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How To Manage Morale When Companies Hit Turbulence

This article is more than 8 years old.

Imagine what it must be like to lead Volkswagen's engineering group right now.  Employees—lots of them—completely distracted from their work, wondering about their jobs & worried for their co-workers.  Not that I condone what happened at the company, but some executive—perhaps a new one—still has to lead that engineering group.  What a tough job.  The leader of this team must retain the best employees and keep them focused on the next generation of products while dealing with the emissions problem.  To lead through such difficult times is truly a high-stakes challenge.  VW’s engineering team must deliver some successes in the coming years to restore faith in the company and those projects must make progress now.

When companies go through times of change—whether acquisition, divestiture, leadership change, sales slump or competitive shocks—employees worry, then react, often with little input from management.  But now, far beyond chatter happening only at the water cooler, it can all play out through social media, extending to customers and competitors within hours.  All management can do is mop up and react to the mood.  With average employee engagement already low nationwide, the upheaval caused by such a big change can spike turnover.

But putting marketing-style spin onto internal messaging doesn’t feel genuine.  One company I know of was working through some challenges and made some hard decisions.  As the team figured out what to say and how to say it, someone remarked, “This is just like a press release”, which was taken as a bad sign!  Press releases are sterile, which is no way to communicate within our own team.  Sharing difficult messages through traditional communication is often one-directional, rife with bad assumptions and delivered without sufficiently considering the impact.

Instead, try sharing such news and feelings through relationships.  Management and informal leaders at all levels must be quickly mobilized to use the personal relationships with their teams to listen, then reassure and convey management’s message.  But don’t reach for the megaphone!

Naturally these relationships should have been formed long ago.  Good managers and leaders actually care about their people, have kept up with the lives of their teams and have shared some of their own stories as well.  Caring about how successful your team members are at work is crucial too!  Forming a strong, work-appropriate human relationship with each member of your team is an important investment and hopefully a joy as well.

When change is impending, the CEO (or top-most leader) ought to pull the leadership team together to share the news, discuss what the employees’ concerns might be, then decide on the appropriate message to be conveyed.  For example, in one firm whose founder had just died, the leadership decided to emphasize how the founder hadn’t been “driving” the business’s success for years—it had been the employees.  They also decided to emphasize the financial strength of the firm and how recent results had been excellent.  All this messaging served to assure everyone that their firm would continue along its profitable path, even without the founder.

Next the CEO should ask his leaders to start connecting with their teams.  There must be a deadline (perhaps a week away) and guidance provided on how to share the information.  For small departments, a casual approach may work:  dropping by cubicles to chat, then working in the messaging.  For larger departments, it might start with a meeting, but with some individual, casual follow up.  Remember kindergarten:  kids brought in a toy then casually shared their message with friends.  Don’t stray too far from this simple, genuine approach.

Another key to successful messaging is getting all the company’s leaders involved (all the way down to supervisors), so one person may only need to communicate with 5-10 others.  Ideally involve the informal leaders in the organization too—everyone knows them and (usually) trusts them.

Keep in mind that the most powerful way of sharing is to do it through two-way communication: face to face or on the phone.  Active listening means each person listens to the other carefully, then responds to what they hear.  Of course, it’s not just what is said, it’s what the employees observe or feel.  If they feel panic and fear in you, they’ll panic no matter what words you speak.

Repetition of these conversations is crucial over time.  For leaders to stay in control of the “buzz” they must anticipate the needs of the employees then continue to lead the discussion with regular updates.

Nothing about this process is easy.  Using a grass roots approach, don’t control messaging too tightly; it could be interpreted as marketing spin.  If the CEO has done a good job communicating with the leadership team, they’ll internalize the message, reformulate it and then put it out in their own words.  Here are more approaches to managing morale.

Make sure your management team invests in relationships long before you need them.  Relationships are important.  Start sharing quickly in times of change.  This relationship-based approach may seem time consuming but it is a powerful tool when needed and can help employees stay focused on the business at hand.

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