This year, “stability” has become a luxury for many companies in Romania. The economy has slipped into a moderate recession, with forecasts pointing to a contraction in GDP for 2026, after a 2025 in which purchasing power fell by roughly 6%, and Romanians are bracing for a further drop of a few percentage points this year, as inflation continues to outpace wage growth. On top of that, a wave of layoffs has already hit tens of thousands of employees — in the automotive industry, in IT&tech, in the public sector — alongside political instability that has been felt directly in financial markets and in companies’ investment decisions. For an employee, none of this is an abstract statistic: it’s bigger bills, uncertainty about their job, and often, colleagues who leave or get let go. And for an employer, this context raises a simple but far from easy question: how do you keep your team engaged and motivated when times are hard?
Why engagement matters more, not less, in a crisis
The instinct of many companies, when budgets tighten, is to push employee engagement to second place, somewhere below cost-cutting and short-term survival. It’s an understandable mistake, but a costly one. People who feel uncertain, uninformed, and left in the dark don’t become more efficient — they become more anxious, less productive, and more likely to leave the moment an alternative shows up. In periods of instability, engaged employees are the ones who make up for limited resources with initiative, who stay loyal even when someone else offers a slightly higher salary, and who help the company get through the difficult stretch faster. In other words, engagement isn’t a perk for good times. It’s a resource you need precisely when things get complicated.
Strategies that actually work in difficult times
Communicate more, not less
The biggest mistake leaders make under pressure is going quiet. Silence leaves room for speculation, and in a vacuum, people usually assume the worst-case scenario. You don’t need good news to communicate — you need honesty and consistency. Short, regular updates about the state of the company, the decisions being made, and the reasoning behind them do more for trust than a single, perfectly polished presentation delivered once a quarter. In practice, that means internal communication channels where information reaches people directly, not filtered through rumors by the coffee machine — whether that’s a dedicated channel, short town-hall sessions, or messages segmented by team, so each group gets the information that’s actually relevant to them, instead of a generic update that tells no one anything useful.
Be clear about priorities
When resources shrink, priorities need to be rethought — and communicated again. A goal set in January, in a different economic context, can become irrelevant or even demotivating by August. Reassessing goals at shorter intervals (quarterly, or even monthly, depending on how volatile the situation is) helps teams feel like they’re working on things that still matter, rather than executing a plan that’s lost touch with reality. This is where a simple performance management system, with visible and updatable goals, makes the difference between a team that knows what it’s working toward and one that’s guessing.
Recognize effort, even the small kind
Bonus budgets are usually the first thing cut in a crisis, but recognition doesn’t have to cost money. A public “thank you,” visible to the whole team, for a colleague who pushed a hard project through, carries more weight than it seems — especially when everything around them feels unstable. Companies that manage to keep up a steady rhythm of appreciation — whether through peer-to-peer recognition or small, visible gestures at the organizational level — see real effects on retention. It’s not a coincidence that studies show a mere 10% increase in engagement can translate into meaningful profit impact, depending on company size. This isn’t about “gamification” for its own sake — it’s about a mechanism that makes visible what would otherwise go unnoticed: people’s effort.
Listen actively, not just formally
In a crisis, it’s easy to assume you know how people feel. Most of the time, you’re wrong. Short, frequent pulse surveys, run every few weeks, say a lot more than an annual satisfaction survey, because they capture the mood in real time rather than six months after the fact. What matters is what you do with the answers: if people feel their feedback disappears into a form with no follow-up, trust erodes. A simple process — ask, show what you learned, say what you’re doing about it — builds a real sense of partnership over time.
Give autonomy where you can
You can’t control the economic context, but you can control how much decision-making space you leave your teams. Even during restructuring, giving people a say in how they organize their work or how they reach a goal gives them a sense of control at a time when much else feels out of their hands. It’s a simple but effective antidote to the sense of helplessness that often creeps in during a crisis.
Support your middle managers, not just your teams
Line managers absorb the most stress in difficult periods — they translate decisions made at the top, manage their team’s anxiety, and often deal with their own uncertainty at the same time. If you want engagement to stay high at the employee level, invest in preparing your managers: how to have difficult conversations, how to deliver bad news with empathy, how to spot the signs of burnout in their people. A supported, well-informed manager passes calm down through the organization; one left to figure it out alone passes on panic, even without meaning to.
Technology doesn’t replace leadership, but it can support it
None of the strategies above are, at their core, about a piece of software. They’re about leadership decisions, courage in communication, and genuinely paying attention to people. What a platform for internal communication, performance management, and engagement — like the one we build at Co-Factor — can do is remove the friction that so often makes these good intentions fail in practice: messages that don’t reach everyone, goals that end up forgotten in some document, feedback that’s collected but never analyzed, recognition that happens only by chance, whenever a manager remembers to give it. The good news is you don’t need to change everything at once. More often than not, a few consistent habits — regular communication, clear goals, visible recognition, and real listening — make the difference between a team that sticks with the company through hard times and one that leaves at the first opportunity.
It’s not about eliminating uncertainty, but about getting through it together
No one can promise employees a stability that the current economic context doesn’t allow for. But you can offer them something else: clarity about what you know, honesty about what you don’t, and consistent proof that their effort matters. In difficult times, people don’t necessarily stay with the company that has the most resources — they stay with the one where they feel seen, informed, and part of what comes next. That’s not built overnight — but it is built, in small, consistent steps, even when the times aren’t on your side.
For more than a decade, Co-Factor has been supporting companies to build an organizational culture that allows them to successfully navigate tough times and thrive. Because, at present, the general context puts both employees and employers to the test, Co-Factor offers a substantial discount on the entire package of digitalization of HR processes.
