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Newsletter November 2008 Look After Your People in the Tough Times and They will Look After Your Organisation |
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Every
newspaper I pick up, every business magazine or journal I open and 5-8 emails I receive every day have “news” about the
recession we are about to have and the global economic crisis we are supposedly experiencing. It would be very easy to be overcome with fear, doom and gloom, anxiety, depression and despair. On the other hand, I don’t want to make light of the world situation we all find ourselves in. It is unprecedented. It is volatile and
unpredictable. There is every indication that the outcome, when the dust settles, will be a new economic order, a new way of being and doing. In the meantime, the message is that we have to batten down the hatches, put our nose to the grindstone, get tough on our employees and keep a very tight hold on the reins. In short, life in the foreseeable future is going to be tough, serious and certainly no fun! But will such an approach bring success? Will it engage your people to work with you
through this tough period? Will it motivate them to give everything they’ve got
to work with you not just for you over this time? It will be your
people who will be responsible for either your success or your demise. How you
manage and look after your people in these tough times will be crucial. Our feature article below addresses this issue – Look After Your People First in these Tough
Times and They will Look After Your Organisation. Re-subscribe to Our Mailing List before I want to remind
you about re-subscribing to our mailing list before the end of December 2008 if
you want to continue receiving information from us. All names of people who haven't renewed their subscription at that time will be removed. We do not want to send you unsolicited emails. We want to make sure that
you want to receive our information. When you re-subscribe, you will receive a
copy of our free 28 page e-book – You
Empowering You for Personal and
Professional Success.
Go to our website and subscribe by filling in the box in the sidebar on any page http://www.peopleempowered.com.au 
Maree Harris |
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Look After Your People First
in these Tough Times and They will Look After Your Organisation. As a CEO, senior
executive or manager in an organisation at the present time, you are probably
setting a new agenda for the anticipated tough times ahead. It would not be
surprising if most, or many of you, are thinking contraction rather than
expansion, crisis rather than opportunity, cost rather than value. You may very
well be deeply concerned about how you will meet targets, attain goals, meet
budgets, get credit or manage cash flow, for example. You may be concerned that
you will have to put drive your people harder to perform, ask more from them while giving
them less – decreasing or even removing bonus incentives, restricting access to
training and development, removing flexible work family balance arrangements,
for example. Maybe you’ve had a
meeting and told them all this, or maybe you weren’t even courageous enough to
face them so sent them a memo by email. Maybe there’s been no discussion about
it with your people. Is it possible that people feel it has been imposed on
them? Could they feel that they are just pieces on a chess board to be moved
around at will so that you and your organisation can win the game? Might your
fear and concern be creating a culture where people feel on edge, fear
redundancy if they don’t meet the terms of your new agenda? Is disengagement
setting in? This approach
focuses on ensuring that your people meet the terms of their employment
contracts. It carefully measures how much the organisation has to give to meet
its obligations and gives no more. At the same time it calculates the utmost it
can take from its people in terms of this contract. It adheres to the letter of
the contract – for the good of the organisation - and “your jobs”, of course. So what happens to
people when this happens? The under-performers, whom you could afford to lose,
stay, fearful for their jobs because they sense they wouldn’t get anything
elsewhere. They are unable to be creative or innovative or take risks that could
create new opportunities in these challenging times. They are already jaded,
disillusioned and disengaged. Your most talented people, the ones you need to
get you through this phase, feel there is no room to grow and advance in this
kind of environment and look for work elsewhere. Or, they also stay but only
bring their bodies to work, leaving the most important part of themselves at
the gate – their hearts and minds and spirit. This is the part that houses the
talent and potential that sets your people and organisation apart from the rest
and is most needed in tough times. So what is the alternative?
How do you do this? Set Up Emotional Bank
Accounts for All Your People. Every organisation
is different and some will do this much more easily than others because they
already have a culture that facilitates such an approach. For those that
aren’t so advanced in this area, now is a good time to begin. Stephen Covey’s
concept of “the emotional bank account” offers both insight and ideas. It’s a
very good metaphor to explain what organisations need to be doing with their
people, not just for these tough times, but for all times. We all know about
financial bank accounts. We’ve all got one or many. We deposit our money into
that account, save it until we need it – the “rainy day”, the emergency, the
unexpected event – and then we withdraw it to meet that need. If we have
consistently deposited into that account, we can withdraw when we need to and
still have money in the account. We then build it up again. What we get from
consistently depositing like this is a security and knowing that when we need
to call on extra money to support ourselves it is always there. Covey says that we
need to set up “emotional” bank accounts in all our relationships – with our
partner, our children, our family and friends, and of course, in our workplace.
Organisations can set up emotional bank accounts for their people. If organisations
regularly make emotional deposits into the bank accounts of their people and
build up that account, they can then withdraw from their people’s account in
the emergency or tough times for their organisation, without damaging that bank
account too much, without damaging their relationship with their people. This
is just another way of understanding “psychological contract”. If an organisation
hasn’t made deposits into their peoples’ emotional bank accounts, and they
attempt to withdraw in times of crisis, they usually emotionally bankrupt the
relationship with their people because they feel used, even abused and often
betrayed. Without a good relationship
with its people an organisation is in trouble. It is important to
find out what constitutes a “deposit” for your people. Don’t assume that a pay
increase or a promotion is what will make them feel good about the organisation
and inspire a greater commitment. Instead they may want you to tell them – in
words – how valuable they are to your organisation. Something that simple (and
inexpensive) may be seen as a substantial deposit into their emotional bank
account. It is often the
multitude of little things that make a difference. It’s also often the people
in the leadership team with the highly developed people skills who have the
sort of “wealth” to deposit consistently and continually. What Kinds of “Deposits” Build Strong
Emotional Bank Accounts for Your People?
If you are now
asking: “Yes, but how do we actually do those things? They are so general”,
then your organisation needs to make this an item on your meeting agenda. For
example, start with one issue and make it a priority this month. What are the
many ways we let our people know that we value and appreciate them? Take it
from the top right through to the bottom. You have your people right down
through the ranks working out how they can value and appreciate one another in
the organisation. The bigger deposits will depend on your organisation. It is good to ask,
how much of your meeting agendas, across your organisation, deal with the hard
stuff of your business, and how much deals with ways to look after your people
and thus inspire their loyalty and commitment. Back to the top Have you heard about this? Actualise It is the email newsletter of http://promomail.adrenalinmedia.com.au/em/message/email/view.php?id=399538&u=3288
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