Chris Hopkins Caburn Hope - Employee Communication blog

Since the UK finally admitted that it was in the grips of a recession in January this year, your top talent has been battening down the hatches and biding its time... waiting for the moment the market finally starts to show signs of improvement before upping sticks and moving on.

In a recent survey conducted by the CIPD, 34 per cent of respondents admitted that whilst job security concerns are forcing people to stay put at present, they plan to make a move to pastures new in as little as a year’s time.

The recession has been hard on everyone, and whilst a proportion of the workforce have lost their jobs entirely through a rash of redundancy, those left standing are expected to do more work for less money to compensate for their erstwhile colleagues and help the business survive the storm. This has led to a league of incredibly talented, yet incredibly disgruntled, employees who are keen to take their new skills and place them elsewhere at the very first opportunity.

GUEST BLOGGER: CLAIRE BRISCOE, ACCOUNT MANAGER, CABURN HOPE

Your communications strategy is the key to successfully embedding your company mission, philosophy, personality, vision and values – collectively creating your employer brand – and transforming employees into engaged ‘brand champions’. The humble stick of rock is a great analogy for how you need your employee communications strategy to behave to make that work.

Like the writing that runs through rock, it shouldn’t matter where you choose to examine your communications; the brand message must prevail throughout, clearly and consistently.

GUEST BLOGGER: LEE NICHOLLS, ACCOUNT DIRECTOR, CABURN HOPE

It’s not just the advertisers who are willing Christmas to come earlier year after year – your employees become distracted weeks before the big day, and it is imperative that you start to plan now for that final push to achieve end of year results for your business and smooth the way to an efficient New Year.

A 2007 survey* estimated that around one third of employees – that’s approximately 9 million people – start winding down for the holidays from the 14 December, a full week and a half before the festive season officially begins. Productivity plummets, and one in three people state that they will come in late at least once during this period while one in five say they plan to throw at least one sickie.

Whilst there’s plenty of talk of green shoots on the horizon, it is still important to tread cautiously with spend until we can confidently state that we are out of the clutches of this downturn. With research suggesting that it has never been more critical to look after talent, how can companies recognise employees without doing more harm than good?

Banish the cynics

Empowering employees to thank each other directly in an official way is a recognition scheme’s best weapon against cynicism in the workforce. By giving employees and line managers a stake in the process, you will go a long way to banishing rumblings about management favouritism or recognition being dependent on what employees’ futures may be.

E-cards, an intranet Wall of Fame, or simply a sincere letter from a line manager are all excellent low-cost ways to achieve this.

Change the criteria

I read a rather contentious piece on Timesonline which not only alleges the demise of the HR department, but asserts that we should be happy about it.

HR teams are “the ‘people people’ who ensure that companies adhere to minimum wage requirements, rules relating to diversity, gender, sexual orientation and so on and generally try to prevent businesses being sued to death”, claims The Times. The amount of money spent on the HR function “seems to far outstrip their contribution to the world”, and the columnist has “never really understood the point of human resources departments”.

An interesting comment from a person who openly admits that he himself has never dealt with an HR department, which makes me wonder whether he is qualified to comment on this arena. But taking this argument at face value, I must disagree.