How to Retain Your Employee despite No Increment During Economic Downturn?

December 24, 2009
by Fred Victor, Calvin Goh

No doubt, countless profit and/or non-profit organizations are in a tradeoff dilemma to stay within lower HR budgets or just rewarding them so as to maintain the morale and motivation. Despite the fact that you are doing performance reviews without increment, there are some ways you can do by considering the followings:-

1. Identify Your Top Performer and Poor Performer Segment.

You should divide your employee into two groups (top performer and poor performer groups), it enables you to have a clearer illustration on Sun Tzu’s “Four Conditions of Morale” as it guides you how to reveal and explain the truth (Item 2) accordingly.

Sun Tzu’s Four Conditions of Morale

a. Your Soldier fights – Because he has hope;
b. Your Soldier quits – Because he can quit instead of fighting and still alive;
c. Your Soldier fights – Because he has no choice but to fight or die; and
d. you Soldier quits – Because he loses his will to fight.

2. Reveal the Naked Truth.

Be truthful on your current economic situation ensued from the economic downturn. Your employee may start assuming another rationale was imposed on such “no increment” decision in the event of such truth hidden from view.

2.2 For top performer segment, they will be the most disappointed on the “no increment” issue. Hence, you should provide them a Hope. Brainstorm and goal-driven reward setting to revive their morale.

2.3 For poor performer segment, be ready with a detailed development plan for them to improve their performance as this will actually position your organization as that values employee development, and is willing to provide time with care to help every individual to succeed.

3. Focus on Performance-based Rewarding Scheme for Upcoming Plans.

Your employee performance has a significant impact not only on the entire morale of team, but also the overall profit sustainability for your organization to survive. Hence, you should have a process by which rewards are openly and fairly distributed to those most deserving on the basis of merits, efforts and results. By doing this, you will successfully not only realize your fixed expense, but also build a more motivated team … thus creating a win-win situation.

Stiff competition, customer focus and the need for speed and flexibility within the economic downturn have transformed another business equation. But to obtain an optimal result that you desire, you still depend on you “soldiers” (your employee, in other words) to carry the day. Without a doubt, you should reform a bigger % on your Top Performer segment by nurturing, motivating, rewarding, and providing them with work processes and organizational cultures that guide them to succeed.

Look, you are the biggest winner!