Category: Business

Whether you’re just starting or are a seasoned entrepreneur, “Inside Business” provides you with advice and best practices to help you better manage your business. In this story, experts review the benefits of employee appreciation with tips on how to express recognition.

It may sound cliché, but your employees are your most precious asset. Accordingly, you want them to be happy, productive, and stay with your firm. Showing your employees that you appreciate them will go a long way in achieving these objectives.

Employee appreciation — also known as employee recognition or employee gratitude — is about valuing people for their contributions and letting them know it. One can express it in many ways, from something as simple as a heartfelt “thank you” to gifts like flowers, chocolate, or gift cards.

The benefits of showing employee appreciation

Employees who know they’re appreciated tend to be happier, more creative, and better team players. At least that has been the experience of Jamie Barnes, owner and strategy communicator of 981 Communications, a human resources communications consulting firm in Chicago. “They’ll bring more energy, interest, and enthusiasm to the work,” she explains. “This benefits the employer because happy employees create happy customers.”

Simple acknowledgment makes workers feel valued, which promotes feelings of positivity in the workplace. “It is important to recognize employees now more than ever,” says Virginia Pagan, coordinator, human resources and benefits at 1-800-FLOWERS.com, Inc. “Right now employees are looking for an indication that their work is meaningful and that their organization values and appreciates them.”

Pagan notes that employee appreciation day is a perfect opportunity to show them they are valued. Sending them a gift for this special day that reflects their personal interests are the small details that show a company understands the core personality of their employees.

Go for high engagement

Conversely, not feeling appreciated or connected to the organizational culture breeds disengagement and discontent, which begets a negative cycle. “When employees are not engaged, they’re not in a flow state or producing effectively, both of which drive profitability,” says Angela Heyroth, founder and principal of Denver-based Talent Lifecycle Designs, a boutique HR consulting firm specializing in the design of custom employee experience programs.

In the worst-case scenario, valuable employees who do not feel appreciated will leave the firm. “One thing the pandemic has taught us is that feeling connected and valued is of primary importance to people,” Heyroth continues. In her experience, underappreciated employees of the past got frustrated or became less engaged in their work. “Now they’re just leaving, sometimes without having another job to go to,” she says.

Getting the most from your employee appreciation efforts

More companies are beginning to realize that showing gratitude involves much more than celebrating the annual Employee Appreciation Day in early March. With greater frequency, they’re allocating budgets to develop formal employee appreciation plans and programs.

According to one study, companies with a strategic employee recognition program reported more than 71 percent higher engagement levels among their staff than companies without such a program. For a few reasons, managers may prefer to work with a consultant to develop an employee appreciation strategy. One is objectivity. “Sometimes it takes an outsider perspective to identify the company values and culture and design the employee appreciation program to align with these,” Heyroth explains.

The other lies in the interest of saving time. “As an internal employee, you’re focused on keeping the company moving and don’t always have time to step back from other priorities and design a program,” says Heyroth. “Having someone come in whose sole task is to create that employee appreciation plan lets the HR manager keep the core foundational HR elements running seamlessly.”

Even without generous budgets and resources to dedicate to formal employee appreciation programs, employers can still get on board. There are many no-cost or low-cost initiatives, such as a sincere verbal or written thank you, that can go a long way to engender trust, motivation, and goodwill.

Regardless of what you choose to do, making appreciation part of the culture is critical. It will consistently show employees that you recognize their value to the company’s success.

Aligning recognition with what matters

Which employee rewards should you offer? Well, there’s probably not much merit to gifting free baseball tickets to someone who is not a sports fan. On the other hand, that same person might welcome a free subscription to his or her favorite magazine. “One way to deal with this challenge is to let people pick their own rewards from several options you’re offering,” says Heyroth.

Feeling appreciated has its rewards

Successful appreciation programs are built to recognize and reward employees at various levels. “Spot rewards—a small but tangible gift, such as a cup of coffee or lunch—should be common and easily distributed,” says Barnes. “This can fuel momentum when a project gets tough,” she says

Social recognition also normalizes a culture of celebrating successes. “A fellow employee compliments another, a manager publicly recognizes someone, or a public post is made— these all allow an employee to share their pride and accomplishment with the community and can contribute reputation building,” says Barnes. And finally, more significant rewards can recognize and award tremendous efforts. “These can be a bonus, extra time off, or other appropriate gifts,” she says.

The right gesture, wrong token

There are also specific actions that managers should avoid. “One of the worst mistakes I’ve seen is where companies obtain a rash of gift cards and hand them out at their discretion to employees for every little thing,” says Heyroth. “They mean well, which is admirable, but if the value of what the employee did doesn’t correlate to the value of the reward, the recognition loses all sense of purpose to the employee,” she says.

Ultimately, to feel appreciated is a basic human need. Meeting this need in your employees can yield high dividends to the company. Heyroth sums it up nicely: “At the end of the day, letting someone know they are valued is a small thing that can make a huge positive change in the effort they give you, and isn’t that what we’re all after?”

Whether you’re just starting out or are a seasoned entrepreneur, “Inside Business” provides you with advice and best practices to help you better manage your business. This article offers tips on how to reinvigorate workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts.

