Did you know that feeling unappreciated in the work place is one of the main reasons people leave?
I’m not saying you have to constantly be praising your employees but it’s important to engage with your team on a happy, positive level and not just a negative one.
By providing them with a little thanks and praise, could be the difference between your staff under-performing, to performing, and in most cases over performing. People love to have their confidence built up and have a sense of feeling valued. If they can see their efforts aren’t going unnoticed, you’ll often find that they will put in more effort as an effect of this.
Why not implement your own strategies to allow other employees to be able to recognise their own teammates efforts? Rewards are a proven way of improving engagement and retaining staff. By doing this, you’ll be able to still focus on the KPIs and money-making tasks of your business, whilst allowing everyone else to help build and boost morale and engagement for you.
Being a manager often means you don’t always see all the great things people are doing in the work place and can quite often lead to a case of you quickly becoming the ‘negative’ person as you only ever deliver the bad feedback. By implementing a simple ‘Star of the week’ method, you’ll be able to keep on top of the good things that are being done. By giving your employees the power to nominate each other will boost their morale and push them to work harder in the hope that they too, will get noticed by their teammates and gain a nomination.
The concept is simple:
You have a locked box, 1 per team. You can either do a star of the week, or star of the month — you decide what you feel would work best for your company. Send out an email announcing the new award that is up for grabs — Headline could be: Hard work, nominations, recognition — create some intrigue amongst your staff. Outline the rules within the email (everyone must vote, all nominations to be hand written and put into the box etc), make the email positive, use pictures and bright coloured text to draw in their attention and get buy in from the team. What’s in it for them, why are you doing this? Make it exciting! Perhaps chuck in some small prizes too, so those not seeking praise can still get involved by potentially winning a prize.
What are the benefits of having happy staff in your organization?
Better production, accuracy and creativity
If people enjoy their job and working environment, then they are more likely to produce high levels of accurate and creative work. This benefits the manager by allowing them to achieve more department or business objectives. Along with benefiting the employee by allowing them to have increased promotions and opportunities.
Job satisfaction
Having a job that feels like you are valued and what you are doing is making a difference due to your hard work, will make the individual feel like what they are doing is worthwhile. If you ask your employees what makes them come to work each day, I’m certain there would be a large percentage of which that would say that job satisfaction is a contributing factor to this. Nobody wants to be bored at work.
Employee happiness
Happy, healthy employees = motivated employees = better performing employees = profit for your business. A positive employee will be able to show the benefits first hand to other employees that their hard work does get noticed and in turn they should want to follow in their footsteps. Not to mention the better working environment, happiness creates, avoiding toxicity.
Retention and loyalty
When a company has a high turnover rate, it can often lead to poor morale amongst those who are still working within the business. However, poor morale could end up pushing others to look for jobs elsewhere too. I’m fairly certain I don’t need to go into what it costs to find and train new staff members — retaining staff should be a priority. Therefore, rewarding and praising your staff helps to better retention and loyalty amongst your staff.
Team culture
By implementing something as simple as a ‘Star of the week/month’ reward scheme and ultimately putting the nominations in the hands of their peers will help to create a better team culture as most employees like to feel valued by the people they work so closely with every day. It will help to give them a sense of empowerment, build confidence and should mean they want to continue working hard in the hope they will generate more nominations from their team mates.
If you don’t feel that this would work for you, why don’t you try popping a post it note on your employees’ desk with something that you have noticed about their work to give them a boost on a Monday morning? Starting the week with a bit of ‘Monday Motivation’ should help keep them focused for the week. There’s also something very thoughtful about a hand-written note for them to keep and refer back to.
See how having happy, healthy staff could help your business by looking at our ROI Calculator.
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