Keeping Morale High

Morale, Productivity Go Hand in Hand

In a slow economy, IT departments often tend to scale back new initiatives, cut projects and just maintain the necessary functions of the business in effort to limit expenses. However, such measures can drain employee morale and be highly counter productive to the success of your department.

A critical component of surviving, and even thriving, in a downturn is to protect employee morale. Let’s face it, when coworkers are being let go and budgets cut, remaining employees are at risk of wasting a lot of energy worrying about their own job security. Here are some tips to set a proactive course of action towards maintaining employee morale and preserving the productivity of your IT department.

1. Keep the lines of communication open wide. You don’t want employees in the dark over the current status of the business, or constantly looking over their shoulder wondering if their jobs are secure. Face-to-face communications is best to keep employees in the loop, and remember to spend as much time listening as you do talking.

2. Focus on new initiatives that improve productivity, eliminate waste and further align IT objectives with the business. Looking ahead to new opportunities keeps people busy and optimistic.

3. Establish rewards for ingenuity, particularly those that save the company money. Encourage thoughtful risk taking. Nothing kills creativity faster than fear of failure.

4. Continue training and employee development programs. These don’t have to be costly. Consider training offered by vendors or training provided by your own employees.

5. Encourage your IT department to keep current. Even if software, system or equipment upgrades are not in the budget this year, staying on top of the latest IT tools to consider in the future will help employees keep their eyes on the horizon.

Morale and productivity go hand in hand. Protect the morale of your employees and you will help to ensure your IT department remains productive through difficult economic times.

How far have we Come?

Consider the following:

On December 14, 1799, when George Washington died, it took the information seven days to travel 240 miles from northern Virginia to New York . The speed with which information travelled was largely determined by the speed of transportation. News traveled only as fast as people, whether by messenger, the mail, or the shipment of newspapers.

Excerpted from: The First Tycoon, The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles.

I highly recommend this book.

Keep the Shore in Sight: Maintaining A Healthy Perpective In Tough Economic Times

This article was published in the September 11, 2009 Dallas Business Journal

Regardless of the personal challenges the recession has thrown your way, one thing is certain: you cannot control current market conditions. Market forces have aligned in unprecedented ways to create a problem more powerful than any one individual. Unemployment stands at 8.9 percent nationally and is likely to exceed 10 percent. Worldwide GDP is contracting and no one is sure when it will hit bottom.

This economy is like a riptide. You can’t swim against the current and survive. For those who have experienced serious setbacks in their career or in their business’s performance, staying afloat in today’s economic environment requires a healthy perspective. Through my years of management experience in expanding and contracting economies, I have witnessed firsthand the difference between individuals with healthy, productive perspectives and those who are so weighed down by career setbacks they can’t recover. You must keep the shore in sight and remember things will eventually get better. You must foster a healthy outlook through setbacks.

Begin by shedding the emotional baggage that could weigh you down. Whether or not you are to blame for your current situation, there is nothing productive about holding on to the guilt, fear or shame often associated with business struggles or a serious career setback. Ask yourself some tough questions. Make a clear-eyed assessment of what happened so you can learn from your mistakes. Then move on. Holding on to unproductive emotions can interfere with your ability to be effective.

You may need to redefine what success looks like. This economy has presented today’s business world with a new reality in which to operate and it can be difficult to get your bearings. Take a careful look at your business and then look outside your organization at the performance of other businesses in your industry as well as those related to your industry. You must come to a clear understanding of what is within your ability to control and what is not. This will help you to better understand your options and define new goals and objectives.

Attempting to meet pre-recession metrics by simply working harder may not be possible. When faced with tough situations there is a tendency for hard-driving professionals (accustomed to being in control of their destiny) to go into default mode—meaning they rely heavily upon the very characteristics they attribute to their success and career advancement. They push harder and demand more from themselves and those around them in an effort to sustain previous performance. In other words, they are swimming against the current. Stay afloat with smart proactive measures, but don’t wear yourself out and those around you by fighting what is out of your control.

