Contemporary research continually places the importance of employee engagement front and centre. The latest Gallup poll suggests that only 30% of the workforce feel engaged … blah, blah, blah … I know … we have all heard the statistics about the lack of engagement. So how do you grasp the nettle of poor engagement? How do you encourage employees without alienating them?
Recognising employees for a job well-done has a positive impact on individuals. It also has the ability to change the culture of an entire organisation for the better. Many companies have employee recognition programmes in place. However, a lack of clear objectives for these programmes can lead to poor implementation and disappointing results.
Yesterday we had the pleasure of announcing our newest Advisory Board Member J.C. Herrera, SVP Human Resources at Lithium Technologies. Last week I was speaking with J.C. about organizations and culture. He had some great perspectives on how companies can build the culture they want, and it all begins with listening. I'd like to take this opportunity to share some of J.C.'s thoughts:
Every day is a great day to appreciate and recognize your employees, however today is officially ‘that’ day. It originally started in North America and is the first Friday in March. While recognition can come in many forms, from hand written thank you cards to a peer-to-peer social recognition system, it’s important to keep a few things in mind. Here are 10 tips, courtesy of Saira Gangji from Elevated HR on how best to recognize your employees.
Social Recognition, while new to some, has already proved itself to be an effective and engaging recognition tool. It encourages individuals and teams to reach out to recognise one another for the great work they do.
A Social Recognition platform provides a toolkit, which can build meaningful relationships as well as supporting an organisation’s culture and values. It has the immediacy and reach not available to other forms of recognition. These are just some of the elements which make Social Recognition especially appealing for organisations to implement as it helps turn a work place into a great place to work.
Welcome to the world of Social Recognition!
Last month I was fortunate to be part of a Government of Canada Trade mission to the Philippines with the Honorable Federal Minister of Trade Ed Fast, Federal Senator Tobias Enverga Jr, Ambassador Neil Reeder and many other business delegates from the Canadian business sector.
Have you ever worked extremely hard on a project, or closed a difficult account and felt like an indestructible work machine with the soundtrack from Chariots of Fire rolling around your head as you stand a few inches taller around the water cooler? If so have you felt the reciprocal range of emotion as you are indirectly put back in your place by a lack lustre, inauthentic acknowledgement by your superior? You leave not only discouraged, but in many cases wanting to take your awesomeness to an employer that values you and your contributions…because damnit, YOU deserve it!
We were at the Motivate Europe Live Conference in April and there were a lot of ideas and talk around how best to improve employee engagement. We believe the answer is about humanizing work with more social tools.
The way we work and the digital tools we use are going to more closely resemble the tools we use in our everyday lives. Lets face it, most platforms and systems in the work place for communication, administration and Human Resources are nowhere near as elegant, compelling or easy to use as our personal tools or Apps.
The team at Kudos has definitely been busy. Companies all over the world are quickly realizing just how much employee recognition matters, and they’re getting their teams engaged on Kudos. A growing Kudos universe meant it was also time to grow our language offering. While Kudos was all already offering an employee recognition product in English, French and Spanish, we’re now in use in over 80 countries and we’ve added five more languages, with more on the way, to keep recognition expanding to progressive organization across the globe.
We’ve done some digging to see what some of the organizations who do employee engagement right have to say. The likes of Sir Richard Branson definitely have sage advice on creating an energized and excited team of people. While there a lot of different ways to do it, leaders the world over agree that a well thought-out employee engagement strategy does the trick.
Since 1995, the first Friday in March has been dedicated to Employee Appreciation Day, and this year it falls on March 6. If you’re using Kudos, you know that effective employee recognition is a 365 practice, which is all the more reason to make a splash! When recognition already plays a big part in your culture on a daily basis, going over and above on Employee Appreciation Day shows your organization’s depth of commitment. Excited to celebrate? Let’s get this employee appreciation party started!
Oh no…another employee recognition program?! Negative emotions can run high in some organizations around these types of new program initiatives. The main questions are: How do you avoid this reaction? And how can you maximize the adoption of your new initiative?
