Engaging Your Workforce During Challenging Economic Times

As a professor at Regis for the last five years, my classroom dynamics and discussions have changed dramatically over the last year. Recently, we were discussing training and development and the importance of leveraging it during the downturn. Employees need to know that they are an intricate, valuable asset in the organization in order to keep them engaged and performing to meet overall organizational goals. However, I surveyed the class and found that 60% have had lay-offs or are in a hiring freeze. So, as one student asked, how do we develop our employees with such constrained budgets? We began to answer this key question and together determined these top six recommendations:

1. Keep your training programs alive or bring in an outside firm, such as EPI, to conduct training and keep employees engaged.
2. Host lunch-and-learns and utilize talent throughout the organization to share knowledge, skills and abilities. Expertise resides in our own organizations. It is likely someone on staff could share how to manage finances, how to do yoga, nutrition, or even how to lead a team meeting, etc.
3. Implement formal mentoring programs. They are low cost and provide opportunities for knowledge sharing across the organization. These formal programs also help develop relationships across the organization and can break down silos. The goal is that these formal relationships will become informal.
4. Develop your employees on the job. For instance, select a new person to lead the team meeting, have an employee attend a meeting for you in your place, cross-train your team to build new skill sets, or select a person each week to give a presentation on something new they’ve learned.
5. Provide rewards and recognition. Congratulate your employees who do a good job, write a personal note for good performance, publicly recognize an employee for good performance, take a fun break and let employees visit, and ask for their input about how to do something a different way with less staff (make it a contest).
6. Communicate, communicate, communicate. Try to share as much information as possible with your team. If you have valuable information regarding what the company is going through, share it. They will trust you more and be more engaged and likely to perform.