simple path forward. Work with senior leadership to develop the broad outlines of a recovery plan.

  3. Align everyone’s interests. Consider the broad array of senior leadership and employee motivations. Then zero in on factors critical for survival.

  4. Introduce positive incentives for employees to stay. Monetary and nonmonetary motivators will have to be offered to keep employees involved.




The Headcount Solution. How to Cut Compensation Costs and Keep Your Best People
The Headcount Solution : How to Cut Compensation Costs and Keep Your Best People
ISBN: 0071402993
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 143

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