Francis Wade | Inspiring ‘paused’ employees

ADVISORY COLUMN: PRODUCTIVITY

As a result of the pandemic and the recession, are many of your staff members unconsciously ‘working to rule’?

In other words, have they reverted to doing the minimum possible to keep their jobs? If so, what can you, as an employer, do to break them out of a dangerous rut that could drive your firm all the way into bankruptcy?

These are scary times, and with good reason. Here in Jamaica, COVID-19 is spiking to unforeseen levels, and as the death toll mounts, even more people are testing positive. Furthermore, the economy faces poor predictions as we enter the traditional slowdown of the tourist season. Arguably, business confidence is at its lowest ever.

Consequently, most of your employees are probably stalled. Confronted by bad news and distracted by children who would normally be in school, they are overwhelmed. Lying awake at night, they are preoccupied with the need to keep themselves and their loved ones safe.

It seems only natural: in response to a threat, you should focus on defending yourself. However, when the threat is enduring, there’s a limit to how well a good defence works. Case in point: you can’t win the football World Cup by only preventing goals from being scored. Plus, deep within the human spirit lies a steady force that drives us to do more than just survive.

Unfortunately, few corporate leaders know how to transcend the ‘survival’ stage of the pandemic. With each spike, they reset their companies’ attention to the usual: social distancing, wearing masks, and working from home. But there will always be spikes ... for now. A vaccine won’t make its way to our citizens for several years.

In the meantime, your company may just go out of business.

Instead of waiting and resetting every few months, how can you take your employees out of the ‘pause’?

Think big

A few years ago, the US Coast Guard had such a challenge. The world was changing rapidly, and its old operating mode as the first responder to sea-based emergencies was no longer working. The threats it faced were now organised, some by terrorists and others by global forces such as climate change.

The organisation needed to take into account incipient trends then rise far above them. As opposed to merely reacting, it needed to shape long-term outcomes. That could not happen in the short term.

Instead, the organisation developed a decades-long scenario in which it transformed itself, creating a new, influential role in the future. From that end point, it worked back to today, resulting in a difficult reorganisation impacting thousands.

But my experience leading Jamaican companies' planning tells me that the articulation of a vision isn’t enough. To some degree, we are immune from such leader-talk, courtesy of politicians. Now your people are, quite rightly, sceptical of bombast.

They should be.

Research shows that overblown visions of the future can be demotivational. Why? When a goal is too far out of people’s reach, they give up, asking themselves whether to waste time on a failure.

Be fact-based and realistic

The first way out of this dilemma is to create a numbers-oriented map of the journey from the future back to the present. Such a chart is quite difficult to craft, but it starts by defining a specific year for your goal, such as our own Vision Jamaica 2030.

Furthermore, it must show how critical metrics such as top-line revenue, EBITDA, and market share need to change to accomplish your end point. Plus, it needs to capture qualitative milestones.

Finally, projects and interventions that take months or years to implement should be added in and synchronised with the other targets.

The end result is a detailed picture of the journey your organisation must take from now until the stated year of your vision.

Some would say that such detail is likely to be incorrect, and they are right. This is not an exercise in prediction or accuracy. Instead, it’s meant to galvanise your organisation with not only a destination but a realistic means of reaching there.

Why is this activity important to employees? Without this level of specificity, they won’t buy in and will simply add the goal to their mental list of empty promises. This is the problem with overarching, vague vision statements. They have stopped working because people are immune to the optimism of world-class pronouncements, which are more ignorant than credible.

One way to tackle this challenge is to involve all your staff in your data gathering. After all, this is their future you are crafting. Take care to address all the facts and assumptions they deem important.

The fact is, in these difficult times, people want to be inspired, but, more so, they don’t want to be disappointed by a CEO’s pipe dream. Focus on creating a vision that’s realistic, and you’ll replace their unwanted fears with a motivation that enlivens and lifts them to extraordinary achievement.

Francis Wade is a management consultant and author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity. To receive a summary of links to past columns, or give feedback, email columns@fwconsulting.com.