A Chance to Learn and Grow
At companies that have made deep cuts, of course, reassigning certain job responsibilities is a necessity rather than a virtue, and usually entails adding more duties rather than taking any away. But even when the volume of work seems to limit a manager's options, scrambling up job duties may be a smart move.
At seven-year-old, privately held Odyssey Logistics & Technology, a logistics outsourcer for chemical companies, CFO Cosmo Alberico has actually added staff in the past year, with zero layoffs and hardly any turnover. Still, he has about 40% of his 25-person finance staff cross-training on particular tasks. As an example, "you may generally be doing fixed-asset tracking, but now you'll also be doing something in the treasury function, such as getting involved in moving money between bank accounts," and vice versa, he says. Employees seem keen on the nearly year-old program "because it makes their jobs more interesting and broadens their knowledge base," he says, and there's a natural benefit to the company in having more backup when someone is out.
Assigning high-potential employees to special, often cross-functional projects with executive-level visibility can also provide a much-needed morale boost. "These kinds of special assignments, as opposed to the routine taking over of a job, are terrific," says Gochman. Employees "get to work with others, present to others, and if you do it right, you can make it a developmental experience, too."
You might succeed too well. Alberico just lost one of his high-performing staff accountants to the IT department after the employee excelled in a special project helping a customer restructure its billing in ways that opened up new business opportunities for Odyssey. "My controller wasn't that happy," Alberico says with a laugh, "but the employee really benefited; it propelled him into a promotional opportunity."
Although the recession may seem like the worst possible time to create or expand job-rotation programs — after all, there may be no new positions for those more-well-trained employees to move into — experts say that, in fact, the rotations send a strong signal that the firm cares about developing individuals' talents. Grant Barber, CFO at Hughes Communications, has moved four senior employees to very different roles in the past year, and is planning to increase that number. "If I had my perfect plan, I'd move a third of my senior direct reports every year," with rotations occurring twice-yearly, he says.
There are also less-formal (and cost-free) ways to cross-pollinate. At Aspect Software, an outsourced provider of customer relationship technology, more than 60 of the 77 people in finance have attended each of the first four monthly "Be Better Informed" sessions, half-hour mini-lectures that use internal speakers on such topics as credit and collections, the order-management process, and product development. "They've been a huge enhancement," says Cathy Trainor, a senior finance manager at Aspect who liked the idea enough to volunteer to coordinate the sessions. "They really break down barriers between different parts of the [finance] department," she says, and, at 30 minutes, "they're not extremely time-consuming; you get enough and can follow up if you want more."
Fame, If Not Fortune
With bonuses in short supply, many companies are looking for quick and inexpensive fixes in the form of gift cards and trophies. Nearly 30% of companies surveyed by Towers Watson said they were planning to expand their use of such programs. The downside, of course, is that "if you give something to one person, the other good people say, 'Why didn't I get one?'," Hosein says. "But if you give it to too many people, it loses something, too." Hosein says he is ambivalent about instituting such a formal program.
Last year, Aspect Software doubled the number of spot awards it gives each quarter, from 20 to 40, and plans to boost the number within finance even further this year. While too many rewards can certainly dilute their effectiveness, CFO Michael Provenzano says that getting a reward (which can range from $250 to $1,000) "still holds a lot of weight" with employees who win, since they must be nominated by a peer (rather than management), "and we're still pretty stringent in terms of the criteria" to receive one. Of the finance employees who have received one, he says, most of the nominations came from outside the function, such as from business-unit managers.
The power of 15 minutes of fame can't be denied, either. "People often value the recognition more than the reward," says Provenzano. The awards are given in front of the whole company and documented on the company intranet. That was certainly true at Knight Capital, which offers a $2,000 award to one employee per month. With each department getting approximately one shot a year, the winner from finance last year "was in tears" when the CEO announced her award, Quall says. The employee had done a lot of cleanup work on books and records after a colleague left abruptly, but "she told me, 'It was only when I got that companywide recognition that I really felt like I accomplished something,'" he says.
Keeping the threshold high for awards is key, says Gochman, as is making sure that they reward the right behavior. "A lot of companies have realized that people were giving spot awards for doing a job well versus doing something extraordinary," she says. Now, more are starting to write guidelines and philosophies of recognition, wrestling with such questions as what constitutes extraordinary work and whether to reward teams or individuals.
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