The company is facing what many other companies are currently facing. The current economic crunch has left even the most solid companies looking for shelter. As the ultimate aim of all companies is to survive in the market no matter what it takes, and to satisfy its stakeholders so they keep investing in the company and keep it from facing even more financial losses, the company has had to fire one fifth of its staff. These were most likely those people who either were not performing as good as the remaining employees or did not have enough potential in them for a company in such a situation to support them.
However, this has created a major problem. The employees are now lower in number. But the work and clientage of the company is still quite large. So large in fact that it is beyond the capabilities of the current workforce. However, since the company cannot afford more employees, these existing employees will have to work more to cover up for the lost employees. This can only be possible if they are motivated enough to take on the extra workload being given to them. They cannot leave their jobs because they might not find another job as every company is in this situation.
There have been many ways to motivate an employee. But most of them like offering higher salary and bonuses and perks or other benefits will not work in this case as the company is already running low on cash and therefore cannot afford to go ahead with these types of motivational tactics (Bruce, 2002). Therefore I think that the best way to motivate employees is to involve the human factor. As the employees are more stressed out, the company should provide a more relaxed atmosphere for them. The boss of every employee should develop a personal relationship with the people under him and be kinder to them. This will make the employees believe that the company cares for them and they will consider the organization more like their home than someplace they have got a contract to work at. The company can also change the way it works. Instead of making employees come to work from nine to five during the week, they can just assign targets to the employees for the week and tell them to achieve it themselves without daily reports or any follow up. The employees can work from home or come to office late and leave early. The bottom line however should be that they produce results. This is going to help a lot as many of the costs will also reduce as the company will be catering to lesser employees during the day as most of them will prefer to work from home. This is a well proven tactic used by IBM since the late 1990’s which they used for their contract workers to do work for them (Fargus, 2001).
As seen in the paper, there are some traditional ways of motivating employees but for this particular case we need some ways which involve lowering costs and creating value in the hearts of the employees so they will be willing to work more by themselves. Providing freedom within the limits of achieving targets is the easiest and best solution for a company in this state.
References
- Accel-Team. (2008) Employee Motivation: Theory and practice.
- Bruce, A. (2002) How to Motivate Every Employee. McGraw-Hill Professional.
- Fargus, P. (2001) asuring and Improving Employee Motivation. Financial Times Prentice Hall.