A new white paper by the Performance Improvement Council of the Incentive Marketing Association takes a look at ways to sustain employee engagement in companies caught in the challenges of the economic downturn. Despite shrinking revenues and unrelenting expenses, the analysis concludes employees still are the biggest contributing factor for success or failure in the drive to do more with less.
"As today's executives wrestle with sustained economic uncertainty and frequently changing value propositions, they need to hold fast to the idea that engaged employees can set their firm apart. The operational challenge is finding ways to do that with a constantly shrinking bottom line," says Karen Renk, CAE, executive director of the Incentive Marketing Association, whose Performance Improvement Council generated the analysis. "Even though raises and bonuses have all but disappeared from the economic landscape, we wanted to help employers understand that non-cash recognition can still be a very powerful employee motivator."
According to Renk, the new white paper examines:
• How companies can sustain their corporate culture through people.
• How people can drive much needed innovation.
• How companies can reinforce the right behaviors.
• What it takes to keep the best performers.
"Nearly every organization today is re-examining every aspect of its business, debating every cost and looking for even more ways to trim costs while still hoping to find effective ways to exploit competitive advantage," says Mike Ryan, current president of the PIC. "People are clearly that competitive advantage, the challenge lies in finding cost effective ways to unleash human innovation, promote the right behaviors and keep the right people performing to the optimum level despite the economic chaos."
The paper concludes that today's business leaders can maximize their investment in employees by cultivating a consistent culture of employee recognition that reminds employees on a continuing basis that they are valued in spite of all of the turmoil that may be going on in the business.
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