Zane Safrit

Employee Recognition: Why Not A Press Release or An Ad?

I saw this announcement in our newspaper a few years ago.

How cool is that? A display ad announcing the return of an employee. How do you think it made that employee feel? How do you think it made her family feel?

I sometimes see little announcements about this company just hired that VP or Director or SVP or higher. Nice.

What if those same companies issued a similar announcement for every employee they hired, entry level to CEO?  Include in the announcement a quote from their new manager and co-workers. Take a picture of them with their new team. Get the executives in on this little celebration, too. Imagine...yeah, imagine the satisfaction and sense of well-being this new hire experiences. Imagine the stories they will share with their families and friends and neighbors about this experience. This is word-of-mouth advertising at its best. From employees!

Imagine what this announcement and these stories do to lower recruiting costs and employee turnover.

Imagine what it does for the company’s marketing! If they treat their employees this well ... You know that through will cross the mind of prospects and current customers.

Now. Imagine if you issued a press release for the next goal reached or heroic accomplishment of your employees.

Imagine the effect if you issued one every time an employee was promoted even if it is the intern to fulltime, the entry-level CSR to Senior CSR or Team Leader. A public press release.

That’s a booming, happening place. That’s what people would say: employees, customers, neighbors and friends. That is word-of-mouth gold for employee recruiting and retention and customers and prospects.

When you’re thinking about how to recognize your employees ... keep it simple. Recognize them and their talents and skills and strengths and your excitement with their contribution with press release or a nice display ad.

Create a Company Snitch Program

Encourage everyone to snitch on their colleagues and their unheralded achievements...

To talk, to share, to speculate, to question, to criticize, to snark, to rave...it’s as natural as breathing. It’s how we connect and add meaning. With social media we’re transforming the globe into a small town, sharing our experiences and pleasures and moments of happiness and outrage ad disquiet and silliness and profundity...with our community who shares it theirs and theirs. Today, we're doing electronically what we've done mechanically or physically for millenia. 

Snitching, snitches, is just another term, albeit a pejorative term. Until now, snitches have been those...what...rats in a house. Their little whispers and innuendoes chewing holes throughout the house, bringing dis-ease and pestilence, aka bickering and division among all those who live there together.

It’s not the behavior that’s the problem. We're doing what comes naturally. Telling stories comes naturally. We love to hear them and tell them. It's the stories being told. Too often, anyway. And the rewards are misaligned. We reward negative stories and their teller's, for awhile until the damage is done.

The challenge isn't to ban snitching or point fingers at snitchers like we do a dog and the hole they dug in the backyard. The challenge is to feed it other content. The challenge is to reward other stories. . The challenge is to redirect the attention to what's also present: the good, the powerful, the strong.

These are the stories of all the unsung heroes in your organization. The unsung heroes and their unsung heroic accomplishments that too often go uncelebrated, unrewarded, in every organization of every size.

Here’s what you do. I’ve done it and it worked wonderfully.

Create a snitch program.

That’s right. Encourage snitchers to share ... stories of heroes they see around them. That's leveraging the power of recognition to bring its sunlight to all the cubicles and their unsung occupants. That's infusing your company with the power of recognition.  These stories abound once you make a habit of seeing them, celebrating them and rewarding them.

Disclaimer: I found this idea from somebody else. I can’t remember the name of that somebody else. If you know this person, read it four or five years ago, please let me know. I want to give them the credit they deserve.

Creating this program might take some time. As CEO, I needed three months or three company meetings before it matured to a self-sustaining effort with everyone’s enthusiastic participation.

In the first meeting, I announced a new agenda item for future meetings. Moving forward, we would include time for people to snitch on each other. We all were doing outstanding work - too much, really, for one person to recognize all the time and too important to go unrecognized, too. If they didn’t feel comfortable coming forward with a snitch like that they could tell me. I would share that snitch anonymously at the meeting.

At the first meeting, I was the only one that snitched. I pointed out little heroic acts that saved customers or kept our servers up and running or landed a big whale account or delivered invoices on time...A snitch for almost everyone. There were smiles and nods of approval. And the meeting ended with a little lift in everyone’s spirit. But, I sensed everyone remained skeptical.

