Question: How do you keep people motivated when the metrics are going south and management’s response is to impose the following cost savings on everything: a recruitment freeze, no bonuses, no promotions, no travel, no spending on training, etc?

Answer:  Move away your focus from the three small p’s (parking, pension and pay), towards the three big P’s (Purpose, Passion and People).

• Recruitment freeze – this hardly ever happens on direct personnel (that is, people who are needed to meet demand). It is normally a freeze on recruitment of indirect staff, which in my experience is often an over-populated area anyway. Focus the support teams back on their purpose, why they exist and what they are supposed to do to support the value adding teams; re-prioritise their activities to the absolute key work (they can tell you what that is – because of passion for the craft); be brave and remove any non-value adding work that has crept in from the centre and get them on the pitch (means, ability and accountability), helping the value stream (with problem solving activities, improving flow, communications, internal training/coaching, audit actions, etc). In one case, my engineers had lost their will to live – they had become engineers to work with machines and over the years we had systematically removed a large part of these responsibilities. Do the same with the quality people, for instance – get them back to doing what they love.
• Training – there are lots of opportunities to train in-house with no external spend. The level of knowledge and experience that already exists in most organisations is a dramatically untapped resource. Create mini centres of excellence. Who is your best practical problem solver? Ask them to put on a workshop. Who is the best at Excel? Ask them to put together a hints-and-tips document. In a previous production environment, we used to get the maintenance engineers to teach various engineering skills (electrics for beginners, welding, turning, etc), which some people even found useful for their own DIY. It went down a storm. Ask the finance team to put together a finance-for-non-financial -managers course. When you get people being creative you literally have too much stuff you could do.
• Bonuses and promotions never stay away for long – unless the company is in massive trouble. But take the time to ensure you are doing all you can on career conversations – make them a priority. Be fit for the future.
• Travel is not particularly motivating for most people. However, you can still go to local sites or perhaps work remotely. There are still lots of ways to open up people’s experiences. For instance, shadow in areas you wouldn’t normally go or share best practice with business units you rarely speak to.