Retain Top Talent

Although the example used in this article was about dissatisfaction among nurses not finding meaning in their work" the exact same issues affect your employees regardless of industry. Are you leveraging recognition and appreciation to motivate, engage, and help show employees how they matter to your success?

This is exactly what I am seeing over the last 6 months at many of my clients - a decline in employee engagement activities like celebrations, fun, team building, recognition, one-to-ones - all because your team members are out of sight - out of mind.

We should be doing the opposite - and reinvigorating our efforts around engagement, recognition, automony, development, training, coaching, mentoring - all the activities and initiatives that lead your employees to want to lean in and show discretionary effort like proactivity, initiative, doing more than asked, being inquisitive, problem solving VS. just trying to survive and do the minimum so they can stay on your payroll system.

I cannot stress enough the importance of a vibrant employee recognition and reward program. Here are some additional ideas to consider in recognition and rewards. Next to the lack of NOT defining success, a weak or non-existent recognition and rewards program is the secon reason you see a lack of engagement and productivity in your organization.

More statistics on the value of having a good employee engagement and recognition strategy and process.

"81% of employees say they’re motivated to work harder when their boss shows appreciation"

That by itself should be enough of an incentive to create a good program. Most companies recognition and engagement programs are either non-existent, left up to individual managers, or so superficial they border on useless.

Second most important element in driving productivity. We wonder as CEOs and senior execs why the productivity of the organization is so bad compared to where it should be.

When people don't feel engaged and appreciated, they give you the absolute rock bottom minimal level of effort that they think you'll tolerate without firing them. Shameful!

I liked the breakdown of different kinds of recognition - and opportunites to recognize your employees. The key is to put in place a rigorous system of recognition vs. a random process based on what each managers wants to do.

Almost all of my clients have some element of a recognition program in place. This article does a great job pointing out the mistakes and errors many employers make in launching or managing these programs.

Are you guilty of any of the recognition program mistakes or errors listed in the article?

I get this question a lot from my clients related to what are we measuring and how are we recognizing it in our people? Is it more about performance or behaviors?

Good article by BambooHR on the Dos and Don'ts of employee recognition. As I indicted earlier, many companies have just zoned out on the need to increase employee recognition, rewards, sensitivity, empathy during COVID. My argument is that we should all be doubling down to show how much we appreciate our employees.

Here's an interesting quiz on identifying where you are in having a systematic, structured, organized, planned approach to employee recognition.

Loved the Wall of Happy described in this article. The statistic that rocked me a little was the one about 4 out 5 employees indicated they would work harder if praised/patted on the back.