Now’s the time to help your employees get out of the recession rut. And the business can’t move forward if your employees aren’t.

Is your company losing money because people are in a holding pattern?
Corporate employees across the country are experiencing a resigned sense of stagnation. Tribe fielded research in the first quarter of 2010 with corporate employees in three generations, Boomer, Gen X and Gen Y, and found a lethargic do-nothing spirit among workers of all ages. Typical comments from respondents include, “Nothing’s getting better or worse,” “I’m just going through the motions,” and “I’m sort of stuck in neutral.” When asked if they thought it was more likely they’d be promoted or fired in the next year, 77 percent responded “neither one.”

Management has a plan, but employees don’t know it.
One internal communications manager with a Fortune 100 company described a dangerous divide between the great majority of employees and those at the top with clear plans for how they’re transforming the company for more profitability. When asked if he thought the management at his company (a global brand) had a strategy for recovery, he said, “No, I don’t think they have a plan. It worries me.”

During qualitative interviews, many top leaders revealed that they thought employees understood the business reason behind layoffs. In reality, employees aren’t always so clear on the reasoning behind many changes. One reason for this is that employees have trouble separating changes caused by the recession from necessary changes that need to happen, recession or not. The recession is becoming the scapegoat for necessary business transformations to grow the business.

They want to know what’s going on. Especially the younger employees.
Tribe’s survey asked “If your company could do one thing to make you feel better about where you work, what would it be?” The two most common answers, in almost equal numbers, were more money and more communication. New Generation employees offered twice as many comments as Boomers about wanting increased or improved communication.

One way to open communication is a leadership blog.
It’s relatively simple to establish a leadership blog, by the CEO or another top visionary. Tribe’s process for developing a leadership blog includes a topic matrix and editorial calendar, to give key topics the right visibility across the year.

The risk in not having frequent communication from the top down is that employees assume no news is bad news. A leadership blog can efficiently fill that vacuum of communication and help employees feel in the loop and on board.