A week or so before the next meeting, I reminded everyone to let me know if they have any snitches for me to share. They did. But they still preferred to remain anonymous. Again, we're a small company, so it's not like the source of these tales was truly anonymous. But, you have to recognize the whole person and lead them from their starting spot.

 I shared mine and then I shared the stories of heroism I received from everybody else. The spirits were even higher at the end of this second round of snitches than at the end of the first where it was displayed. That boost came from three sources:

1. momentum carried over from the first

2. these were richer, deeper, snitches from more than one source

3. they're starting to believe

The 3rd month, the snowball started to roll. We went around the room and everyone snitched on a colleague. Laughing and clapping ensued. A Yeah, that’s right! I saw that, too! spirit arose. We could have gone around the room twice. It was a feeding frenzy of positivity and recognition, celebration and emotional rewards and yes, alignment of our decisions with our purpose and our connections with each other.

And so it continued.

Word-of-mouth marketing boils down to inspiring the customer to share a positive experience with their friends and neighbors. Employee recognition is no different. Help inspire everyone to recognize those around them: their strengths and achievements. Find a structure that institutionalizes recognition in a real, natural, meaningful manner. Then expand it, reporting the results, celebrating them (more recognition) as often as possible, inspiring everyone to greater heights, starting another round of recognition and celebration. And people will. Even the snitches.

Added notes:

Inexpensive:  a few minutes were needed and nothing more. There was no budget item, no finance committee approval needed, no dashboard to create and monitor, no expensive outside agency was needed to manage it.

Empowering: everyone was empowered to see it, share it, enjoy it on their/our terms.

Habit of Seeing: the habit of finding, recognizing and reinforcing our achievements turned the culture around.

Recognize Your Disruptors

Yes. Recognize, respect and reward their courage for:

• asking why’s-the-emperor-nekid kinda questions.

• seeing a different way and being bold enough to try it.

• asking why, why not and what if.

• asking What’s in it for us, why should we believe, why should we care.

• asking What, so what, now what.

• asking If not us, then who? If not here, then where? If not now, then when?

Reminder: Money is the least important reward. Recognition by peers, co-workers, managers and leaders is the most important.

Reward the disruptors. Recognize them for their key role insuring the growth of everyone around them.

Recognize the Dreams of Your Brand Evangelists

You see things; and you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say, 'Why not?' - George Bernard Shaw

What do YOU say?

You know, Willy Wonka said it best: We are the makers of dreams, the dreamers of dreams. We should be dreaming. We grew up as kids having dreams, but now we're too sophisticated as adults, as a nation. We stopped dreaming. We should always have dreams. - Herb Brooks, inspirational coach who guided the U.S. Olympic hockey team to the "Miracle on Ice" triumph in 1980

In our dreams rests our future. Sacrifice our dreams and we sacrifice our life.
Recognize the dreams of your brand evangelists and you recognize their lives, their living.

When we are dreaming alone it is only a dream. When we are dreaming with others, it is the beginning of reality. - Dom Helder Camara, known as Bishop of the Slums

Recognizing their dreams is the first step to sharing those dreams. Sharing is not suborning, not confiscating or co-opting or undermining.

SHARE 1 | sh e(ə)r|
noun
a part or portion of a larger amount that is divided among a number of people, or to which a number of people contribute : We shared our dreams, finding common ground, and common resources which we could use to make those dreams possible.

Sharing those dreams starts the process of creating the reality of those dreams.

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.T. E. Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia.

Dreaming during the day, together, can make your organization dangerous to your competitors. Open your eyes. Dream your dreams, together. Be dangerous and act on your dreams together. And you can:

• disrupt global corporate giants,

• create business model innovations that transform your dreams into marketplace dominance,

• carve out market niches whose fat profit margins were previously unseen,

• inspire evangelistic employees and customers who defend a dream they now share together.

• squeeze cash-flow from surprising sources.

That’s powerful. That’s dangerous. And that is profitable. And, that is how you sustain your business.

Make It Hard Fun

Have you ever found a successful person or organization that lived by this rule:

• Make it miserable. Make it unbearable. Make it grim. Make it unpleasant.

Literalists will quibble about work, saying It's a job not a play period. To that I say:

• Fun is learning.

• Fun is exciting.

