Partnering in tough times

No doubt you have noticed – we are going through tough times. 

But, have you ever thought about what makes tough times tough?

One factor is that past practices no longer seem to work. There is a new immunity that means they have little or no effect. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Keynesian approach of spending your way out of recession. This is impossible because we have already been to the well too often and levels of debt are already way too high.

However, this does not have to be depressing. You see, it means that you have to find new solutions. It is that old "Necessity is the mother of invention" situation. It thus creates a time of opportunity and can actually be quite exciting.

To make the most of it, however, you have to throw off the trammels of traditional thinking. You also have to recognise that new ideas can come from anywhere. No-one has the monopoly on them. But, more importantly, they seldom happen in isolation. They are invariably the result of collaborative effort. Yet you so often overlook this.

Redundancy initiatives and headcount reductions are the perfect example of this. When you start to look to reduce your employee numbers you are effectively:-

• Diminishing your intellectual capacity to come up with new ideas;
• Undermining your capability to respond at the appropriate time when things do start to improve;
• Transferring the economic burden of looking after your people to the state, and so exacerbating and prolonging the problem you are trying to address. 

And of course that is to ignore the breakdown in trust and the inevitable erosion of employee engagement that follows.

So what's your alternative? It has to be greater employee ownership. It is no coincidence that employee owned-companies do better than their competition in good times and bad, and recover faster from any economic downturn. There are of course may such organisations, but in the UK the John Lewis Partnership is the best-known employee-owned company. And for me the organisation's insistence on calling its people partners rather than employees is the epitome of what I am talking about.

To survive tough times you have to create a spirit of "all being in this together" that transcends conventional definitions of employee engagement. And there is no better way to instigate and inspire and inculcate this than through employee ownership. So if you haven't thought about this already you need to be asking yourself, "Why not?" Especially since there is a way that you could do this without equity and at virtually no-cost to your organisation or your "partners."