Posts tagged Employee retention

No Tricks, Just Treats! The Recognition Your Employees Value Most

Trick or Treat? Well, that’s a dumb question. Who wouldn’t want the treat? Your employees included. Everyone wants to feel appreciated and receive a simple thanks or a pat on the back. But how are we as organizations recognizing our employees’ efforts? Forbes just completed an extensive study to evaluate employee recognition, and this Halloween, we wanted to share a few “treats” that are especially effective in thanking and engaging employees.

Employee recognition is a $46 billion market, which focuses mainly on thank-you awards, pins, plaques, etc.  Of the programs evaluated, 87% focus on tenure … people get rewarded simply for sticking around. Forbes found that most of these tenure-based rewards systems have virtually no impact on organizational performance. They did however find programs that were able to impact business performance – namely 31% lower turnover rates! A well designed program can achieve great results – here are five best-practices Forbes’ identifies:

  1. Recognize people based on specific results and behaviors.
  2. Implement peer to peer recognition – not top down.
  3. Share recognition stories.
  4. Make recognition easy and frequent.
  5. Tie recognition to your own company values or goals.

When your company embraces a modern recognition program and people start thanking each other, trust and engagement go up – improving employee morale, quality, and customer service. It’s good management and good business.

For more information about the Forbes study and results, click here.

Keeping Your Talent in Your Company

You’ve spent significant time and money hiring and training good employees. Now how do you keep them? If you are happy to have them, your competition would be too, especially since you made the initial and often costly investments of taking them from the “maybe” group to the “proven” stage.

Before you look up to see your treasured performer standing in front of you with resignation in hand you may want to ask yourself a few serious questions.

1. Would I want to work for me?
2. Do my employees feel appreciated?
3. Am I paying enough?
4. Do the people here feel they are part of a community?
5. Do my people feel they make a difference?
6. Are my employees proud to be part of my organization?
7. Would I want to work in this environment?
8. Does everyone here believe they have a future?
9. What am I not seeing?
10.Is the existing orientation process working?

People that are thrown into unfamiliar situations without clear expectations and understanding may never even begin the process of becoming part of your company.

Many times we fall into the rut of thinking that the way things worked yesterday will be fine for tomorrow. Meanwhile the people that want to take our spot in the marketplace are searching high and low for that added edge. Keeping the people we need to perform our tasks at maximum efficiency may be as easy as asking ourselves, “What would keep me here?”