• Fun is challenging. Fun is when you face the challenge with the knowledge you have the tools and resources to meet and beat that challenge.

• Fun is when you know you will be recognized and you’ll recognize others.

• Fun is when you laugh and then learn from your mistakes. Fun is when you share with others the story of your mistakes and what you learned from them.

That’s hard fun.

Seymour Papert, Ph.D., wrote this about that: hard fun.

It is expressed in many different ways, all of which all boil down to the conclusion that everyone likes hard challenging things to do. But they have to be the right things matched to the individual and to the culture of the times. These rapidly changing times challenge educators to find areas of work that are hard in the right way: they must connect with the kids and also with the areas of knowledge, skills and (don't let us forget) ethic adults will need for the future world.

Change educators to managers, kids to employees, adults to companies and it reads:

It is expressed in many different ways, all of which all boil down to the conclusion that everyone likes hard challenging things to do. But they have to be the right things matched to the individual and to the culture of the times. These rapidly changing times challenge managers to find areas of work that are hard in the right way: they must connect with the employees and also with the areas of knowledge, skills and (don't let us forget) ethic companies will need for the future world.

It reads well*, don't you think?

A recent study at the Journal of Leadership & Organizational Structure summarized:

This study examined the link between workplace fun, employee satisfaction, and perceptions of customer service quality. Our results showed that employees who experienced fun in the workplace had greater satisfaction with their job and that the relationship between workplace fun and job satisfaction was greater for those who placed a high value on workplace fun. Additionally, we found that satisfied employees believed that their organization provided customer service that was reliable, responsive, and empathetic, and that employees were knowledgeable and able to instill confidence in customers.

There’s some softness in their terms like believe and the correlation of work place fun and job satisfaction with who placed a high value on workplace fun is like saying those who value sunlight felt a greater satisfaction when the sun rose. But, still.

Fun brings more discretionary effort**. ( I love that term. It’s so objective and disengaged, yet it’s a key term in the employee engagement arena.) That arises when we’re free to move forward with less fear and more fun. Less fear and more enthusiasm. Less fear and more ideas...and more solutions. More solutions mean more revenues, fewer costs, more cash-flow, more cash.

Fun means success. Fun means sustainable.

For me, I’ve always made it fun where I worked. I have a strongly developed sense of humor, personally. Professionally, I’ve found keeping a sense of humor around keeps a sense of perspective, balance and purpose around, too.

Make it hard fun.

* I’m not comfortable with the model of companies and managers are adults and employees are the children. That being said...the mechanics of motivation and learning remain the same for adults or children. I’m pretty convinced that a major factor in our low employee engagement scores as a country arise from our institutions discouraging our natural skills of curiosity, communication, and collaboration.

** Discretionary effort is what separates a volunteer from an employee. It's what distinguished a fan or advocate or champion or evangelist from an employee.

Recognize the Specifics of Your Brand Evangelists

Seems obvious, doesn’t it?

This is so obvious I wonder why, as CEO, I needed four or five years of saying thank you to those around me before I understood that my ‘thank you’ while nice would have more meaning if I invested a few moments in recognizing the specifics of why and how they mattered so much.

Growing up in the South the manners of saying Please and Thank you and addressing adults as Mr. and Miss or Mrs. was a well-entrenched habit by the time I was five.

But, too often with good habits their importance is ignored or their practice blends with the background, gets lost in the noise of stress and work challenges. So it was with saying ‘Thank you.’ My habit, my knee jerk response, of saying Thank you muddled how it was heard and they deserved more than to be the target of well-formed habit, as well.  

My first steps here were almost as painful as a child’s first steps on a concrete sidewalk. Awkward moments for the recipients and a bruised ego compounded with a mental freight train that kept chugging along carrying the load of the latest faux pas.  

I solved that by writing an email. Once I saw the impact, I vowed to practice for the next one where I’d deliver it in person. I did. I wrote it down and then spoke the words. It worked.

 That gave me confidence and that confidence relaxed us both. We both smiled, relaxed our shoulders, even uncrossing our arms and leaning forward on the conference table between us. Now, my intent and their just dessert meshed together nicely into a satisfying experience. With that our conversations always expanded to offer ideas and suggestions and what they saw and didn't see and would like to see. That makes for a very good day.

