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Guest post by: Millard MacAdam Become an Author

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If you are a frustrated business owner facing a tough economy, making it a priority to keep your excellent staff members in place will be a key to your ability to survive and come out of the downturn. It will also be a challenge to pay what excellent staff members expect. However, it's critical that you focus on doing all that you can to retain your excellent staff members during difficult financial times. You'll need them to be there and ready to make excellent contributions when business picks up again.

Here's what I've observed to be the top ten best and tested tactics I urge you to implement:

Provide Open, Honest Communications - Use all lines of communication with openness and honesty at the heart of all interactions. Too often business owners keep the bad news away from their staff members. My observation is that the owners who lead well share it, discuss it and seek ways to move forward in collaboration with their staff members. Keeping the bad news quiet feeds the rumor mill, negative attitudes and an overall feeling of low spirits that hinders all areas of individual and business performance. Ensure that you and the managers and key leaders in your company actively share and discuss news and information with your staff members.

Provide A Clear And Compelling Vision - As the owner of your company, you need to ensure that you have a clear and compelling vision or story to share with your staff. This story needs to include the key things your company has to be proud of, an outline of what is happening, a concise picture of where your company is headed, and how it will get there with everyone contributing their part. This story needs to be shared widely, repeatedly and consistently.

Manifest Genuine Respect - Treating your staff members with patience, kindness and respect will go much further than using intimidation and fear to get them to do more with less.

Focus On Providing Opportunities To Learn - It takes more than gimmicks to keep excellent staff members happy. Create an environment where staff members can focus on career development, learn new things, get training and enhance their skills as such an environment will allow each individual, especially high performers, to thrive.

Training and education will ensure that your staff members can both fill their positions excellently and help improve your existing systems. Additionally, having staff members who are cross-trained is a great competitive advantage if you are required to reduce your headcount during a downturn. Use your skilled staff members to help provide the training.

Provide And Encourage Coaching - Working one-on-one with staff members in a coaching relationship is also a great way to discover and tap their talents to benefit the whole organization. Develop a culture of "Mutual Coaching" to help one another enhance their knowledge, skills and attitudes.

Provide On Course and Off Course Performance Feedback - Providing performance feedback should be turned into a continual process rather than an annual or semi-annual performance measure. All of your staff members need and deserve feedback. Engage them in giving feedback to one another and to you as the owner based on the performance guidelines you've established for each position, including your own. It's the clear statements of key functions and related tasks in the performance guidelines for each position in your company that helps focus feedback among your entire team on relevant performance enhancement opportunities.

Provide Decision-Making Opportunities - Compensation is important but it's usually not enough since excellent staff members also want to be involved in the decision making process. After all, achieving buy-in from your staff members will not only help you to retain top talent, it's also a great way to generate ideas to enhance the operational aspects of your company. If you want to retain your best staff members during a tough economy, be sure to make an effort to develop their skills and to create a work environment they thrive in rather than just survive in.

Keep A Focus On Excellent Customer Relations - With the increasingly important role of good customer relationships in tough economic times, the customer engagement quality of your staff members can make all the difference between customer retention and defection. Maintaining high integrity with and among your staff, and through them with your customers, is critical.

Dialogue On Cost Reduction Strategies - Engage all of your staff members in dialoguing about cost reduction strategies that will help keep the entire team working, even if with less time and less money if crunch comes to crunch. If the business fails, everyone is out of work. Keeping it going is in the best long-term interest of everyone.

I've observed owners who have reduced their salaries and profits significantly during tough times. I've observed a few who took nothing from their company revenues for themselves for a year or more! That's setting a sacrificial example.

I've also observed staff members agreeing to work less hours for less pay... even less days for less pay, so that the entire staff could stay intact while working their way through the difficult times. I call this "collaborative belt tightening" and it has saved many a good company.

Consider Creative "Fringe" Benefits - Recognize your people in concrete ways for their efforts. Focus on and celebrate desirable behaviors and achievements and thank those who exhibit them. You as the owner and your managers can effectively do this only if you consistently model the desired behaviors yourselves.

A few of the creative fringe benefits I've seen do wonders for the morale of peak performing employees are: (1) Gifting them the use of the owner's vacation home for a family vacation; (2) Giving them a special "time off" for special family events like their children's birthday parties or sports events; (3) Giving them complimentary tickets or sports or theater events that are appreciated by them.

In closing, I find that most forward-thinking business owners have come to understand that engaged staff members can significantly outperform those who are not engaged in their work. The positive results of an engaging workplace are well documented, with benefits including better customer service and loyalty, improved individual performance, and reduced costs associated with safety and absenteeism.

At anytime it makes good sense to actively engage and collaborate with your staff. In tough times it's essential if you don't want to put all the hard work and money you've invested in developing your company at even greater risk.

If you need help in mastering and implementing any of the skills and tactics mentioned above, I'm here for you! Please visit the Call-A-Coach section of my web site for more information, and contact me if you have any questions.

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