Communicate frequently
In times of uncertainty, the worst place you can keep your employees is in the dark.
If your company is forced to undergo cutbacks or downsizing, remember that your employees might not like the news, and you might take some heat for it, but the consequences of clamming up are potentially far more severe.
“You really need to make sure everybody on the team understands the situation,” Lents says. “Just as it’s important to keep your employees informed when things are going well, it’s important to do the same when things are not going well. When everybody understands the facts, if you have good people working for you, most people will understand why your decisions are being made, even though they might be difficult decisions.
“If everyone understands the reasons why you are doing what you are doing, it helps everyone have a good attitude. Uncertainty is the real attitude killer. It’s very dangerous to have people who are scared every day.”
Don’t dance around the subject when talking about layoffs. Layoffs and cutbacks are a negative development no matter how you slice it, but downsizing with an explained reason is always better than downsizing with silence from the top levels of the company.
“Nobody wants to be subjected to an arbitrary process,” Lents says. “But everyone understands that in a bad market, you have to do some things to stay healthy. That’s why we work hard to make sure that everyone has a good view of reality.”
However, a rational approach is often not enough, especially when it comes to layoffs, which are often an emotionally draining time in a company. Employees need to know the logic behind the decision, but they also want to see that you’re not just mechanically performing cutbacks.
Lents says you can’t manufacture sympathy or emotional appeal. It either comes from the heart or it looks phony.
“If you truly care about your people and care about the hardships that layoffs cause, they know. And if you don’t care, they’ll know that, as well,” he says. “That caring aspect isn’t just something in a leader; it’s something innate in the organization. It’s not just a business thing.
“That’s not the kind of news you want to send out in an e-mail. Whenever we have had to deal with work force reduction, we’ll have our senior people go out in the field, explain why this is happening and get all the facts on the table. If you have a good team spirit and a group of people that care about each other and the business, when times get tough, they’ll still care about the other folks on the team, even though you might have to make some changes on the team.”
As the economy sinks, your personal contact with your employees needs to rise. They need to see and hear more from you, even if you think you’re repeating the same messages over and over. Lents says repetition and reassurance from the top is essential to salvaging the morale of your work force.
“In situations like this economy, it’s more important than ever to have personal, one-on-one conversations with your team,” he says. “There really is no substitute for direct conversations, especially when things aren’t going well. That means you need to have a positive attitude yourself, and remember that even in a bad environment, there are still things going right. Even if you make the decision to close a plant, it can be done in a fair way and done well.
“When you talk openly about it, you get people involved in the decision, which means those decisions aren’t just being forced down through the organization from the top.”
It’s easy to get wrapped up in the day-to-day challenges presented to your company. The challenges become magnified in an economic downturn. But you can’t let that get in the way of interacting with your employees and keeping them in the loop.
There is no secret formula to staying engaged. You have to make time for it. If that means blocking off time on your calendar for communication, you need to do that.
“Especially at the senior level, it is so easy to get wrapped up in the corporate-type things, which really don’t have to do with the business of making and selling your products,” Lents says. “That is really one of the big challenges, how to stay engaged at the operating level and not let other priorities stop that. That does happen, and you have to make sure you watch out. When you see that you’re starting to push communication down on your list, you need to pull the plug on some of those other activities and get out in the field.
“Those other activities not focused on your people are not the most important things on your plate. Sometimes they are the most pressing things but rarely are they the most important things. Sometimes you simply have to stop doing those things for a while. Like most things, it can almost always wait.”