String a few of those together, back-to-back, and you have a good week.

String a few of those weeks together, back-to-back, and you have a good month.

You see where I'm going...String a few of these months together and you have a great quarter, a few quarters and you have a great year. And it all starts with a simple step, affordable, scalable step.

My friend Stephen Lynch COO of Results.com offers a more formal, systematic approach. How to Praise Your People and Increase Profits. He articulates one key point that drives the power of this step.

Recognize the specific behaviors that reinforce your company Core Values, or comment on specific RESULTS that were achieved – e.g. a task being completed, progress on a Strategic Project, or a Key Performance Indicator Goal being exceeded

Thank them for how their work achieved those goals and what reaching those goals meant to you, to everyone in the group.

Headsup: Some of us feel awkward with deserved praise, given or received. Making this a daily habit will help erase that awkwardness. You may also be in an environment where this type of recognition could 'unsettle' others, threatening their sense of control.

To that I say: Tough. They need to be unsettled. Their need for control limits the growth of everyone around them. But, you can speak that tough love in a language they'll love. Ask them:

Would you object if we reached our goals faster, if our employee turnover declined and our hiring costs declined too? Would you object if everyone showed more enthusiasm and offered more ideas and...discretionary effort...and those generated high close ratios and lower customer churns, grew our revenues faster and lowered our costs? Because that's what happens when you recognize people. This isn't me saying it. The science shows it. Here let me get you some reading material.

And you can point them to all the sources  I've listed here in this book. Now you're speaking their language. You're recognizing their specifics in a way that makes them feel comfortable.

Your Brand Evangelists Use Social Media; Don't Interfere

Amy - why do we let employees have access to telephone, fax maching, break rooms, smoking areas, and email, but not social networks? All are tools of communications.

This comment from David Meerman Scott on his blog post Blocking Facebook and Corporate Regime Change in...2011...sums it up still today. Organizations provide communication tools to every employee. Employees add tools of their own as fit their needs. From swimming pools to running clubs to coffee bars to bars to conferences to cellphones and laptops...the list goes on. Don’t forget mouths and ears.

Along comes social media and companies freak out, denying what is essential a hallpass to their employees to roam the halls of social media. They're still freaking out under the guise of corporate policies or hiring an intern or an external agency to handle the scary world of customers and prospects.

You hired adults, right?

You trust their judgment to talk with your (their) customers and prospects, vendors and partners.

Here's a reality that too many companies choose to ignore. You know what they talk about? You. Your decisions, your policies and you make them feel. Appreciated and inspired? They’ll share that. Denigrated and debased? They’ll share that.Working is how the majority of us spend our days, so of course we're going to talk about, process, that experience afterwards. (Wanna know what's worse? That's when they don't talk about their work. )

In between likes and pictures and videos of their family, friends, neighbors, classmates, sports teams, shopping-shopping-shopping and the weather...they'll talk about you.

They've been doing this since...forever.

Rather than restrict their social media use, why not insist managers and executives inspire them, recognize them, provide them the necessary tools, celebrate their successes, learn from their mistakes, create a powerfully engaging workplace and let nature take its course? That means people will share these stories with...phones, fax machines, cellphones, laptops, at the water cooler, on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, instagram, pinterest, vine, tumblr, google+, snapchat, while they're at the pool, out for a run, over dinner...wherever, however, they congregate with friends and family. Would you have a problem with that?

Now, some will wring their hands and say:

But golly gee, what about productivity? That'll take a hit, won't it?  

You hired adults, right? You've created an exciting, inspiring, challenging, rewarding, place to spend their day, right? You've created the opportunity for them to create and develop stories of their success/your success, right? Cause that's how people want to spend their day, right? Then you have nothing to worry about. On the other hand, if your management hasn't done these things, then maybe this policy of denying access to these tools is a reflection of...that failure.

Ironically, my challenge as CEO were employees who did NOT want to use social media. I even paid for their blogs and offered company time. Write about anything you want...We were a communications company, a small one and we needed more ideas. To spark those ideas we needed to develop the skills to articulate those ideas, wading through our mental and emotional chaff and growing in comfort with sharing ideas and debating them. I had this vision of a small company, with each member finding their voice and true passions, and building the company around those voices. But, a reluctance to share ideas or begin this journey speaks just as powerfully as thousands of tweets.

