Keeping Spirits Bright |
Employee morale is the issue facing HR managers in 2010. Here are some ways to lighten the mood when the money isn’t there
by Michael McCullough
To be an oil and gas engineer in Alberta in 2009 was a demoralizing experience. Faced with project postponements and outright cancellations, engineering and oilfield services firms shed employees in numbers not seen since the imposition of the National Energy Program. If you weren’t laid off yourself, you knew someone who was.
“The large plant work just evaporated from the industry,” recalls Amit Varma, business manager for engineering consultancy and Alberta’s Best Workplaces finalist Vista Projects Limited.
When cutbacks became inevitable in March, Calgary-based Vista sent a statement to employees explaining the situation and the firm’s response. First, the company would slash the rates it charged clients as a way to bring in new business. Then, to bring costs in line with revenues, the company’s 19 employee owners would take pay cuts in the range of 15% to 20%. It would also review its compensation at all levels. The company would lay off employees only as a last resort, it told nervous workers.
Following a comparison between Vista’s payroll and industry averages compiled by an outside consultant, the company left virtually all lower-level employees’ salaries where they were.
Fortunately for Vista, it still had a series of smaller debottlenecking and $20-million plant contracts on the go. With workers less busy, the firm decided to spend more time training and introduced a $200,000 quality management system. In stark contrast to many of its peers, Vista finished the year with more employees than it started – 140, up from 130 the previous January.
“Communication was the key. We communicated much more than normal,” says Varma of Vista’s effort to maintain morale in the midst of an industry-wide meltdown.
Varma’s assessment is echoed by virtually every human resources expert we spoke to for this story. “Communication that is frequent [and] well-thought-out, at all levels, is critical” during the tight times, says Calgary HR consultant Charlotte Bouchard. “It helps employees understand the why. If there’s a lack of transparency, it will often just create a feeling of powerlessness for the employee.” And make no mistake, morale is the issue facing human resources managers in Alberta today, after years of labour shortages dominating the agenda. “A few years ago we were in a completely different world. We were all recruiting, all looking for the employee who could put you ahead,” says Bouchard, president of the Human Resources Institute of Alberta (HRIA). Now it’s the employees you have, not the ones you don’t, that you have to worry about.
Layoffs, mergers, salary cuts and freezes all take their toll on staff morale, and that can undermine productivity and corporate cohesion. “Our work is our second home and the people we work with are our second family,” explains Bouchard. A pervasive sense of loss or anxiety fosters absenteeism and higher use of the employer’s benefit program.
A national health survey released by Desjardins Financial Security last May indicated a third of working Canadians felt more stressed than they did a year earlier and 30% were experiencing anxiety, loss of sleep, headaches or other physical ailments.
If the unease in the workplace persists, trust breaks down. Workers speak poorly of their employer out of the office and on social networking sites. While some are driven to work harder out of fear, others slack off or start planning a career move.
Dan MacDonald, president of Business Improvement Solutions Inc. in Sherwood Park, recalls one corporate client that faced a severe slowdown last year. “The negativity just seemed to grow over the last six months. It became a challenging place to work,” he says. Companies sometimes make the mistake of focusing on the people who are in obvious distress and ignoring the rainmakers they depend on. “Somebody in the dark can build a lot of fear just in their own mind. They don’t see anything in front of them,” MacDonald says. People who are fearful or preoccupied pay little heed to product quality or customer service.
So what can you do to maintain employee morale when your hands are tied financially? As noted above, communication is vital. MacDonald advises making it personal, too, with mentors and supervisors conducting regular, scheduled one-on-one talks instead of relying on a company-wide memo (though you need that too). At one Best Workplaces applicant, Rifco Inc. in Red Deer, CEO Bill Graham leads a weekly 20-minute staff meeting.
Effective communication is also a two-way street. Inter Pipeline Fund, a finalist in the Volunteerism and Community Involvement category, conducts an employee opinion survey every year as a way to determine HR priorities. “I was impressed. This company really listens,” says Gail Hunter, whose first task after being hired on as an HR specialist in January 2009 was to sort through the survey responses and make a presentation to company executives. The three issues employees were most concerned about that year were stress, training and recognition, and ever since, Hunter has been implementing new measures to address all three.
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