Say Yes! at Work

Becoming a Great Employee During a Recession

It is critical to keep your job for as long as possible when the economy turns sour. Keeping your job should be your number one priority, because it is exponentially more difficult to find a replacement job in a recession. As a recession accelerates, rapid market changes cause business managers to cut costs quickly.

One of the first things to be cut is at-will employee headcount, a major cost driver for most companies. This includes administrative, human resources, operations, and product development personnel. Revenue targets for sales and marketing employees become do-or-die stakes driven in the ground that must be met or termination is assured.

The first thing a boss looks at is whether his or her employee has a positive approach to the job. A “can do” attitude is essential to success when times get tough. That means doing more work with less resources, making more sales with fewer opportunities, and cutting costs as much as possible. Employees who refuse or complain about these requirements are quickly eliminated.

You must say “yes” to nearly every challenge handed to you BY YOUR BOSS (note we did not say "handed to you by your coworkers" -- being helpful and having a can-do attitude does not mean doing your coworkers work for them, or worse yet, assuming responsibility or association with a project they know is about to fail or get cut from the budget).

You can volunteer to help by simply asking your boss “How can I help you or the company succeed?” This does not mean seeking out people who have been given impossible tasks, aligning with people facing the most difficult challenges, or accepting blame for failing projects. It simply means being pleasant, having a happy attitude, and marketing yourself by exuding a positive and helpful attitude, then putting your full effort behind everything you do.

If you do this with your boss and your boss’ superiors, you dramatically increase your changes of retaining your job while others lose theirs. Even if you eventually lose your job, you will have guaranteed your own employment for a much longer time than you would have with a “can’t do” attitude.