Make Their Day Blog

A few months ago, I wondered,”Is the economy affecting employees’ sense of being valued?”
For the past two years employees have coped with a lack of raises, reduction in benefits, and increased workload. I wondered, was this having an effect?

People who don’t feel valued aren’t usually engaged or motivated, so knowing the affect of economic changes on sense of value is important information for companies struggling to stay productive.

So I conducted a survey that asked:

“Do you feel more or less valued than a year ago?”

The largest percentage (42%) of respondents said they feel less valued than they did one year ago. In contrast 31 percent reported no change and 28 percent said they feel more valued. Given the circumstances in most organizations: cutbacks, downsizing, extreme budgeting, it doesn’t seem surprising that people might feel less valued than they did a year ago.

What you might find surprising is why they feel less valued.

The most sited cause of significant change in the way they feel was not pay, benefits, or work overload. It was the behavior of the manager or supervisor (49%)!

It always seems to come down to the relationship of the individual to the manager. People can tolerate just about anything but a manager who doesn’t seem to care.

To see the results of this survey click here.

A new article was posted on the Inc Magazine website on the subject of How to Reward Employees on a Budget. Read it and then let me know what you would add to the list!

An article in the Wall Street Journal online offers three ways to motivate recession-weary staff: ask for input, offer cross-training, and assist with family matters. These are all good ways to communicate staff value, but when you are talking about motivating the weary, there is an important ingredient missing, and that is FUN.

People need to laugh, or at least smile, at work. It reduces stress and increases cooperation. It is good for business.

How can you lighten up?

1) Give out a silly award. Get something cheap: an eight-ball, a wrench, a jar of peanut butter. Endow it with meaning: looking ahead, mistake of the week, smooth handling of a sticky situation. Keep it light-hearted. If you go with something like the mistake of the week, give yourself the first award.

2) Have a crazy contest: office miniature golf tournament, who can build the biggest house of cards in 5 minutes, or the ugliest pet contest.

3) Have a competition that relates to work and make the prizes fun: customer service contest between departments or branches with toy giraffes for the winners (sticking your neck out for great service), or a competition with previous results (production rate, error rate, safety record, increase in sales) and celebrate any win with a pizza party.

4) Add a touch of fun to your meetings: put a bit of humor in your PowerPoint, take a moment to play “something no one here knows about me is,” put toys on the table for people to fiddle with throughout the meeting.

When your routine is beginning to wear on your team, break with routine. Do something out of the ordinary. If your are afraid that people won’t like it, remember, even groans build energy.  Put some squishy stress balls on the table. Tell people that if they don’t like your humor, they can throw the ball at you. You will be surprised by the number of smiles you can generate in just a few minutes.

Now it is your turn. Tell us how you lighten up at work!

Copyright 2010 Cindy Ventrice

A new survey by CareerBuilder, released yesterday, has found that 23 percent of employers believe that morale in their organizations is low.  No surprise here.

Workers stated that low morale was due to heavier workloads and longer hours. Again, no surprise.

The study also found that more employers are turning to employee recognition to help the situation. This could be good news. Great employee recognition can help give a boost to morale, particularly if employers can demonstrate that they really do value employees. Long term though, recognition is built on respect, so when the economic reality changes, if work conditions don’t change with it, recognition programs will no longer work.

There were another part of the study that I found interesting. Thirty-eight percent of workers felt there was favoritism at work. When asked what that favoritism looked like they identified many factors. Here I will focus on just a few.

They believed that favored workers/departments receive:

• More recognition by senior leaders (P/A)
• More flexibility (R)
• Greater career advancement opportunities (O)
• More training and leadership development opportunities (O)

For those that are familiar with PORT and the four elements of recognition, I have attached the corresponding letter to each of these complaints. For those that are unfamiliar, PORT stands for Praise, Opportunity, Respect, and Thanks or appreciation. You can learn a bit more here. PORT — the elements of meaningful recognition that are laid it in detail in Make Their Day! Employee Recognition That Works and Recognition Strategies That Work. I have attached an R to flexibility because it equates with trust. Many of the items I left off the list would also have an R assigned. In fact fairness, would be tagged with an R. Lack of fairness, overall, is seen as disrespect. And disrespect is the greatest driver of poor morale.

The best way to improve morale is to focus on creating a respectful environment: honest, fair, and concerned with employee well-being. What do you think? Are these impossible goals given the economy?

As Thanksgiving in the U.S. approaches I can think of no better time to reflect on the value of telling employees that they are valued.

Readers of Make Their Day! Employee Recognition That Works are aware that there are  four elements of meaningful recognition.  The acronym PORT stands for Praise, Opportunity, Respect, and Thanks or Appreciation.

Many of us say “Thank you” all the time. It is as much a habit as “Hi. How are you?” But habitual thanks aren’t the kind of appreciation I am thinking about. I am thinking about - the kind that is firmly grounded in gratitude.

Try this exercise:

Make a list of ten people you work with, for, or report to you. For each person on your list write down what it is about him or her that you rely on. Is it a certain skill set? An attitude? A behavior? How do these traits make your life better/easier? Got it? Then you’ve got gratitude. You can turn this into meaningful appreciation by communicating it. Put it in a note card, on a bulletin board, in an email - the medium isn’t critical, but the message is!

