How can I create a positive work environment during cutbacks?
Article Type: Q&A From: Strategic HR Review, Volume 12, Issue 6
Leading industry experts answer your strategic questions
It is very easy, during difficult times, to lose sight of achievements and successes. All too quickly it begins to feel as if there is no good news, only more bad news. Motivation and morale can fall off as people become demoralized followed quickly by a drop in performance. In the worst cases a vicious downward cycle of negativity and conflict can develop.
However, there are ways to mitigate this. Following are seven actions you can take:
1. Develop a success and achievement strategy
Develop a strategy for recognizing, capturing and broadcasting the great things people and teams are still managing to achieve, despite a difficult context. In a redundancy situation this can extend to capturing any good news about peoples job search efforts and outcomes. Help people focus their attention on the good news amongst the gloom by asking positive questions such as. “What has been your proudest moment at work in the last month? or “Tell me about a recent success at work.
2. Include positivity in your leadership development and equip leaders with practical skills to encourage positivity
Educate leaders about the work of Losada and Heaphy (2004) and the magic ratio of 3:1 positive to negative experiences necessary to enter the zone of creative problem solving. Explain how spending time creating good emotional states helps people work well together on the difficult decisions that often need to be made in times of cutbacks. Equip them with techniques like questions and effective positive feedback skills.
3. Develop a “hotspot team
Have an HR or OD (organization development) hotspot team that can work with any team area or division where early warning signs surface such as a fall-off in performance, conflict in relations, decisions being pushed up the line, increased complaints against management and so on. Using team-building and OD techniques, they can help re-build trust and goodwill amongst group members before the problems become intractable.
4. Actively engage with the emotional challenge of redundancies for all staff
A round of redundancies produces all sorts of emotions for people – both those going and staying. The more people are able to influence the process of seeing the redundancies through the better. It is possible to help people support each other through leaving and staying in a way that enhances the experience of both. It should also allow for the expression of positive emotions and hopes for the future without people feeling they are betraying their colleagues. However, this does not often happen without positive help.
5. Help leaders and managers understand that the focus of their leadership must shift to people
Sometimes leaders and managers perceive dealing with “people problems as an interruption to their real work. It is really important during difficult times that managers and leaders appreciate that the context has shifted, and so have the priorities of their role. Maintaining morale and motivation is not a “nice to have, it is a business necessity. Feeling good is key to keeping up performance and making it possible for people to rise to the challenge of “doing more with less or “working smarter not harder. In these times, more than ever, the people are the work not the interruption to the work.
6. Create an attractive pull to the future
It really helps to have an attractive pull towards change. The more you can help people see bright spots ahead, that they are invested in creating and want to achieve, the greater the chance of them being energized to make changes. Appreciative Inquiry, an approach to change built on positive psychology, is a particularly powerful approach in this regard (http://www.appreciatingchange.co.uk).
7. Hard facts and safe spaces
Part of the HR role, along with senior leadership, is keeping the hard facts of the case in the conversation – “Sales have dropped by 70 percent or whatever is the underlying reality that is driving the cutbacks. At the same time, there needs to be safe spaces where people can engage with these hard facts in a creative way, where it is possible to ask the un-askable, question the unquestionable, and be irreverent about sacred cows; in other words where the usual conversational rules are suspended so that new ideas and possibilities can emerge. Having a space to grapple with the meaning of the imposed changes and to be freely creative in finding ways forward can be highly motivating. HR can have a role in creating these conversational spaces.
References
Losada, M. and Heaphy, E. (2004), “The role of positivity and connectivity in the performance of business teams: a nonlinear dynamics model, American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. 47 No. 6, pp. 740–765
About the author
Sarah Lewis MSc C.Psychol is an associated fellow of the British Psychological Society and a principal member of the Association of Business Psychologists. She is an acknowledged appreciative inquiry expert and author of Positive Psychology at Work (Wiley) and Appreciative Inquiry for Change Management (KoganPage). She specializes in working with organizations to co-create organizational change using methodologies such as Appreciative Inquiry, and the practical application of positive psychology. Sarah Lewis can be contacted at: sarahlewis@appreciatingchange.co.uk
Sarah Lewis
Sarah Lewis is based at Appreciating Change, UK
