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"Times are tough." We've heard it so
often it's almost become
a mantra - the all-purpose excuse for cutbacks, pessimism, and
defensive thinking.
Today's managers are facing a relentless and difficult challenge:
After a large layoff, how do you rally the survivors to not only
recover, but act even more effectively than before? How can you
do more with less when the "less" feels like they've
been battered and abused? Here are the best techniques we've found:
1)
Cost Reduction is Everyone's Job: If cost reduction comes
at the expense of employee morale, it creates a vicious circle.
Profits
fall, so benefits are cut, so morale falls, so profits fall further,
etc. etc. To arrest and even reverse this cycle, harness your team's
creativity in cutting costs. They probably know better than their
managers where to find efficiencies. Let them know that they can
significantly affect the process of finding and eliminating waste
- and set them loose. Better yet, inform them that if targets are
reached, the benefits will be shared across the team in the form
of incentive rewards or reinstatement of previously-lost benefits
or wage cuts. This sounds cliche, but it still works. According
to Meg Allen, VP of Finance at Brighton Metals, "[Our employees]
were the ones that laughed at our inefficiencies and waste
when business was great. Of course they knew how to streamline
things after the downturn."
2) Eye on New Opportunities: If
your teams are heads-down trying to crank out as many widgets or
lines of code as possible, they're
not helping you look for ways to raise your top line. Even a single
half-day meeting or brainstorming session can give your staff a
forum to suggest new lines of business, new markets, or ways to
cross-market existing product lines. Set aside your skepticism
and listen - you'll be surprised how resourceful they can be. When
Paul Oppenheimer of Franklin's Fine Foods challenged his team to
find
new distribution channels, "a line worker suggested
we sell to health-care facilities. Within 6 weeks, we'd signed
up
a local
hospital and convalescent home, and that added 10% to our top line."
3)
Show Respect for the Fallen: Laid-off employees often resemble
plague victims, as if their bad luck will rub off on others. Avoid
the tendency to treat them as cast-offs. Downsized employees can
drag down the morale of your existing workforce faster than you
think. In this age of instant email, anti-company web sites and
angry mailing lists can spring up overnight. So you need to anticipate
and deflect this negative energy. Try to include your recent laid-off
staff at a few company social functions. Publicly promise to your
remaining staff that those let go will be proactively sent notice
of any new jobs. Encourage both official and "unofficial" company
alumni mailing lists, and monitor them to be sure they're not being
used to vent excessive complaints.
4) If You Lack Optimism, Borrow
It: When gloom is everywhere, it's nearly impossible
to feel energized and creative. If your whole industry or town
or company is in the dumps, you'll need to import some positive
energy. Find stories of successful businesses -- in your local
business newspaper, in magazines like Fast Company, or maybe in
other divisions
of your
own company. Clip articles and stuff them in mailboxes, post them
on the bulletin board, discuss the best of them in your staff meetings.
As one HR staffer from MCI tells us, "I'm photocopying
everything I can get my hands on. We're finding great articles
from real estate, finance, biotech, you name it. It's the best
thing to get our people talking about new ideas."
5) Plan for the Aftermath: In
lean times, capital spending is cut and new projects are put on
hold. OK, that's
obvious. But you can spend
a small fraction of a project's budget and develop your "Post-Recession-Gameplan".
Here's how it works: Evaluate each sidelined project or product
in what you believe the post-recession climate will look like.
In
18-36 months, will your competitors still be alive? Will you be
able to aggressively grab new market share when your cash flow
improves? Will new technology have made your current plans
obsolete? By re-casting your current plans in light of the post-recession
world, you'll find new opportunities to shift your plans and you'll
give your teams the chance to think strategically about the future. "When
we included the delay in our technology plans," says
Brian Henders of Expo Insurance and Title, "we found we could
actually fast-track two software projects that were still on the
drawing board. Now we're taking advantage of less-expensive programmers
and
we've
been able
to
leap
to
much cheaper hardware
that wasn't available last year."
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