Maintaining high employee performance during a recession

Any manager’s bottom line during recession involves taking crucial decisions, channeled towards decrease of spending while still maintaining or enhancing the company’s performance.

In other words, the leadership role is now in continuous challenge since businesses are in survival mode, when cash generation is more than ever necessary as opposed to investment projects.

One indubitable responsive mechanism some corporations have applied to deal with adverse effects of global economic recession is downsizing, that entails dismissing some workers.

Employee salaries and remunerations form a good proportion of any company’s huge expenses, and this is why times like these increases the risk of redundancy.

It is never easy to let go of workers a company has created such a great rapport with, but recession is an external force beyond its control.

Senior managers understand this completely and if some employees must go, the first step to ensure this incredible internal change is well receipted, is involving the victims.

With the assumption that the HR manager has a unanimously accepted downsizing strategy in place, starting and completing the process should encompass two groups of employees.

The layoffs

Keeping the company image outside sparkly, even after showing some workers the exit door is right treatment for the layoffs, so that they can still preach good news out there.

So, a personnel manager at this stage will have to apply some form of organization development technique to ensure that those who leave are comfortable with the company’s move.

Even with highly committed workforce, managers cannot erase the society or external public interested in their products and services.

If the layoffs tarnish the reputation of their former company to the public, the best performance of those who survived may not take it far.

It would be a great honor to the lay offs, if, first, the managers take time to explain expressively their reasons for this and then pay them benefits according to their legal rights as employees.

Any country has its own stipulated labor laws that govern the employee’s welfare and should be the companies guiding light, when downsizing.

The immune workers

It the top management expectation that the workers who survive downsizing process are well engaged to assist in accomplishment of the company’s overall goals.

Assuming that they are okay because they were not victims will not enhance or maintain their prior performance; most of them are anxious about the company’s next move.

This therefore means that managers can expect as many cases of disoriented minds as the ones they just dismissed.

Poor attentiveness during work means reduced productivity for these workers and addressing ways of getting their total commitment back is the first step in enhancing their performance.

Mostly, the worry got to do with more job assignments than before, with little or no pay, for a time until the global recession shifts to stability.

Employees should still feel they are respected assets of their employers and this calls for efficient and effective communication of all decisions concerning them.

A different work structure incorporating the consequences of lay offs and the solutions should be put in place, and incorporate employees views as well as those of managers.

Other moves like abandoning research and development and declining profitable investment projects can help prevent work enlargement for a given worker to levels they cannot manage.

Disposing company assets and inventories, reducing executive perks and benefits for instance, may create more cash that may be used to balance the payroll structure between the executives and immune workers.

Things like recognizing good or improved worker performances may be necessary while shifting them to different workstations gives them an opportunity to learn new skills.

A leadership role giving preference to employee motivational tools is critical to help a company survive recession by employing the best employee performance management strategies.