Implications: Let’s divide these implications into two different groups.
Customer satisfaction. Consumers can sense when employees have contempt for a company they work for; it surfaces in the quality of products a company might produce, or in the service a company delivers. Employee discontent leads to customer unease and dissatisfaction. If you have unhappy employees, this issue is a challenge worth solving. If your competitors have unhappy staff, this is an opportunity worth exploiting.
Employee recruitment and retention. The story cites issues like the feeling of job security, opportunities for advancement, and of course, pay and benefits as the leading reasons someone is either happy in their job or not. Most people could accept cutbacks in pay—even in light of added workload—when the economy began to recede. But those same folks will be watching the recovery diligently—anticipating that their full paycheck will be restored and their workload made more reasonable—as evidence of normalcy return to the general economy and the revenue line of their company.
If it will be a while before your company can fund these improvements to employee pay and work style, it will be critical that you communicate with the team about when you anticipate those improvements. (Most folks will be more tolerant, if they’re not left in the dark.)
If you (your company) is in a position to reward the staff for helping you through the tough times, this might also be seen as a great time to position yourself as “an employer of choice,” recruiting top talent from among those competitors whose company is not recovering as quickly as the greater economy. It’s something to watch for over the next twelve to twenty-four months… if not indefinitely.
Mike Anderson
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