Jaluch Limited

After the private sector taking a severe hammering in the last 18-24 months with pay freezes, redundancies, benefit reductions and other recession driven cost savings, it is now clearly the turn of the public sector.

The Tories have said that next year – if they get into government – all public sector salaries above £18K will be frozen.

And the Labour government has this week said it needs to save £3 billion in staff costs so this year will freeze the pay of top public sector workers including consultants, military chiefs and top civil servants.

I’m sure this will go down well with all those concerned, particularly as ministers have just awarded themselves a pay increase - but perhaps that’s because they don’t consider themselves to be ‘top public sector’ workers?  

But MPs failure to demonstrate leadership aside, if salaries are frozen just at the point the media reports us coming out of recession, what can be done to maintain employee morale? A few ideas…

• Actively encouraging job enhancement/enrichment (where that is possible)
• Providing opportunities to enhance the CV of career driven staff eg sabbaticals, special projects, international travel etc
• Focussing team leaders and supervisors for at least one year on prioritising activities to promote well being and employee engagement
• Getting directors and senior managers to raise their profiles and maintain a very public profile amongst staff for the next year
• Making maximum use of free or very low cost training activities to enhance knowledge and encourage continuous development
• Increase welfare activities to ensure any staff seriously affected financially have the ability to seek support rather than suffer in silence prior to going off with stress

Q. If you could identify one director or manager in your organisation who is fantastic at motivating and engaging staff who would it be and, when did you last publicly praise them for it?