Creative Ways To Reward The Survivors

The company may not have extra funds to offer its surviving troops and it doesn’t have great news to share, but it still has opportunities and challenges in its future. These include a distinct culture, active leadership, hardworking staff, and if it does its homework, a host of ways to say, “We care” and “We want you to remain.”

This is more critical than ever when people are not at the top of their game. They’re shell-shocked by what’s occurred; they’re sad and angry. Senior leadership and managers should try to motivate staff to stay with the company and give their best as individuals, teams, and part of the whole company. The approaches recommended here should also augment a targeted cash incentive plan, as outlined in Chapter 3, if at all possible.

There are numerous ways to reward and motivate creatively as shown in Table 10-1. It begins with emphasizing a quality work environment and includes a company culture, recognition of employees for their contributions, flexibility on the part of the company, and the work itself. These all contribute to a sense of value and mutual commitment between employers and employees.

Table 10-1: Creative Ways to Motivate and Reward Your Best People

	A Quality Work Environment
Culture	Recognition	Flexibility	The Work Itself
Rebuild on company values	Emphasize formal and informal recognition for work accomplishments	Look for ways to ease the greater work burden on the survivors	Look to enhance the inherent value you place on the survivors

Culture

• Culture refers to an organization’s shared values. The elements include human values such as caring, concern, achievement, informality, and commitment. An organization’s true culture is not what is said in its mission statement, but what is played out daily in the way people act toward one another and the company. The aftermath of a layoff presents an excellent opportunity for senior leadership to ask the important questions: “What kind of culture will best serve us, and how do we get there from here?”

The best companies to work for consistently are differentiated by how much confidence their employees have in the company, its shared values, the challenge of the work, and its reputation in its industry. No matter how large or small, a company’s culture develops over time from actual behavior. Management needs to provide leadership by “walking the talk” and creating a culture that instills commitment and mutual respect. Rebuilding starts one step at a time. For example, one manager intended for years to delegate more and allow his staff a wider berth in planning its work and meeting assignment deadlines. Regrouping after a layoff provided an excellent opportunity for him to address the issue and make some significant changes in expectations regarding work style and completed tasks.

Recognition

• This may be among the least understood and least utilized rewards. It consists of positive feedback, reaction to achievements, tangible reinforcement through additional feedback, and on occasion something as simple as a “thank you.”

According to decades of management research, feedback may be the single most important reward to most employees. The lack of feedback in turn may be the single most punishing experience on a job.

To start, a manager can reward someone through recognition on a daily, informal basis. Good managers should be on the lookout for examples of outstanding individual and group achievement. They should be told in words or in writing (a thank you note) when they’ve hit a home run—or even reached first base. Employees, too, should be told to look for examples of recognizing their colleagues and expressing it. For example, Corning Inc. has employee kiosks located throughout each of its units. Slips of paper are provided for an employee to write down examples of excellent accomplishments and reward fellow employees or teams on the spot.

Some companies develop more formal recognition programs such as awards for specific individual or team achievements or customer service awards. Although a recovery may not be the best time for designing and implementing such a system from scratch, it is a good time to review current recognition programs in place and renew or add to them.

Flexibility

Anyone who employs technology-oriented employees learns that flexibility and informality are key facets of interest to them on their jobs. For example, Motorola conducted research on its own employees and found flexibility and informality to be among the most important drivers of employee satisfaction. Other similar components of satisfaction included access to key technical people and respect for individual differences. This type of flexibility is not expensive to implement. Managers must closely examine their own practices to determine the concerns and issues of the survivors, who may have greater workloads than before the layoff.

One manager thought about how to structure work for a group of technical programmers who had survived a layoff. Clearly, fewer would have to pick up the work of what had been a larger team. The following issues occurred to her as she thought about how to change their job descriptions:

1. “We better get nonessential work out of here. We need to look closely at our processes and limit ourselves to critical path activities.”

2. “We can work more efficiently if we do away with barriers created by our current functional job descriptions. With some cross-training, we should be more flexible in conducting projects. Maybe we can identify some shared accountabilities that will move work faster with the same heads.”

3. “Perhaps I should not manage each person’s time so closely. I could set time limits, project expectations, and allow the team to organize its time on its own. We could carve out time for people to devote to projects of special interest to them.”

After laying out these thoughts, she asked for some reaction. She found an untapped well of ideas and enthusiasm that created a win/win situation. Team members were able to structure their personal activities in a more flexible fashion, which also allowed employees to pursue individual interests, yet the overall work of the department improved in quality and productivity.

The Work Itself

The single most important source of motivation—what really turns on an employee—is work. One of life’s most punishing circumstances is to work at a boring job, day after day, whereas one of life’s greatest gifts involves a challenging, fulfilling job experience, not necessarily every day but often enough.

The most powerful tool at a manager’s disposal to reenergize and motivate survivors is to reenergize their workloads positively. Five steps can help:

1. Make sure that a job has variety. Nothing is duller than doing a limited set of activities daily. Look for ways to broaden and deepen accountabilities on the job and make it more interesting.

2. Give employees more autonomy. Empower them. Put them in charge of more decisions. Set longer term goals; allow them freedom to act. Manage results.

3. Give employees important assignments. Minimize or eliminate trivia. Make sure employees have accountabilities that relate directly to their department and organization’s central mission and process.

4. Give employees visibility for what they do. Let employees get face time with other units and with customers. Make sure that others in the organization understand what each employee does and why it is important to the company’s success. Make the employees’ contributions visible to the organization and customers.

5. Provide consistent feedback. The single most powerful reward, again, is information that explains how an employee is doing and what the person can do to improve.