The truth is that praising your employees and showing them appreciation are not just nice things to do – it is important in order to retain your team and maximizing their potential. Survey shows that employees, who feel valued and appreciated, are working more, being more productive and will stay in the company much longer. In a world-wide survey carried out by McKinsey, it turned out that praise from the managers is number one motivator for 67% of employees’. Therefore, it means that these small acts are already making an effect on employees and makes them feel valued!
Here are 6 effective ways to show your employees that you appreciate them.
If a manager shows his trust in his employees, then this supports employee motivation and encourages them to work more independently. Excessive controlling and unnecessary reporting rather demotivates employees.
Set your recruitment processes up in a way that would support attracting and hiring the best talent. Once a person is hired – trust them in their job functions, that’s why you hired them. Give employees the freedom to find the most suitable solution and let them reach the goal themselves.
When we look at the company’s motivation packages and employees value propositions, then it can be seen that in most cases the benefits that are offered are very similar. We encourage to be open-minded and offer some untraditional benefits on top of all the traditional ones.
For example, bringing different entertaining games to the office have gained popularity among start-up companies. Entertaining games like ping-pong table, gaming corner or different board games are an excellent and creative way to engage coworkers and appreciate them, by giving them freedom to take a break when needed and clear their minds while playing. In addition, team and pair games are a good opportunity to improve communication between coworkers and make people feel like the belong.
By praising employees, you will give them more motivation and a sign that their contribution to the company’s success is important and valued. People are too often focused on bringing out employees’ mistakes and areas for improvement – the so called negative feedback. That is the reason why employees tend to fear feedback. In reality, feedback should contain both positive and negative aspects.
Positive feedback means that behavior that is supporting company values and goals will get recognition. Recognizing and praising desired behavior will enforce what is expected and encourages people to act this way in the future as well.
Negative feedback means paying attention to mistakes and areas for improvement. It is often recommended to avoid saying “negative feedback”, because it refers to something bad or negative. That’s why people often leave out the word “negative” and take “feedback” as something that is purely focusing on their flaws. But keep in mind, that referring to areas that need improvement is important, because otherwise employees might not know how to do specific tasks differently or even the facts that this should be done in some other way. Referring to development needs will create foundation to improvement and change of behavior.
We recommend placing emphasis to positive feedback in order to change employees’ feelings about feedback overall – feedback is not something negative or something to be scared of. For example, you could agree to use 2:1 principle in your company. This means that for every development-oriented “negative feedback” there should be at least two positive feedbacks to praise for expected behavioral patterns and for job well done.
Managers can show appreciation of their employees by offering flexible working hours and remote work. If the nature of the work allows flexible working time and the opportunity to work remotely, then it should be taken into serious consideration. For many employees, flexibility is important in order to achieve good balance between their work and private life.
Working remotely is mainly forced right now due to the pandemic, but is would be reasonable to discuss remote working policy once everything is back to normal. Would you be willing and able to offer the opportunity to work remotely and be flexible in terms of working hours? Who would be entitled to work from home and when? Are your processes fully adapted to remote work? Do your employees have all the needed resources to support their performance while working remotely?
By supporting employees in their search for balance between work and private life, you are showing that you care about your employee as a whole, not only are you concerned about the hours they can dedicate to helping your company achieve it’s goals. If an employee feels that there is balance in their lives, then they are more effective and dedicated at work.
As a manager, listen to the suggestions and ideas of your employees. Create an environment, where they feel confident to share their own suggestions. An employee could have a clear vision and specific recommendations on how it would be possible to improve the processes and work. But if managers won’ t listen to employees, then they could miss out on many good ideas, which could have been much more efficient and effective than their own.
In addition, not engaging your employees could negatively affect their motivation and will to improve within the company. It will lead to a risk that your best and sharpest employees will start looking for new challenges outside your company and move to another employer.
Find out their career goals, determine what next steps are needed to get them there. How can you help? Which investments are you ready to make in order to support your employees’ development?
Create a specific training plan and agree to it with your employee. In the eyes of employees, trainings that support their personal career goals and feel important to them, help to increase their motivation and make them feel that their wishes are heard. And you as an employer will also benefit from it – employee’s knowledge, skills and attitude is improving and thanks to that effectiveness increases.
If you feel like you need some help with creating value proposition for your employees, feel free to let us know! We will be happy to help!