Recognize Your Brand Evangelists to Your Boss; Do It Right in Front of Them

Do it.

Next time you're in a meeting with their manager or your manager and this employee is there with you...tell that boss just how awesome this person is. Do it right there, right in front of them.

Talk about their latest accomplishment or heroic moment. Talk about that problem they solved or that idea they offered. Talk about that customer they made happy or the sales goal they exceeded or how they stayed up all night to fix that network outtage that came from last night’s storm...

Why wait?

And why do it behind their back in some closeted meeting?

All that has been accomplished by that person is a cause for a micro-celebration. Their accomplishments, their talents, their contribution to the organization, their strengths, their commitment....all serve as a source for this micro-celebration.

String together enough of these micro-celebrations and you have a huge celebration that engulfs everyone.

Start small. Like a snowball. Keeping adding another micro-celebration. Tell another boss about another great person in their team and what you saw them accomplish. Keep adding them, one after another until you have so much momentum nothing can stop you and everyone from recognizing all your accomplishments and talents, strengths and commitments, sacrifices and dedication and the momentum you have built.

Keep doing it. Keep adding to it.

See where I’m going? See what is possible?

Do it.

Tell their boss how awesome they are, in front of them.

Make your company the snowball in our current economic hell.

They’ll recognize you for how you recognized them.

Study the Teachings of Your Brand Evangelists

This may be the easiest and least expensive step to recognize your brand evangelists.

This may be the step that generates the highest ROI, Return on Investment.

This may be the step that sustains your organization through a period of disruption, innovation, chaos, fear and...opportunities.

Paradoxically, this may be the most difficult step to take and continue to take.

Your brand evangelists have the most knowledge. There are more of them than you. They work in the trenches of your brand, every day. What are you doing? You're probably hung up in meetings, far from their twisted reach of crazy sorrow in those trenches. They're crafting solutions, right now, as you read this post; just like they've done every day.

You taught them their skills, rules, policies and procedures. Sure.

Their daily work is a never-stop classroom confirming your teaching, evolving it with new solutions to new challenges they face every hour, every day, in the frontlines. They teach themselves, then each other, then test their understanding with each customer they help. You could consider this process as a never-ending series of innovations and product rollouts that get immediate real-world feedback. Each solution is a like a micro-product that conceive and deliver to fill a micro-market: one customer’s needs. String them together and you have thriving, surviving company.  

That process insures they own these new mini-products, they own that mini-market - the conversation with each customer - and they will be the best teachers. (C’mon. Have you ever listened to someone teach what they didn’t own. They knew it. You knew it. They didn’t shine.)

Let them teach you all they have learned since their last training. Let them shine in front of you and each other as they share their greater knowledge, as they share their discoveries and the results.

Study the Teachings of Your Brand Evangelists

Here’s another reason.  A culture of learners is a culture of leaders. A culture of leaders is a culture that survives and thrives. A thriving culture is one that keeps the best and attracts the best talent. It’s one that drives the greatest achievements and celebrations. It’s one where work is hard fun. A great teacher helps the student discover what the student already knows, let's them celebrate that understanding, giving them the confidence to tackle greater challenges.

What's not to like about that?

If Sir Isaac Newton can stand on the shoulders of others to discover the Law of Gravity, then surely you can stand on the shoulders of those around you to see further. Don’t worry. It'll be your turn to be the teache and let them stand on your shoulders. You'll be both be stronger for it. 

Study the Teachings of Your Brand Evangelists

Keep the learning alive and growing. Take turns standing on each other’s shoulders so you can continue to see, learn and sustain your organization.

Offer Your Brand Evangelists The Best Parking Spaces

There’s a prestige, a pecking order, in corporate parking lots. What if you organized that pecking order, that symbol of prestige and order, to reflect the importance of your most important customer who is also your most important investor?

What if you reserved the parking spaces out front, closest to the front door, for those stakeholders who spend their day out front, in the frontlines, closest to the customers?

In case my references to most important customer, most important investor or most important stakeholder appear obtuse let me spell it out for you. These are your employees.

Imagine the message that would send through your organization?

Imagine the shift in priorities among the executives and managers?