You also may need to rebalance your priorities. How do you define yourself? Are you a CEO, CIO, Director, Manager, Programmer? If your title goes away, how would you introduce yourself? What else are you good at? If you have never defined your existence beyond your job, rebalancing your priorities may be a difficult task. Finding meaning beyond the straight ascending line of your career path is critical, because chances are before we recover from this recession many individuals’ careers will look more like a sine wave.

You can view a career setback as an opportunity. Make this a defining moment. Tough times and how you deal with them will define you in new ways. Staying afloat during the current recession will necessitate learning new skills. The way you operate in a burgeoning economy is different from how you must operate in this recession. The uniqueness of what you are faced with will provide you with experience that you would have never otherwise gained. When recovery occurs, you will be able to leverage your new knowledge into greater success.

The recovery will happen. In the meantime, adopt a perspective that will enable you to swim with the current and keep the shore in sight. Shed the emotional baggage, redefine what success looks like, reprioritize and look at what the economy has dealt you as a defining moment in your life. Formulate a healthy outlook that will help you come out of this trying time having gained invaluable experience.

Managing IT resources in a difficult economy

Appeared in Fort Worth Business Press BY JAMES E. THOMPSON

Organizations that survive and end up thriving through a downturn resist the temptation to take only defensive measures. They develop aggressive offensive strategies as well. Successful businesses strike a balance between cost containment and capitalizing on new opportunities that present themselves. They are innovative and find new ways to provide value to customers. In addition, they take advantage of the greater availability of talented people in the job market. Smart organizations remain flexible and astute in order to react decisively to the changing landscape.

A proactive approach to managing your IT department is a good offensive strategy. Begin by renewing IT’s relationship to the business side of the organization. Closely examine where IT is legitimately adding value and how IT initiatives are helping the organization achieve competitive advantages. Scrutinize every aspect of your department (infrastructure, legacy systems, databases and application development) and then reprioritize your initiatives, keeping in mind the key business drivers the organization will be using in its decision making process.

Next, foster innovation. Research conducted by the consulting firm Accenture shows that a company’s ability to view the tools and resources they already had from an innovative perspective was key to success through the last downturn. In fact, the ability to innovate in a way that strengthened a company’s strategic position was second only to a healthy financial position prior to recession in determining whether the company would come out ahead.

Opportunities to innovate abound in a downturn. Maximizing your existing IT assets and finding new uses for resources already in place has historically paid off for organizations willing to think outside the box and take decisive action in a timely manner. These innovations can be seemingly simple concepts. According to Jean-Phillipe, president of Microsoft International, companies can reduce the number of servers by running more applications per server. Another cost-savings innovation is the implementation of employee mobility strategies that help to reduce travel expenses, as well as increase flexibility in talent recruitment and retention. Advanced Internet applications commonly known as Web 2.0, provide a variety of avenues for creative problem solving and innovation.

Calculated investments in new IT systems and projects also can boost a company’s ability to succeed in a tight economy. The Accenture research found that successful companies invested in new information systems that provided insight into value drivers. According to a recent Forbes article, “As the economic cycle inevitably shifts upward, companies who have dropped the innovation ball will find their fortunes sagging just as the economy surges.”
Finally, it is time to assess your people. Many organizations currently are in a holding pattern when it comes to their IT talent.

The InSource Group recently conducted an informal survey of companies in the Dallas area regarding their hiring plans. The majority of respondents indicated they were not planning on major changes to their IT talent and most hiring plans were conservative. These responses were not unexpected and in all probability these organizations are waiting on further economic data to make decisions before making bold decisions. While this is predictable, businesses can put too much weight on economic data. Remember such data reflects what has already happened and smart managers look ahead; not in the rear view mirror. Thoughtful, educated projections are required for employing smart resource management strategies.

A down economy is an excellent time for a cost effective talent upgrade because more IT professionals are available. It is also a good time for outsourcing contracts. Managing budgets and timelines of outsourced projects can be easier than containing the head count, costs and timelines of in house projects.

