No money. How to reduce personnel costs without reducing motivation

According to Gallup Media, the difference in KPIs between companies with high and low engagement rates can reach 10-20% or more. That is, personal motivation and involvement affect employee efficiency more than wages and other material bonuses. What should you do if you need to cut costs for employees and at the same time keep motivation at the same level or even increase it?
Overall team goals

Make "confidential" company information "explicit". How the company makes and loses money, what brands it competes with, what development strategy has it chosen, how satisfied the company's customers are with the quality of products and services, what is the level of staff involvement and, most importantly, how each employee is involved in this.

In this regard, strategic sessions are perfect, when the head of the company announces plans with the whole team and each department in the format of working groups thinks about how to achieve the set goals. At the same time, it is important to show what each person will receive when achieving common plans: new ambitious tasks and directions, the possibility of development, training (which will increase its value in the labor market) or moving to another department, raising the career ladder, and so on.

Education and development

According to the international recruiting company Kelly Services, 34% of employees consider opportunities for their development within the company as an important additional motivation. Thus, by training and developing your employees, you get a double benefit: you increase their motivation, and employees learn something new and useful for work, introduce new behaviors and increase productivity. Good impact can be achieved by choosing priority areas for development and training in the format of short-term and mobile programs. The whole world is moving away from cumbersome, offline, the same content and long-term educational processes. It is convenient for everyone to use mobile, personalized, microformat learning in the style of Instagram. The "corporate student" is offered short, explaining videos in a few minutes with a call to immediately apply new knowledge in practice.

Gratitude and Feedback

According to the results of the same Kelly Services research, 33% of employees consider public recognition of their success as the most motivating factor. An excellent effect is produced by weekly meetings within the department, where the names of the most successful and productive employees are announced. It is important that this does not look like a formality: it is necessary to name specifically what they have achieved, what a positive contribution they made to the development of the common cause.

For the majority of employees, not only public, but also personal praise is important, so thank the specialists for their quality work in private dialogues as well. They will understand how important their tasks are and how valuable what they are doing. Express your gratitude both verbally and in writing: for example, by e-mail. For feedback to be effective, keep basic principles in mind to follow. First of all, feedback must be timely: if more than 24 hours have passed since the event, then it will not be so effective to give feedback on it. But most importantly, it should show the value of a person, his personality and his work achievements, he should be aware that his work is important. Specially train top managers in this skill and the correct interaction with subordinates.

Day off work

Another popular solution that came to us from the West is the right to work from home one day a week. In addition to the fact that this motivates some specialists to perform their work with high quality, so as not to waste time on a trip to the office, thus you can also reduce a costly item: for example, an employee does not need to provide a free lunch. Due to this, a compromise is achieved, because the employer saves money, and the employee gets what he really wanted.

And finally, a little advice: you need to give up material methods of motivation gradually. If you immediately cut all bonuses, cancel free dentistry, cheap vouchers to resorts, and other material benefits, then your employees will stop trying the way they used to. But if you consistently increase the level of engagement, improve the corporate culture, introduce feedback from management, learn to praise the most productive and useful specialists, then over time it will be possible to completely replace material incentives with non-material ones.