Chris Hopkins Caburn Hope - Employee Communication blog

We all know times are tough, whatever sector you’re in. Frozen or constrained pay have become the norm, with 2012 expected largely to continue the trend. Little surprise, then, that the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD)’s annual survey of Employee Attitudes to Pay found that a larger proportion of employees received pay cuts or freezes in 2011 than in any year since 2008.

Keeping staff motivated during a recession is a challenge, and the stakes are high. Morale directly affects productivity, creating a downward spiral when things start to slide. So how can your workforce stay focused and positive, even when they don’t get the pay review they’ve been counting on?

On behalf of Pamela Kent, Account Director, Caburn Hope

You wouldn’t ask a web developer to do your advertising, so surely something as important as reward communication should be to a left to a specialist?…

For the past decade, various international HR management consultancies have been providing excellent brokerage and facilitation services to help companies deliver reward packages to their people. As well as advising to the highest standards on the best benefits to offer, they will also broker and supply them via sophisticated platforms that give employees the opportunity to choose their own benefits online.

Once built, these platforms are often managed on a fee per employee basis, through multi-year contracts. They can also offer communication services relating to the benefits provided by their clients to employees.

But is this always enough?

As competition for talent becomes ever fiercer, embracing new communication channels is going to be essential in ensuring a successful business for the 21st century.

The business landscape is always changing but the pace of that change over the past decade or so has accelerated hugely thanks to a combination of economic, political, cultural and technological factors.

Just as the marketplace has never been more turbulent and unpredictable, so the workplace has never been more varied, or offered so many opportunities. The people who work for you are spread right across the demographic, social and geographic spectrum and have a wide variety of expectations and preferences about how you interact with them.

Keeping these disparate groups happy, loyal and united is a challenge. Enlightened bosses know that they must combine the four elements of the employee value proposition – reward, business strategy, brand and behaviours – to build loyalty and engagement in their staff, and that effective communication is the cement binding these elements together.

Thanks to the financial crisis, the fundamental shifts in the global economic balance of power and the extraordinary pace of technological progress, we’re expected to cope with change that’s more significant, more frequent and more intense than anything we’ve faced before.

So how do we deal with this as managers and communicators? How do we communicate about all of that change positively in a way that engages the workforce and retains the best talent at a time when money is tight and people’s fears are heightened?

Typically, the default reaction to the prospect of change is unhappiness and the reason for that unhappiness is uncertainty. People think ‘it’s all changing at work so how am I going to suffer as a consequence?’ This uncertainty is what makes good communication so vitally important.

The assumption people often make is that the outcome of change is going to be worse for them - and in truth they’re sometimes right - but in many circumstances changes are actually for the better.

Retaining your best workers during an economic downturn can make the difference between success and failure for any company.

When pay is squeezed and standards of living seem threatened, people naturally focus more on salary and benefits and less on job satisfaction.

In a recent survey by the Institute of Administrative Management, more than half (54%) of 2,000 UK workers across all sectors gave improving their salary and benefits as the top reason for wanting to change jobs. The second most popular reason (42%) was improving job satisfaction.

Last year’s survey saw 61% of respondents citing job satisfaction as the top reason for changing jobs, while 48% said pay and benefits was the most important.

This reversal will make senior managers nervous. How can they be expected to keep their people – and keep them happy – in straitened times when there’s no money to spend on increasing salaries?