“No matter what accomplishments you achieve, somebody helped you.”
-Althea Gibson
Have you taken time lately to look around your company for the helpers who are quietly building your company? Is your company a place where employees are thanked and rewarded for above-and-beyond service or do your employees often burn out and quit?
There are many reasons why it’s a good idea to recognize the hard work and innovative ideas of your employees.
- Giving employees gifts, thanks, travel incentives, and recognition in the workplace builds loyalty.
- If your company shows appreciation for employees, there’s less turnover, less work for HR, less time wasted in retraining, and lower overhead overall.
- Showing thanks and appreciation is good karma; it builds a positive, results-oriented workplace and that will show to your customers.
- A negative, critical, or degrading work environment will show to your clients and customers, in the way they are treated. This will eventually hurt your company, or at least drive away the positive, upbeat, and more affluent customers. Bottom line: you’ll end up keeping the whiners and you’ll lose the easy to deal with customers.
- It’s tax deductible. Any costs or expenses that are directly related to your business (including employee recognition, travel perks, company cars, and most gifts) are deductible expenses. Please check with your tax team or accountant for exact details about allowable business expenses in your country.
One of the top reasons people quit their jobs is because they aren’t being recognized for their hard work and they want to go somewhere where their contribution will make an impact; sometimes, having employees resign and take another job is a good thing. You want fresh new faces and new ideas occasionally. People tend to get into a rut if they go to the same job every day for 40 years. The enthusiasm can diminish and innovation can decline. But if you have too much turnover, that creates problems, too. The cost of hiring and training a new team are very real; the decline in productivity during high periods of employee attrition has been studied by scientists for years. Often, having high numbers of employees quit is an indication that something’s not right. If pay scale and working environment are good, but you still have a lot of employee attrition, it might just be due to lack of recognition in the workplace.
So where should one start? What’s the best way to begin a new culture of employee appreciation in the workplace? Start by just saying thank you and showing respect to all employees. Ask managers to come up with ideas for perks, incentives, and employee gifts. Start simple, if you like, by taking the team to lunch one day or letting everyone go home half an hour early on a Friday afternoon. As you get to know your employees better, you’ll have more of an idea for which incentives work in your company.
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