Employee recognition doesn’t have to be costly. In the past, I explained the value of symbolic awards and offered tips for using these as inexpensive and impactful awards for recognizing employees.

I am always on the lookout for clever ideas and reader Kellee Joost has an idea to share. She uses a cheese grater to send the message:

Thanks for contributing to the “grater” good of the Company.

The pun may make you laugh or groan, but the message will stick!

What symbolic awards come to mind for you?

All the best, Cindy

Whether I am being asked to speak or consult on employee recognition a comment that I often hear is, “I don’t know if the Make Their Day philosophy of recognition will work here. Our organization is unique.”

No one else has exactly the same challenges. No one has the same difficult people to cope with as your organization. Maybe your organization is really small or maybe it is behemoth. So yes, it is different… and yet for every way in which it is unique there are several more ways in which it is very much the same as every other.

Let’s look at a few “unique” organizational characteristics:

• Our managers are too busy to give recognition. It amazes me that anyone believes that this is unique. Yes, managers are busy, but they are busy everywhere. And yet, there are managers who manage to recognize very effectively anyway.
• We have a unique mission/mandate. Great! Leverage that, but don’t let it be any excuse to not take action. Employees still need recognition.
• We have a union. Or maybe restrictions have been put in place by the government or some other agency. Restrictions can affect the form recognition takes, but never does it eliminate the ability to give the most meaningful, basic forms of recognition.
• We are going through some big changes right now. Everyone is going through big changes and probably will be for a long time to come. There are few better reasons to give recognition than the ability to see people tough times.
• All our people care about are raises and promotions. If this were true, your organization would truly be unique. You see, employees often say that money is what they want. For one thing, they have been trained to think that way. But recognition is something different and employees everywhere want it - no exceptions!
• We don’t have the budget. Very few organizations do right now. It is getting a bit easier to find a few dollars, but overall recognition needs to be free right now. And frankly that is just fine, because you don’t have to spend anything.

There are probably dozens more reasons why an organization might be an exception. What other reasons have you heard for why recognition won’t work?

I’ve been digging through some old posts that many readers of this employee recognition blog have never seen. Some are important enough that I want to draw them to your attention, especially when they offer low-cost ways to improve morale. This is one I hope you’ll read:

The Respect Filter

Are you familiar with the concept of the respect filter? The idea is that employees view what you do through a lense that is shaded according to the kind of relationship that you share. When the relationship is good they wear rose-colored glasses, and that is a good thing!

Kirsten Smith of the provincial government of British Columbia maintains a “Thank You” binder.  Her staff loves it enough that they wanted to share the practice with other parts of the organization. They sent  the following note to be posted on their internal website:

“Manager, Kirsten Smith shows recognition to her staff by keeping and maintaining a “Thank You” binder that holds all the comments and emails about her staff, thanking them for all their hard work or help, etc. At each staff meeting she pulls out the “Thank You” binder and reads out loud all the thank you notes or comments she’d received since the previous meeting. I know Kirsten believes that informal recognition is extremely important in fostering pride, but can often be overlooked and that this type of recognition supports an employee’s identification with the organization and its mission and is a simple and powerful way to strengthen, encourage and reinforce all of the behaviours that are necessary for an organization to achieve success. ”

A manager getting recognition for being good at recognition! Staff that wants to share her best practices. I think that is pretty fantastic!

Yesterday, CareerBuilder.com posted the results of a recent survey.

They reported that those who were laid off in the past twelve months showed a strong preference for working for a small business. After job growth potential, the reasons given  included:

• A family-like work environment (56%),

• More employee recognition (49%),

• A sense that you can make a difference (48%), and

• An absence of corporate red tape (46%).

What I find interesting  isn’t that employee recognition appears on the list, but how all the listed reasons relate to the kind of employee recognition that I write about in Make Their Day! The key message of the book being that everything that contributes to an employee’s sense of visibility and value adds to their feeling of being recognized.

Let’s look at each of their reasons for preferring a small company in a bit more detail:

A family-like work environment. No one expects to feel invisible in a family or a small company. The expectation is that in a small company everybody knows and supports each other. People believe they will be more than a cog in a big machine. The assumption is that in a small company people are valued for who they are as much as what they do.

More employee recognition. When potential employees expect more recognition from a small company they certainly aren’t expecting more big incentives and awards. They anticipate being “seen” for what they accomplish in a much more meaningful way. I honestly don’t know why this is the case. I haven’t found that supervisors in small companies are any more accomplished at providing recognition. I have to think it goes back to the inherent forms of recognition found in the other three reasons for the small company preference.

A sense that you can make a difference. Throw a pebble in a pond and you see the ripples. Throw it in the ocean and, well… nothing much seems to happen. It is the same with big company versus small. Unless a manager takes on the responsibility for connecting the dots from an employee’s actions to corporate goals, employees in a big company tend to feel inconsequential and not very valuable.

An absence of corporate red tape. Bureaucracy sends a powerful message. That message is  “we have to regulate everything because we don’t trust you.” Being trusted and respected is a key component of feeling valued and recognized.

This careerbuilder.com survey tells us a great deal about the work environment that people find most motivating and luckily for the large company, it can be replicated by great managers and organizations of all sizes.

Cindy Ventrice