Companies have rushed to declare their commitment to workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), but despite some progress, many can still do more. Disability:IN, a nonprofit organization, determined that in 2020, 86 percent of companies measured on its Disability Equality Index had an employee resource group specifically for people with disabilities, but only 32 percent of those have hiring targets for people with disabilities.

Likewise, the gender pay gap in 2020 remained consistent with that of years past, with women earning 84 percent of what men earn. Last year white men were also one of the few groups to increase in representation as they climbed the corporate ladder; men of color, white women, and especially women of color all saw massive decreases as white male rankings increased.

There is hope. Organizations will continue to make progress in DEI, say Stacey Gordon, CEO of professional DEI counseling company Rework Work, and Dr. Sabrina Volpone, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder specializing in diversity and identity management in the workplace. After all, it’s a competitive disadvantage not to: Both experts believe companies that don’t take DEI seriously will witness an exodus of workers. In fact, one-third of job seekers reportedly won’t apply to companies that aren’t prioritizing these efforts.

With this in mind, it’s important to ensure that leaders continue to push progress forward. Here’s how.

Start with belonging

Diversity has become a catchall phrase for increasing representation and equality at work, but for lasting change, start with an inclusive mindset. “If you don’t have an inclusive culture, you can’t capture the diversity from within,” says Monika Kochar, CEO and co-founder of SmartGift, a leading corporate gifting platform. “Many companies do a lot of lip singing to actively promote DEI at the hiring stage, but they’re not following up through the life cycle of the employee’s time at work.” Understanding your employees’ needs and desires and recognizing and engaging them will give them a sense of belonging throughout the year.

Ask yourself why workplace diversity is important

The single most important thing you can do to improve DEI in your organization, says Gordon, is to take a good, hard look at yourself and your motivations. In other words, why do you want to diversify the workplace? Is it because you need to tick some boxes, or is it because you truly want to uplift historically underrepresented groups? And if it’s not for the second reason, why not? The most important thing is that your intentions come from a place of compassion and openness.

“For leaders to be able to embrace diversity and make it actionable in the workplace, they really have to internalize it,” Gordon says. “What I’m seeing is that when they don’t do that, it turns into an initiative that HR or the chief diversity officer or somebody ‘over there’ has to take care of. And when they do that, they’re going to have some short-term wins but they’re not going to have long-term sustainability.” 

When you remind yourself and your team that a diversity of perspective, background, and experience leads to better ideas, solutions, and more profits, it will fuel lasting effort and blow the doors open to access and opportunity.

Get personal with others

Relying on press releases from your organization or emails to reassure staff that the workplace is becoming more inclusive because you’re afraid to talk about DEI isn’t going to cut it. It’s vital that you get involved and have conversations with people about their own experiences in your workplace.

“Talking to your team, talking to your employees, creating that kind of culture or climate of ‘We’re going to talk about this’ is vital as a leader,” says Volpone. “If the organization is not doing much, the leader can still do a lot,” she adds. “And that impacts employees and how they react, to how engaged they are in the workplace and how committed they are to diversity at work.”

Ask questions that dig into each person’s point of view: What do you like about working here? What is most challenging? Is there anything that prevents you from doing your job to your best potential?

If managers are not willing to get vulnerable and personally put in the work to ensure that the people and environment they oversee benefit from DEI efforts, nobody will ever benefit, says Volpone. If employees don’t feel comfortable sharing, use anonymous pulse surveys throughout the year in which they can talk about their ongoing journey.

Put yourself in someone else’s shoes

One-size-fits-all solutions don’t breed inclusivity. In today’s business world, we often don’t consider other people’s situations and what they may be going through. Someone who is the first in their family to go to college and work in a corporate environment does not have the benefit of a passed-down playbook of how to get ahead at the office. Personalized learning plans, mentorship opportunities, or assigning an “office buddy” would set up this person for success.

It’s important that leaders invent new norms to better include groups already marginalized. For example, if you’re interviewing candidates for a position and you see a woman who is lacking a year of work from her résumé, it’s crucial to examine your own thought biases in response to that: Is she unreliable, or is it because she had to take on full-time child-care responsibilities at home? That’s the unconscious bias Volpone uses as an example to show how leaders and hiring managers can unknowingly cut off their own diverse workforce.

Likewise, next time you invite your employees out for drinks after work, think about how you might be excluding sober individuals and working parents. Suggests Volpone: “Doing things on lunch breaks can be a better idea.” Questioning norms and why you always doing things a certain way will help you make efforts to consciously implement DEI.

Allow others’ voices to be heard

Social movements are all about amplifying the voices of historically underrepresented groups, so when you shut someone down, you roll back your DEI efforts. Next time you’re given the opportunity to listen to those you lead, take it.

“Meetings are the place to start. They’re usually pretty frequent, and it is so common [as a woman] in every meeting just to be cut off or treated like a secretary,” says Volpone, who advises that leaders “make sure the meetings are good for everybody and that voices are heard.” You can do this by putting a system in place where everyone has at least five minutes to speak, or helping to amplify a speaker’s idea by reiterating it and adding, “That’s a great point, Jennifer. Are you saying ____? What do you think about this idea?”

