How to Maintain Employee Motivation and Commitment after a COVID-19 Rightsizing or Reorganization

For better or worse, depending on one's perspective, the COVID-19 closure has forced businesses to take a serious look at their enterprise to determine the right business model going forward. In many cases, sending non-essential workers home temporarily has helped companies realize that some of those positions are truly non-essential permanently. The crisis has also given businesses an easy excuse to eliminate non-performing business units, to combine departments or job responsibilities, to streamline operations, or to flatten layers of management. Clearly, when employees return to work things will look and feel a lot different.

The reopening of businesses has already begun. Wise business leaders will staff to customer volume. This means there will be fewer people coming back to work than the number of employees the organization employed before the crisis. No doubt, every former workteam in an enterprise will be disrupted by position eliminations, redeployments, reassignments, resignations, retirements, and other staffing changes. The emotional, psychological, social, intellectual, and often physical implications will be similar to those felt by employees after a company downsizing.

How you let people go when the crisis hit and how you bring them back will have a long-lasting effect on those people who remain with your company. Poorly handled decisions today can impact productivity and morale now and for a long time in the future.

Employees who return to your company after the COVID-19 crisis will have confused emotions as they wrestle with the changes brought about by the reorganization. A paradox of conflicting loyalties stirs within them. Feelings of concern for former colleagues are juxtaposed with feelings for oneself. Previous feelings of loyalty to the company now conflict with loyalty to oneself. Employees question their previous work effort as they worry about whether they have a future with your enterprise. While employees are going through these internal emotional struggles several other factors impact their future motivation and commitment.

Invariably surviving employees are expected to take on more work. Normally they are asked to do more work for the same pay or, worse yet, for less pay because of the company’s declining financial position. Since most position eliminations are undertaken to cut costs, the downsizing often results in salary freezes for those who stay with the company. Moreover, some former motivators may also have been eliminated, such as company cars, travel and entertainment budgets, or professional development expenses. Finally, there may be less career advancement opportunities after a downsizing, making one’s future with the organization less certain.

The Importance of Communication

The most important thing you can do to maintain morale and commitment after the COVID-19 rightsizing is to openly communicate with your employees.

Many managers are hesitant to share information with employees after a reorganization, particularly if the information is of a negative nature. However, your workers expect you to bring up all relevant issues in a straightforward manner, especially any negatives that might impact them directly. Avoiding these issues sends a message that either the issues are not important or, worse yet, the employees themselves are not important enough for you to share information with them.

The absolute worst thing you can do after an organizational shakeup is to send a message to the remaining employees that they are not important. The more information you share with your employees during challenging times, the more they will feel you are concerned about their future. Likewise, the more employees feel you are concerned about their future, the more they will be concerned about the future of the business.

One critical thing to remember during a times of uncertainty is that when people lack real information, they make up their stories and draw their own conclusions. Usually what people make up is far worse than reality. You can stop the rumor-mill that typically runs rampant during a crisis by being upfront with the employees.

Three Critical Objectives

There are three crucial objectives you should have for your communication with employees during a reorganization.

First, you should do everything you can to mitigate the usual fears employees have when an organization is in transition.

Second, you should view every employee contact as an opportunity to build rapport and empathize with your workers.

Finally, your message should be formulated and presented so well that it focuses the energy and effort of the employees on where you want it – on the customers – rather than on the company.  What you say must eliminate from the employees all doubt, worry, gossip, wondering, and hesitancy.

At the conclusion of your message, you want the workers worrying about their work, not worrying about their jobs or their employer. To do this you must understand the psyche of the employees and address the concerns they worry about the most during a work crisis.

What Employees Want to Know

Invariably, there are five predictable questions employees will have during a company transition. Although the specific verbiage of the questions highlighted here may not be exactly how the employees would articulate their concerns, the answers to these questions will address most of the issues employees will be wondering about. When you know these questions in advance you can target your communication to address the employees’ concerns before they come up. This in turn shows the workers you are empathetic to their needs, thereby building rapport between you and them.

Your answers to these five core questions will determine whether surviving employees will remain motivated and loyal to a company after a layoff:

1) Were the organizational changes integral to the business’s overall strategy to survive?

2) What does the future look like for the company?

3) Is there still a place for me in the company with continued opportunities for advancement?

4) Will those employees who have been let go be treated fairly?

5) What is expected of the employees who remain at the company after the reorganization? 

Integral to Business Survival

Employees want to know that the reorganization is not random or whimsical. Remaining employees have to be assured that the organizational changes were necessary and not just done arbitrarily. A clear business need for the change must be supported by facts and figures. Employees need to know and understand the business reasons for the reorganization and what the consequences would have been had the reductions not occurred. The eliminations or redeployments must be logically tied to the future business needs of the company and should have only affected those departments that were non-productive or no longer essential to the business.

