How To Keep The Staff You Have Left Motivated

By Author: Erik Sulivan
Total Articles: 43
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No matter how valid and necessary the reasons that a company has to lay off their employees, it is still a huge blow to a worker's life. The struggle not only lies on the one being laid off, but also on the manager who is left to manage what's left after the downsizing. This is a difficult task, knowing that those who are left are more or less demoralized, fearing for their jobs.

It is a great challenge for the manager to make those remaining employees work with the same amount of load before the layoff. In this regard, a manager has no choice but to divide the work equally among the remaining employees. But how can you make sure that they can still be productive after such a demoralizing experience? How do you keep these employees motivated after some of their colleagues have been terminated? It will take all efforts learned in project management training to pull this off.

Maintain or Improve Communication

When things like downsizing and other unfortunate situations in the workplace arise, communication lines between management and employees ...
... tend to suffer. This breeds mistrust, which is not a good thing to foster with your remaining employees. This will make them become suspicious of the management's plans and intentions, which can affect their attitude towards work. The last thing you need is being left with suspicious employees with so much work left to do. Even if the situation is bleak, the employees have the right to know what's going on, and according to management courses, it's your responsibility to tell them.

Establish Trust

This is a tall order after going through downsizing. At this stage, employees will have a tendency to anticipate what the company is going to do next, whether they will keep or lose their jobs in the next few months. A manager has to give some sort of assurance that just because some lost their jobs, it doesn't mean that the rest will follow suit.

Assign Workloads Effectively

It's inevitable that the remaining employees will have to bear the brunt of increased workloads. This can prove disastrous to their morale, but a manager can avoid that from happening if he knows how to work his way around assigning workloads. The best way to go about this is to involve them in the decision-making. Let them give suggestions on how to divide the work equally among them. Avoid assigning the work left by a laid off employee to the colleague closest to them without considering workload and capabilities. Arrange to have your remaining employees to receive additional training or project management courses they might need in shouldering the new responsibilities.

Recognize Their Worth

Now that you are left with a smaller number of people to carry on with your usual workload, now is the best time to let them know how important they are to the organization. You have to do it in such a way that it won't come out as if you're desperate to keep them, or you're brown nosing. You can zero in on the reasons why they still have their jobs to give them an idea on how important they are to the organization.