From listening to how people feel when they’re at work to acknowledging and respecting team members’ experiences of harassment to letting people finish speaking in meetings, listening is vital to transforming your organization into one of inclusivity.

Julie Burton started a company at age 50, and she quickly learned how to run a business and become an expert at customer service. She operates ModernWell, a co-working space and collaborative membership community for women in Minneapolis. It’s home to writers, consultants, bankers, artists, lawyers, doctors, and even C-suite executives looking for community, connection, and inspiration.

“As I was building my business, my husband gave me great advice — always focus on taking care of your customers,” Julie says. Now she thinks about that every single day. “Building relationships with our members is the most important thing to me. I want our community to feel celebrated, appreciated, and valued,” she explains. “The biggest part of my job is to make sure this actually happens.”

From the very beginning, Julie strove to establish relationships with her customers. For example, she offers ModernWell members a welcome gift when they join, and she sends member appreciation gifts every year. She stepped it up even further during the COVID-19 pandemic, mailing handwritten notes of appreciation to members, each with a garnet pendant. “It’s part of offering exceptional customer service, which impacts customer satisfaction,” Julie explains.

Research shows that 68 percent of customers stop patronizing a company because they feel the business doesn’t care about them. This statistic underscores the critical role that customer appreciation plays in a company’s overall success.

Fostering customer appreciation means taking a proactive approach to building relationships and showing customers that you appreciate their business. In other words, a once-a-year Customer Appreciation Day just doesn’t cut it.

So why should you invest time and money in such efforts? And how do you show appreciation? We spoke with several business owners who shared their insights on the value of customer appreciation.

Build trust

When you show customers you care, they trust you as a credible source and know you will solve their problems. “Our clients know they’re appreciated, and when, heaven forbid, a snafu happens, they’re willing to overlook it because we’ve spent time cultivating a relationship with them over the years,” explains Kim Bode, owner of 8THIRTYFOUR Integrated Communications in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Boost loyalty

Allocating time and budget for customer appreciation pays dividends because it increases customers’ affinity for the company and maximizes loyalty, says Austin Cohen, founder and CEO of New York–based virtual training provider FlexIt. Karla Campos, founder and CEO of Social Media Sass Marketing in Port Richey, Florida, agrees. “In a world open for business 24/7, customers are receiving offers every time they open their phones,” she says. “What makes your company stand out from the rest? Sometimes showing a little appreciation is the reason people stay loyal.”

Create brand advocates

Customers who love you are more likely to recommend your brand to others, either through word-of-mouth or via social media or online reviews. Since people tend to trust their friends’ opinions, the personal shout-out “increases brand awareness and ultimately leads to new customers and a larger following,” Kim says. Austin agrees, adding, “Customers have shared our brand with their friends and family, and stayed loyal by booking more sessions following customer appreciation efforts.”

Develop long-term customer value

Research shows it costs more money to acquire a new client than to keep an existing one. Prof. Robert W. Palmatier of Baylor University’s Hankamer School of Business believes businesses should drive sales and growth by putting aside the numbers and “utilizing buyer emotions and perceptions to provide a more holistic, personalized purchase…to create stronger agent/client ties.” Kim echoes that: “I see a lot of my colleagues pour time and effort into acquiring new clients, forgetting those who have been loyal to them for years,” she says. “Existing clients are your best referral source, and they’ll grow with you if you focus on relationships.”

Improve employee morale

You might not realize that your customer appreciation efforts also affect employees, but showing your commitment to customers will in turn positively affect company morale. “Our team members see that FlexIt truly cares about our customers,” says Austin. “It gives our team pride and increased loyalty to be part of our organization.”

5 Simple Customer Appreciation Ideas

1. Communicate regularly: Keep customers informed about what’s going on in your business, but don’t push products all the time. Reach out through a combination of emails, postcards, newsletters, phone calls, and texts. Strike a balance between staying in touch and checking in on them and overcommunicating.
2. Profile customers: Shine the spotlight on customers who love your brand — what problem did your product or service solve for them? Dig up customer satisfaction anecdotes, tap into storytelling to convey how your company made a difference, and distribute these stories on your website, in email newsletters, and on social media.
3. Listen to customer feedback: While both compliments and complaints will trickle back, you should actively seek feedback from your customers to discover what’s working and what isn’t. Thank them for their feedback — then act on it if the situation warrants it.
4. Give a token of appreciation: Who doesn’t enjoy getting a gift? Whether it’s a free product, a complimentary service, or exclusive access to a private event, make your customers feel special with a small gift. Tip: This doesn’t need to cost a lot of money.
5. Send a handwritten note: In today’s tech-saturated world, a handwritten note of appreciation will stand out in customers’ minds. But, to truly make a positive impact, make sure this personal note is heartfelt and specific.

Investing in a customer appreciation program pays dividends on many levels, no matter the size of your business. Whether it’s a simple phone call or a more extravagant customer appreciation event, nurturing relationships with those who buy your products and services is a sound business strategy.