In a difficult economy, the reality is that companies may feel the need to reduce their IT talent. However, it is not productive for an organization to cut or freeze hiring across the board without a thorough and comprehensive review of its talent position by position. The complexities to be considered include preserving subject matter expertise that is critical to your organization and ensuring that the poorest performers are targeted, rather than simply the talent working on redundant initiatives.

Cost containment is important, but must be done with business drivers in mind. Ultimately, those companies that view the current economic environment as an opportunity to refocus on business drivers and stretch the organization’s capacity for innovation will weather the storm and inevitably be better positioned for the economic upturn.

Building A Name

How to create a solid reputation and hire people to enhance it

Appeared in Smart Business Dallas

Reputation is everything to A. Steven Raab. And as chairman and CEO of The InSource Group, he relies on the reputation of his $30 million IT staffing company to draw in not just prospective clients but also prospective employees.

“Being in the business we’re in, people, in reality, are just about everything,” Raab says. “It’s always been about bringing the right people, attracting people and, more importantly, keeping them here once you get them in here.”

Smart Business spoke with Raab about how to build a great reputation for your business and how to use that to attract the best people.

Q. How do you create a solid business reputation?

You want to have the kind of culture that people are proud to work for. That starts with company values. When we started this business, my colleagues and I wanted to make sure that, if nothing else, our business always had a reputation of doing the right thing. Have a strong set of company values and an ethical basis for how you do things — the way you make decisions, the way you treat people, the way you treat customers. All of us want to be proud of who we work for — hopefully on the worst and really crappy day, they go home and say, ‘Truth be known, I’m really glad I work for those guys.’

Q. How do you communicate those values to employees?

They’re published, they’re on their desk, and they understand that we’re serious about those values. It’s being clear as to what criteria you expect them to use in making decisions.

We talk about [how] a basis for making a decision has to be on doing the right thing. We won’t be critical of anybody who makes a decision based on what they thought was right. When people start making decisions on how much it’s going to cost or how much it’s going to hurt — they know that’s not an acceptable reason to make a decision.

The other thing that’s important is that they see you making your decisions based on those same values and criteria. It’s trite to say, ‘Walk the walk instead of talk the talk,’ but people are about, ‘Do as I do, not as I say.’ They have to see you behaving in the way you expect them to behave, and it becomes clearer what kind of company you represent and how you want them to represent you and make decisions.

Q. How do these values influence how you hire?

Bring in people who have a reputation. Take people through multiple interviews and have multiple people talk to them, and you do the best you can to collect their experiences and behaviors. You can’t see character. You use your best judgment and ask questions that will help you gauge where their values lie.

Some of it has to do with how people look at you. You may not be able to do it as well on the phone [rather] than if you were sitting eyeball to eyeball across the table from somebody. See how squarely they look you in the eye, how quickly they answer a question and if they are searching for words that make you think they’re making it up.

I like to ask people to tell me about their worst and best experiences in business. It helps give me a sense of what they don’t like and the things they are very pleased about — do they have to do with money, their sense of pride, things that enhance their reputation? What are the things that disappointed them? Someone didn’t tell them the truth? Someone didn’t back up what they needed to take care of a customer? Those questions help you get a picture.

Talk to people about their hobbies and what they like to do. People who are involved in other things besides themselves is an indicator. People don’t have time to be working in nonprofits; you understand that, but do they coach teams, do they participate in their church — things that show they’re outward-looking and not inward-looking.

Q. How do employees’ opinions impact the hiring?

We’ll have them talk to some of our people because we want them to get to know us and what’s expected and how our people feel about our organization as much as we want to know about them. We want them to come to work not because it was the job that they could get but because of the opportunities they looked at, this was the best fit for them.

Our people’s interviews are important. If our people tell us that there’s something about a prospective employee that they don’t know about, we’ll look long and hard at their comment, and if there’s not a way to put it to bed, we won’t hire them.

These guys are out in the field every day, and as much as we like to think we’re enlightened managers, they know more about what’s going on out there than we do. Their input is valid.

Don’t ask anybody for their opinion if you’re not going to pay attention to it.