At the same time employees must perceive there is a clearly identified and well-thought-out strategy to return the company to stability and long-term profitability. They need assurance that by downsizing and taking hits now the company will be much better off in the future. Perceptions of unnecessary or illogical reductions in staff cause employees to lose confidence in your ability to protect the future viability of the company. Fears of future layoffs persist when employees see no clear linkage between the reduction in staff and management’s plan to return the company to profitability.

You must be adept at understanding and explaining the business imperative for the change. Employees can buy-in to a reduction in staff, even the elimination of their own positions, given a reasonable business need for doing so. Managers who want to motivate surviving employees must take workers into their confidence and clearly outline the logic behind the downsizing decision.

Outlook for the Future

In a down economy when organizational changes are necessary, the future is often unknown. People generally are afraid of the unknown. To alleviate their own fears, the remaining employees will latch on to any information they can get about the company’s future plans to return the business to profitability. This is why rumors run rampant during a reorganization. It is the natural human need for information – any information – even if it is false. Surviving employees will remain fearful about the future until they have information that will assuage their fears.

Before addressing the employees you should have a clear vision of where you want to take the company in the future. Leaders who possess and can communicate a confident view of the future can infuse confidence within surviving employees by sharing their vision. Employees are more apt to follow leaders who have a clear view of what the future entails.

Although you may not have a clear view of the future when economic conditions have not yet stabilized, you must share what you know, assume, or hope for the future. You must help employees to see the future themselves. Let employees know what they can expect to see and experience in the months ahead. Explain what changes or non-changes the company anticipates over the next three, six, or twelve months. Share your plans. Be as open, specific, and precise as possible. Any hesitancy or waffling from you will damage the confidence and commitment you will receive from your employees.

Opportunities for Advancement

Surviving employees want to know what their future prospects are with the newly reorganized company. Since traditional career paths may have been eliminated, new opportunities for “advancement” must be created. These typically entail such things as compensation for performance rather than position, greater autonomy and decision making authority, or opportunities to improve one’s “employability” through exposure to more aspects of the business. Employees in the new organization will want to work on projects that develop their skills while achieving company goals.

During this time of uncertainty, you need to identify the advancement opportunities that will be available in the future. Nothing demotivates employees faster than to have career options for which one has been striving to attain suddenly become unavailable because of elimination of positions or management layers within the company.

Treatment of Non-Returning Employees

Surviving employees are greatly influenced by how downsized employees were treated when they were let go. Surviving employees want to be assured, should it happen to them, that laid-off employees were “cared for” through severance pay, outplacement services, ample advanced notice, and fair and consistent treatment throughout the reorganization. Employees predict how they will be treated in the future based upon how the company treated displaced employees in the past. You will be wise to remember that employees have a long memory when it comes to a company's reorganization. They recall exactly what was said back when and who did what to whom. Be very careful when making decisions about how to treat downsized employees.

Expectations of Remaining Employees

Finally, although employees may not know they have this last need and therefore generally may never articulate it, workers who stay with the company have an inherent desire to know: What is my charge?

Once employees have decided they want to stay with the company after a reorganization, they need clarity on what the company expects of them. What do you want them to do? Should they carry on as they have been doing in the past, or should they do something different? What are their new marching orders?

If you expect employees to change, you must tell them so. If you expect employees to continue doing what they have been doing in the past, you must tell them this also. Never assume that the employees will conclude what you want them to conclude. You must tell them.

After you have gone through a reorganization you must give the surviving employees their charge. You should share with your employees the things that matter most in the new business model. Tell them:

• What it takes to win in the new company
• What they can do to contribute to the success of the company, as well as to their own success
• What is in it for them if they do contribute to the future success of the company

People need hope in the future. Employees need to know that their future will once again be bright as they work to return the closed company to profitability. Everything you do during a reorganization must be designed to build hope, not destroy it. When you answer point-by-point every question outlined in this article you mitigate the fears of the employees, you build tremendous rapport with them and you refocus their energy and effort on the future success of the business. You get people focused on the customers instead of focused on themselves. §

Innovative Management Group is adept at bringing about successful organizational change, particularly on how to maintain employee commitment after a downsizing. We know how to engage your employees at every level of your company and get them to commit to the new organizational conditions. Please call us at 702-592-6431 to learn how we can help focus your employees on the things that matter most.

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Mac McIntire is the president of Innovative Management Group, a Las Vegas-based training and consulting firm specializing in strategic visioning and alignment, organizational effectiveness, management development, quality improvement, customer service, and teamwork. He can be reached at 702-592-6431 or e-mail [email protected]. His website is www.imglv.com