How to keep staff happy during the downturn

In tough economic times, businesses must do more with fewer people. Stuart Roberts offers some advice on how to make this happen.

How's your staff these days? Have you thought about this lately?

The recession has us thinking about cutting budgets, revising project portfolios and renegotiating vendor contracts. It makes sense, after all, as many businesses are in full cost cutting mode, but you still must consider your staff.

If you've had to lay people off, then of course their welfare is on your mind, but what about those who are left? As we race to do more with less, we sometimes forget the human angle.

Right now we need to do more, with less people. This makes increasing productivity in the current climate a whole new ball game.

Let's take a moment and look at what 'do more with less' actually means for workers: more work, longer hours and living up to higher expectations (which often lie outside an employee's area of expertise). This takes place within a volatile working environment where fears of further cuts are constantly in the background.

All in all, this results in overworked, anxious and possibly disengaged employees.

A recent study by the CIO Executive Board revealed that 64 per cent of CIOs from 3,600 companies cite under-prepared teams as a major impediment to increasing value from IT. The same study shows that discretionary effort among staff fell by 50 per cent between the end of 2007 and 2008 alone.

This is a challenge we need to solve. Today we have to focus on keeping our staff engaged more than ever. The next question is: how?

The IT leaders surveyed said only a handful of 300 'performance drivers' actually increase staff engagement - and thus productivity.

Staff do not respond most to increased competition or benefits but rather to manager quality, organisational culture and day-to-day work environment, as seen in the graphic below.

The focus on manager quality makes sense. There is an old saying: 'People join companies but leave managers.'

If you respect and work well with your manager, you are more likely to stay, and also more likely to put in that extra 10 per cent discretionary effort, even in a time of crisis.

So can we teach 'manager quality'? To some degree, we can. Manager quality breaks down into four elements: their approach to process management, their skill at people management, their ability to give informal feedback and their personality.

The question, again, is how?

Here are two examples of how two CIO Executive Board member organisations have done this:

• Approach 1 - Make managers accountable for staff development

  This entails creating transparency and accountability for employee development in each manager's performance expectations, and providing targeted tools to support managers' development conversations with their staff.

  To achieve this, Company A ties staff satisfaction, retention and performance into manager performance criteria. The IT organisation at Company A also supports managers by providing tools such as personal balanced scorecards and IT skills road maps to use in manager-employee discussions.

• Approach 2 - Create compelling opportunities to develop critical skills

  This means engraining quality management in staff at an early stage. To achieve this, Company B pinpoints a set of experiences, referred to as skills accentuators, that develop the desired qualities in staff. Managers work these accentuators into their employees' career plans, taking care to get the sequence right.

  Consequently, Company B creates a workforce with precisely those business and leadership skills which they require, while equipping employees with skills that allow them to shift roles and responsibilities in times of crisis.

Having highlighted the link between staff engagement and performance, and provided snapshots of how to drive engagement, we should now ask what success looks like.

Recent CIO Executive Board research shows that, at leading companies, 24 per cent of employees are strongly engaged, and that at lagging companies this number falls to three per cent. The same study shows that organisations with improved engagement sees a 57 per cent increase in discretionary effort, and an almost 87 per cent decrease in the probability of staff departure.

This alone is a sign of an engaged workforce which, in turn, means increased productivity - and that's essentially what we're after.

So, let me ask again… How's your staff these days?

Stuart Roberts is managing director of the IT practice at the Corporate Executive Board.

The Corporate Executive Board offers research and insights along with an integrated suite of members-only tools and resources that enable the world's most successful organisations to deliver superior business outcomes.

The CIO Executive Board, part of the Corporate Executive Board, provides research, tools and resources to help executives and their teams solve complex organisational, process, and management issues that commonly derail IT organisations.