Now that the crisis has led to layoffs, the pressure on IT is likely to increase. How can CIOs keep IT people from becoming disgruntled in this era of tightening budgets and deep uncertainty? And how can they tell when IT staff is buckling under the strain?

"It's hard to read the mood of a place," says Paul Glen, author of Leading Geeks: How to Manage and Lead People Who Deliver Technology (Jossey-Bass 2002). "The bigger the organization, the greater the need for people who are personal touchstones and who will relate what people in the department are feeling."

The idea, he says, is not to recruit spies, but to nurture employees who will tell the absolute truth, no matter how unpleasant or personally upsetting.

"It helps to cultivate a network over time for this kind of information gathering," Glen adds.

Another clue to an IT department's declining mood may be falling productivity, though employees still look busy.

"People in distress during an economic downturn will make it appear they're working harder," Glen says. "But productivity can be a clue. Productivity is not a measure of how many items there are on someone's to-do list, but how many are coming off the list. If those go down or there's a drop-off in deliverables, it's likely there is a problem."

But by then, it may be too late.

"By the time there's a noticeable morale problem, it's difficult to turn things around," says Shane Aubel, co-founder and managing partner of Accent Global System Architects LLC.

Instead, he recommends that every tech leader takes the same steps to alleviate IT frustrations, or else avoid them before they occur.

"Either way, it's best to operate on the same premise," he says.

The best approach is a three-pronged strategy that addresses employees' uncertainties about their jobs, IT's relationship with business, and their overall enthusiasm about their work, experts say. Here's a look at how to create such a strategy.

How to Address Uncertainties
People who are fretting about losing their jobs are likely to lose focus and productivity, so it's best to start with a policy for addressing job insecurity in uncertain economic times. Here are some guidelines:

1. Don't offer blanket assurances "Whatever you do, don't make promises you can't live up to," advises Bill Lessard, co-author of Net Slaves: True Tales of Working the Web and Net Slaves 2.0: Tales of Surviving the Great Tech Gold Rush. "Don't give anyone false hope, and if you don't know something, say so."
   
   After all, there's a good chance you may need to reduce the size of your department. In a recent survey by the CIO Executive Board, 61% of CIOs said they were reevaluating their budgets in light of the economic crisis. Chances are, at least some of these reevaluations will lead to job cuts.
   
    
2. Share all information "There is no way to honestly assure people that there won't be layoffs, but it is possible to assure them that there are no layoffs planned at the moment, and that they'll be told as soon as that changes," Glen says.
   
   That builds trust with employees and helps them focus on their actual work, he adds. On the flip side, withholding information will likely do more harm than good.
   
   "No matter how bad the news, the fantasy people have is inevitably worse," Glen says. "The only antidote I know to office rumor is office reality."
   
    
3. Give a positive task to focus on Glen recalls working in one company where most of the senior staff left to start a new company of their own. "The entire office was in a panic because they believed their company was about to close," he says. When simply telling employees there were no such plans proved ineffective, Glen gave them a task instead -- to help recruit new talent. Not only did that help get their minds off their job worries, but "they were focused on an activity that said, 'Yes, we have a future,'" he says.
   
    

Focus on Improving IT Relations with Business Staff
The second prong in the approach is to pay special attention to communication between business and IT. It will likely be business leaders who make the final decisions about budget cuts, so the better IT understands business concerns and can demonstrate business value, the smaller those cuts are likely to be. Here's how to increase that understanding:

1. Involve business counterparts in the process "The way the industry is constructed, there's a great divide between business and IT folks. A lot of the time, IT likes it that way," Aubel says. "But what winds up happening is that business has no stake in the game. It's really easy for them to write up a change request with no concept of how much work it will take. Incorporating them into the process gives them an appreciation for what IT folks are doing."
   
    
2. Find ways to reframe impossible tasks One of the biggest complaints from IT employees is that they are assigned to "death march" projects, which require them to sacrifice their home lives, sleep and even health in order to complete Herculean tasks with impossible deadlines. Even in hard times, it's imperative to address these issues up front with business contacts. "We're professionals, and we have to push back when we're given impossible demands," Glen says.
   
   But, he adds, the mistake many IT managers make is to get stuck in the "binary" viewpoint that completing a project on deadline is either possible or impossible. Instead, if time or resources are cut, look for ways to reconfigure the project so that it will still work, he advises. "If your boss moves up a deadline for project completion, a good response is, 'I'm going to come back to you with a list of features for the project, and let's set priorities so we can select some features to leave out until the next generation,'" he says.
   
    
3. Cultivate a business focus "It's a lot easier to justify budgets when you can communicate and show business value," Aubel explains. He advises getting the entire IT staff as focused on business and familiar with business terms as possible. That strategy, he says, can forestall budget cuts and help avoid "death march" projects. "In my experience, if the IT person can speak the language of business, and explain the technology without using techie buzzwords, I've never found an unreasonable business person."
   
    

Help Tech Staff Find Rewards in Their Work
The best way to avoid tech flameout is to keep IT staff engaged with and enthusiastic about their jobs. Here are some strategies that can help:

1. Create a sense of vision "Morale is generally very much in tune with the actual situation in a department," Aubel says. "So if there's a lack of vision, it's hard to motivate your team."
   
   In bad times, he says, coming together around a strong vision for your department can get everyone focused on the job at hand rather than the uncertain future.
   
   "Create a business-focused vision, show them how valuable they are to the business," he says. And if you already have a vision, "It's time to turn it up a notch."
   
    
2. Use careful planning to work smarter, not harder Planning in software development can save untold hours of work and turn impossible projects into manageable ones, Aubel says. "On one project I got involved with, the team was working 10-to-12-hour days every day, often including Saturdays and Sundays," he says. "They'd been doing that for six months."
   
   The problem, he discovered, was more than 1,200 change requests, nearly all of them caused by defects in the code.
   
   "I said, let's stop here, and make a six-month plan," Aubel recalls. "We did that, carved it up into deliverables, and defects fell by about 95%. All we'd done is spend more of our time designing and planning rather than coding. Planning and design work are often viewed as obstacles to getting things done -- and they're really enablers."
   
    
3. Listen to what tech people want "We have something called the Solutions and Leadership Delivery Forum, which is an avenue for tech people to be heard," says Denise Messineo, senior vice president of human resources at Dimension Data, provider of outsourced tech services.
   
   The forum is an opt-in group of tech employees that meets once or twice a month and addresses problems or opportunities for tech people at the company. As a result of the forum's recommendations, for instance, Dimension Data now uses unified communications to help keep everyone in touch and able to remotely join meetings when they're away from the office.
   
   The forum also helped create a reward system for tech employees, basically redesigning the whole compensation scheme for these employees and adding a technology recognition program, with an incentive trip for the three highest achievers.
   
   "It's not very often that you get to have input into how you will be compensated," Messineo says. "That was huge -- and risky for us."
   
   But, she says, it was important for the company to follow through on its commitment to listen to tech employees' input. And the strategy paid off: Dimension Data has a voluntary turnover rate of less than 10%, in an industry where 15% to 16% is the norm.
   
    

Ultimately, Glen says, "Tech people want four things: interesting work, good relationships in the workplace, the sense that they're being paid fairly and the prospect that the future holds more of the same."

In uncertain times, it may be tough to offer assurances about the fourth item on that list, he says, but a thoughtful tech leader can provide the other three.

Minda Zetlin is a business/technology writer and co-author of The Geek Gap: Why Business and Technology Professionals Don't Understand Each Other and Why They Need Each Other to Survive.