Recognizing Your Biggest Asset - Your Employees.

Employee experience is important. Employees are the lifeblood of a company - not only do your employees inform your culture and your values, but companies with great employee experience also report mirrored customer experiences. According to  Harvard Business Review:

 “companies that excel at customer experience have one-and-and-half times as many engaged employees as customer experience laggards do.” 

Put simply, Engaged Employees = Engaged Customers. Engaged customers are essential for successful retention.

All too often the bottom line is the primary focus of companies, with the employees expected to fulfil their job description and receive a paycheck at the end of each month for their troubles. Unfortunately, the archaic mindset that “if you don’t want your job, someone else will” is still alive and well in corporate America. This tunnel thinking is flawed for several reasons, however let’s start with what matters most to companies who are guilty of seeing employees as simple cogs in the spoke – Revenue.

Gallup Reportreport found that although 87% of the total global workforce is not engaged, organizations with highly engaged employees outperform their peers by 147% in earnings.

In other words, employee engagement matters a whole lot.

According to recent reports recognition is more important to employees than pay rate. So where do companies go wrong with employee recognition??

Ignoring Departmental Contributions

Employees who feel valued will continue to work hard to impress leadership. Those who are not recognized as a contributor will eventually stop trying.If you want to beat the competition, or just stay afloat, you need to think of your organization as an organism. It can only operate successfully if every area (i.e. department) is properly taken care of and healthy. From administration to the finance team, no one department is more important than the next. Sales brings in revenue, but without a solid operations team, new accounts are lost, resulting in further expenses in marketing to replace lost revenues from lost accounts. Each section of your company should be acknowledged for their specific efforts and made feel like they are an important part of business process- because they are important! While marketing may build your brand recognition and result in increased leads, without payroll no one receives their paycheck. Ask any employee and they will agree that their paycheck is a top priority for them. All departments contribute to revenue flow one way or another, after all each department of your company is required to operate. 

Ignoring the individual

Just as each department requires recognition, it is important that individuals feel as though they are important to the company. In some departments all achievements will be a group effort, however this does not mean that individuals should be lumped into one category and not seen as an independent and important member of the business. Birthdays and anniversaries are a great chance for one person to stand in the limelight and be recognized separately. For one day, it’s their day. Even if the work day goes along as usual, with the same start time and stop time, and the same work, the day feels different when an employee birthday or anniversary is being celebrated. An employee birthday card or anniversary card might be passed around for everyone to sign. Other team members might stay late the night before or come in early to decorate the honoree’s office or workspace. 

The power isn’t in how the event if observed – it’s in the fact that it is being celebrated at all.

When employee’s special days are ignored, the employee is left feeling like a cog in the machine. They begin to feel that they are not valued as an individual, but only as a tool for producing output. And that can send morale and commitment plummeting. 

That could lead to increased employee absenteeism, declining productivity, or even your best employees looking for a more welcoming workplace somewhere else.

The Takeaway

Your employees are your number one asset and taking care of them to make sure they’re happy, engaged and effective requires implementing strategies that have already worked well in areas like customer experience. When you train your employees with care, treat them well, and actually listen to what they have to say, they’ll become loyal and fight for your shared goal until the end. As Sir Richard Branson puts it, 

“Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.”