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3 simple acts of reward that will transform your company culture
So, how do you go about transforming your company culture and start incorporating acts of recognition into your company’s daily routine? Here are our 3 top tips:
- Remember and acknowledge personal milestones
Your employees are highly likely to reach a number of personal milestones while working with you, so a good way to show them that they’re appreciated is to acknowledge these events when they do happen. From birthdays, work anniversaries and engagements, to moving house, getting married and having children, there are a number of life events worth acknowledging in the workplace.
You can identify the key milestones/events that deserve acknowledgement for yourself, the point is that you do so. Taking the time to recognise these things demonstrates to your employees that you care about them as a human being. You don’t even have to organise a grand gesture; a straightforward verbal or written acknowledgement is a step in the right direction and will make a huge difference because your employees will feel like a valued individual within your business. - Be flexible
A good work/life balance is really important and is often facilitated by businesses through a flexible working culture. Whether it’s allowing employees to work remotely, or giving them the option to have flexible hours, allowing employees to comfortably fit work around their lives gives them the gift of balance and shows that you care about their wellbeing.
Adopting a flexible workplace culture can be considered as a form of employee recognition, because it shows that you trust, value and appreciate employees enough to reduce the control you have over their working patterns. Giving them that freedom and opportunity to work in a more convenient way for them shows that you, as a business, respect their individual needs and understand that they have a life outside of work.
Businesses with flexible working cultures tend to have lower stress levels among their employees too. For example, flexible hours can be used by employees to avoid rush hour and the subsequent pain-staking commute to work. In addition, employees can also use flexible working to work remotely if they need to be at home for any reason. Being flexible is therefore a positive indication that you appreciate your employees and will go a long way. - Reward achievements
Rewards also go a long way in the work place and significantly indicate appreciation. Whether it’s a bottle of champagne, a box of chocolates or a duvet day, giving your employees something that represents your appreciation is powerful because it provides them with a reminder that their achievements are recognised and valued.
You could do this when an employee reaches a sales target, or when an employee goes above and beyond for a customer – whatever you consider an achievement, reward your employees.
Making your gifts personal to the employee takes this one step further, so if you want your acts of appreciation to have maximum impact, consider how you could tailor them to their personal interests. This can become complex when you consider the logistical and administrative side of things. It’s not always easy to give personal rewards to every single employee, all the time. That’s why reward and recognition platforms are valuable. They automate and streamline the reward process and will allow you to reward achievements in a way that actually means something to your employees.
With this in mind, you could even develop the notion of rewarding achievements into a reward strategy. This way, you can use these rewards to praise positive behaviour that is aligned to your company’s values. For example, one of our values is “Collaboration”, so when someone from our team displays a good example of collaboration, we recognise and reward them. Rewards don’t have to be physical objects either, you could use a points-based system like we do at peoplevalue. We reward our employees with points which they can then ‘spend’ on a product of their choice from our reward catalogue.
The overarching point here is that employees deserve to feel appreciated. These three key tips are an excellent starting point, but a strong embedded culture of recognition is far more powerful.
This article is provided by peoplevalue.
In partnership with peoplevalue – The Employee Engagement Company
We are a leading provider of employee reward&recognition, benefits delivery&wellbeing solutions.
