It’s been a dry season for IS groups. So nobody’s going to blame you if your response to the downturn is to just keep the servers serving, the help desk helping and the lights on.

Well, guess what: This recession isn’t going to last forever. And CIOs who have kept their staffs energized and focused on innovative IT will help their companies shake off the economic malaise, ahead of competitors. You don’t need massive bonuses and multimillion-dollar projects to keep staff engaged; it can be done in small, inexpensive ways.

If you don’t focus on keeping your employees focused, they’ll be out of shape and unprepared once the economy bounces back, or worse yet, out the door. Sure, people are motivated by the prospect of losing a paycheck?but money’s not everything. "If [employees] remember staying here in tough times because it was the only available situation, you’ll lose them," says Hank Zupnick, CIO of GE Capital Real Estate, a $1.9 billion real estate investment company based in Stamford, Conn.

What’s Their Motivation?

Perhaps the most important action a CIO can take to keep staffers looking ahead rather than over their shoulders is to make sure they know it’s OK to fail. In a rough economy, where IT workers may have seen friends or coworkers lose their jobs, it’s natural that they might be paranoid about doing any work that involves risk. You must combat this. For example, Dan Horton, CIO of S.C. Johnson (the makers of Johnson Wax and other consumer products) in Racine, Wis., recently tried to pilot an enterprise portal. Though the project flopped, team members were featured in a companywide internal communication piece discussing how important it was to try new things. "It showed employees that even if we fail, as long as we learn something, it’s encouraged in our company?no matter what kind of economic time we’re in," he says.

Neil Hastie, CIO and senior vice president of Chicago-based TruServ, the $2.6 billion parent company of True Value Hardware, saw his IT budget drop from $58 million to $34 million between 2000 and 2001, and hold flat for 2002. Yet he was still able to initiate "vendor-managed data," an ambitious attempt to wire TruServ’s hardware supply chain end-to-end, enabling even the smallest vendors to share product information and custom catalogs online. The project did succeed, but Hastie was concerned from the outset about staff trepidation. So he as-sured them that he’d take the fall for any failure. "Especially during an economy like this, staff are good businesspeople too and are scared to make mistakes with any dollars at stake," he says. "You need to give them 100 percent backing that it’s OK for them if it doesn’t work out."