Many finance executives are keen to boost staff morale, but few can rival Clyde Hosein's creative — and potentially humiliating — effort. Last December, the CFO of Marvell Technology Group strutted his stuff, literally. Inspired by the choreographed "mob dance" that a Chicago crowd performed with the band Black-Eyed Peas on The Oprah Winfrey Show last September, Hosein took the stage at the finance department's year-end meeting and performed what he describes as a "funky '70s thing" in front of more than 200 employees.
And his direct reports joined in.
It wasn't completely spontaneous. In fact, Hosein hired a professional dancer to teach him and more than 15 of his direct reports a routine that they could perform as a surprise for the rest of the staff.
Although the team practiced after-hours and in the hallways for more than a week, Hosein wasn't concerned about how much talent they might display on stage. Rather, his goal was to get in touch with the talent in his firm. "I'm giving the message that my management team is willing to take risks and be vulnerable," he says. "It's time to make the workplace a more fun place."
After a year of gut-wrenching layoffs, extra work, and few financial rewards, it's no wonder CFOs are starting to ramp up efforts to reinvigorate employee morale. Grateful for a steady income, many employees have been content to cling to their jobs, but that may not last for long. Several polls find that 50% to 60% of employees plan to jump ship as soon as the economy rebounds.
Yet not every morale-boosting strategy will hit its mark; some can even have an alienating effect. "It's okay to do something simple, but if that's all you do, it's going to look superficial," says Bob Nelson, author of Keeping Up in a Down Economy and 1001 Ways to Reward Employees.
There are several smart (and affordable) ways to keep employees from waltzing away. They don't require fancy managerial footwork, but they do demand a level of attention and humility not often found in the corporate world.
Speak Clearly, Listen Well
Nearly every company says it is trying to communicate more with employees to give them some reassurance during these turbulent times. A hefty 83% of executives responding to a recent Towers Watson survey, in fact, claimed to be taking this approach to engage employees, far outstripping any other. But that doesn't necessarily mean the quarterly town-hall-type meetings are effective.
"They're a good start if done well, but I've seen a lot of these kinds of presentations, and sometimes they're incomprehensible to the average employee," says Ilene Gochman, director of Towers Watson's organization-effectiveness practice. She says the biggest sin executives commit is lapsing into "business-school jargon," including terms like "EBITDA" and "SG&A." A second one is including too much information. Even if finance employees understand those terms and avidly scan PowerPoint projections of spreadsheets, she says, CFOs aren't setting a good example for them in how to communicate to broader audiences.
And even if an executive strikes the right tone for a mass audience, it's a mistake to leave it at that. Company strategy has "really got to be translated down to employees in terms of their goals, and how what they do fits with the bigger picture," says Gochman. That means the all-company meetings need to be followed up by departmental meetings, which should then be followed by regular one-on-one meetings between managers and employees.
"One of the biggest things right now is for managers to truly sit down with their employees, one-on-one, and find out what is on their plate, what they would like to do more of, what they would like to do less of, and what their career aspirations are," says Lori Dernavich, a human-capital consultant in the New York area. "One, it shows you care, and two, it gives managers a between-the-eyes honesty about what is really going on."
A good question to ask in those meetings: "What can I do to make your job easier right now? And keep going at it: Is that all? Is there more?" she says. "You've got to really get them to open up to you, because by not letting your employees be heard, you're doing far worse damage."
Hosein says his dance number is just a small piece of his broader effort to engage the workforce, and to train his staff to do the same. "Managers are as much doers as they are managers, and one of the biggest concerns is that they tend to get caught up in getting things done and get away from the fundamentals of management, like complimenting employees when they do a good job, coaching them, and paying attention to them."
Of course, such conversations "are meaningless unless something is done after the fact," says Dernavich. Consider the approach of Joel Quall, corporate controller at global capital markets firm Knight Capital Group. He has been mentoring three junior staffers who are supervised by other senior accounting and finance personnel, taking them out to lunch (individually) about once a quarter and getting a read on their attitudes toward their job functions and responsibilities.
"I come back from lunch, talk to the other managers, and usually things are resolved," says Quall. The most common complaint, he says, is employees not liking a particular aspect of their job, in which case, "we try to train others to do that task to free the employee up to do other things."
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