Retain Top Talent

Many of my clients are at a non-existent to minor use of employee recognition to drive motivation and productivity. Here is a great framework and some creative ideas to executive on employee recognition. Which of these ideas is most relevant for your organization?

What a great story that reflects praise, gratitude, appreciation, and recognition. A letter to the parents. Duh! Why haven't I thought of that as a tactic around motivation? How many of you have written a note to an employee's parents?

My experience of consulting with hundreds of companies on an annual basis for the past 30 years is that very few companies have an effective and robust non-monetary reward/recognition program covering such topics as praise, fun achievement awards, learning and development.

Although it's not possible to motivate employees, you can create an environment for self-motivation by showing your employees that you care and are appreciative when they knock it out of the park or act as a role-model in demonstrating one of your core values. Not having a robust program to show appreciation and gratitude means that your employees will not be motivated to do anything beyond the minimum expectation you tolerate to allow them to keep their jobs. How depressing!

I wanted to slap myself in the forehead after reading this article. Of course, the mission statement is critical to success. It's one of core elements of culture, focusing employees, and gaining alignment around employee motivation and the purpose of your organization.

How strong is your mission statement? Is it a difference maker in hiring and retention?

Very few companies do a great job recognizing and rewarding individual and team performance. I liked this article because it reinforces some very simple ideas about recognition.

If you're recognizing outstanding performance, why would your employees continue to go above and beyond the call of duty for you?

I've been exploring how gamification might work in areas like referrals, but had not yet considered it around employee engagement and recognition.

I'm curious if anyone has started to use gamification on the retention side vs. hiring side?

Struggling to think of ways to recognize your employees? Here are 20 great ideas. Pick one to start changing your culture and showing your employees how much you appreciate them.

I've been talking about this idea for years - great leaders show their appreciation, gratitude, and caring toward their teams and employees.

Not having gratitude and appreciation as part of your core values can be one of the reasons your best performers will be poached in the next year or two.

Fixing a culture where there is a lack of gratitude and appreciation is very simple - why don't more CEOs and Executives take action toward building it into the fabric of their organizations?

Is anyone conducting employee satisfaction or happiness research, surveys, studies in their organization? What tools are using and how effective are these in improving employee happiness? Check out this tool I stumbled across called Gusto - would love to hear your feedback on what looks like a SaaS approach to employee surveys

A large part of employee engagement and satisfaction is work that matters - employees derive a high value from what they do. Do you look closely at these issues for all jobs - particularly those on the front line?