By 2000 everyone knew there was going to be a big correction. Few accurately imagined how big. It was like going to the doctors because you knew something was ‘a little off’ and finding out that you were going to die in three months. Then talking to all your friends and realizing that everyone you knew had the same disease.
Initially many thought it would be similar to the early 90s recession. I.E. A few layoffs with everyone getting hired back again two years later. It wasn’t until 2002 that people realized that springtime wasnt coming back.
It wasnt just places like pets.com that crashed. You had every single non-tech company simultaneously scaling back IT initiatives. At the time there was still a large cohort of management types who considered the Internet more of a fad than a new paradigm. These types took full advantage of the shifting winds to cut deeply into anything tech related. This broad overcorrection did a massive amount of damage to the industry.
You can still see the impact crater. Remember the big talent shortages during 2008-2012? Thats because you no longer had a cohort of mid career professionals to draw from. Only the thin number of people who survived the collapse and a bunch of novices who were just getting started. Everyone was missing that valuable group of mid career 8-12 years of experience etc… Basically a generation of careers strangled. Which is why you’ll often see no sympathy for the ‘talent shortage’ complaint. Five years after cutting everything and leaving people to starve you have the same cohort of managers demanding to know “where are all the people with five years of recent experience”
How do you encourage the workforce without incentives?
Numerous studies have shown time and again that money is an extremely poor motivator. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us is a well sourced book which dives into the topic. The author, Dan Pink, has a really nice animated version of a talk he’s given summarizing the findings.
While monetary incentives are a poor motivator, instead people are primarily motivated by Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose.
Autonomy — Our desire to be self directed. It increases engagement over compliance.
Mastery — The urge to get better skills.
Purpose — The desire to do something that has meaning and is important. Businesses that only focus on profits without valuing purpose will end up with poor customer service and unhappy employees. [wikipedia]
Based on your description, it looks like the company has a lack of Autonomy and Purpose (your question doesn’t mention much relating to Mastery).
The employees aren’t self-directed and in control of their own fates. They’re being asked to work overtime because things are off schedule, again cutting into their autonomy.
They likely don’t feel like there is much purpose to the work they’re doing, which is evidenced by their resistance towards additional overtime.
So, how do you solve this problem? There’s no “easy fix” and no “one size fits all” approach. Especially as you’re already between a rock and a hard place.
It may help to communicate the reason behind the contract, what it means for the company, what it means for the customer, what it means for the customer’s customers, etc. There may be some employee engagement activities you can organize to help them understand the reason their work matters. This can’t be superficial, or trite either, that will backfire. Honestly, the company/project purpose needs to be defined and ingrained in the culture. If you have done that yet, now it’s the time to start, but don’t stop as soon as the current fire burns out. (Thanks to the commenters for pointing this out)
It may help to solicit feedback from the employees about how to proceed. Give them an opportunity to right the ship themselves. You likely have a bunch of smart people who understand the work, customer, environment, etc. and likely have lots of ideas they may not feel comfortable sharing that could help.
If you’ve been running in overtime mode for a long time, it’s quite likely that things like new opportunities, moving teams, changing technologies, etc. are being sacrificed in the misguided notion that “we don’t have time for that”. Happy employees are always better, more productive employees.
.. Perhaps if managers were held accountable for agreeing to unrealistic customer requests and you consulted your workforce about whether they’d agree to perform some overtime to help the company before agreeing to customer demands, the employees would feel more like team players. – David Schwartz 2 days ago
The Case for Letting Your Best People Go
A study finds a link between employees leaving for prestigious jobs and improved company status
.. it is plausible such departures—and subsequent boost in prestige—could help companies attract new, junior talent at lower wages.. nearly a dozen executives who had worked closely with Mr. Ellison at Oracle went on to become a chief executive, board chief or other high-ranking executive at another company—helping to seal Mr. Ellison’s reputation as a talent magnet... More people are managing their careers as a series of steppingstones at different companies, Prof. Finkelstein said. “As a boss, are you going to accept that reality and do something about it, or are you going to fight it?” he said. “Those who fight it are going to have a more difficult time finding good people.”
How do exit interviews benefit the company?
The thing to remember is that the information they are going to act on is the information that supports a change that HR might have been unable to sell to senior management in the past. It is not likely to affect policies that no one in management is interested in changing, and unless the whole staff quits and cites the same manager, it is almost never going to get a bad manager replaced – unless HR was already looking for a justification to replace him.
.. Any company/management that would actually change given the result of an exit interview probably would have been a place people felt comfortable discussing and attempting to fix their concerns prior to leaving.