Imagine the bounce in the step of these most important stakeholders, the smile in their faces, as they arrive in the parking lot to find the most convenient parking spaces waiting for their car. That’s the start of their day.

I see a few companies that reserve one space for ‘our customers.’ Yawn.

I see fewer companies reserve one space for the employee of the month. Double Yawn. Here’s why. Why does that organization have only one employee per month that’s recognized as outstanding? Hmm? Is it their leader’s parsimonious vision marked by scarcity of resources, intellectual and emotional, that restricts recognition to a mixed message delivered with a passive-aggressive twist? Is it this leader’s guilt, knowing he’s unwilling to recognize the most important stakeholders or unable to allow other voices to participate?

The term servant leader is very popular. I googled it December 15, 2013 to find 15.3 million results in .3 seconds. Books and speakers and articles. Rightfully, so for so many reasons on so many levels.

The greatest leaders, always, serve the needs of those who volunteer to follow. They always give their followers a means to rise and shine, to honor their greatest talents and strengths, to explore their highest possibilities - to follow their higher angels... if you will - to bridge the gap between their lives today and the vision the leader sees for all of them. Together.

I’ve not seen any of these resources suggest this idea. But as I have honored it, as I envision it now describing it in greater clarity, it seems step of recognition would remind everyone that it’s the shining stars the external customers see that drives a company’s success.

When I ran a little company I parked farthest from the door when I came in each morning and returning after lunch. Not at first. But one day, maybe six months after I joined the company, I realized...I can park farther away and leave the closer parking spaces for everyone else. A self-serving announcement wasn’t necessary. It was my choice. But it seemed right. It seemed a positive reinforcement of my care for those who I had the honor to work with every day and a positive reinforcement of their importance.

A selfish benefit for me was the extra walking, a bit of fresh air, the chance to listen to the silence at night (our offices were backed against open, untillable, acres and forests).

I’ll also confess I’d forget sometimes, rushing late to a meeting or having an urgent call to make or wanting to get a blog post done right away. Sometimes, I knew other tenants were on vacation so I parked in front.

But, I’m thinking, what a message it would send if a company’s leader chose to park farthest from the entrance. That would show he understood the importance of those best customers, those best investors, who invest the majority of their most precious resources, time and emotion and creativity and intelligence, in delivering the company’s promises to everyone.

Recognize Your Brand Evangelists as Your Biggest Investor; They Are

Employees are your biggest investors.

How can I say that? How can I quantify that?

Let’s add up their investments.

TIME

Their investment is the majority of their waking hours. That's the best part of their day. Should be the best part of their day if you give them a chance.

Time is a most precious resource. Once spent, it can never be reclaimed. And they invest the majority of this resource in building a company.

BRAIN-POWER & TALENTS

Along with time, they invest their brain-power and talent. How much they invest is up to you. I’m not denying personal responsibility. Of course everyone can choose to be the best [insert title]. But what holds so many back is the lack of support and opportunity, ok leadership and management to realize that affirmation. At home, more of their destiny rests in their hands with their choices. At work...the power dynamic shifts that control to your hands.

Statistics show that only a minority of employees are fully engaged, fully invested, emotionally and intellectually with their work. I bet that was not the case on their first interview or their first few days, weeks and months.

That investment is a contingency-based investment. It is contingent on their being recognized, their having the tools and resources to make use of their brain-power and talents. It is contingent on their organization creating a system of incentives, tangible and intangible, that aligns their investment goals with the organization's investment goals.

And yes, it is contingent on their willingness to forge ahead from a grass-roots level in the face of seemingly daunting distractions at the C-Suite level.

THEIR OPPORTUNITY COST?

Every investment has an opportunity cost. That’s the cost of the opportunity, opportunities, not chosen. For your employees, it’s their personal lives - what’s sacrificed at home and in their health. It’s called work-life balance or, if we’re being honest, it’s the lack of balance between our work and the rest of our lives.

They squeeze it in around deadlines, overtime, meetings, bosses so crazy they need an hour each night so they can vent their frustration at their families and friends. The cost is their health and their family and community dynamics.

So many employees give their lives to their work in spite of misaligned incentives, managers who forget to recognize their dedication, companies unwilling to match that investment with an investment in their tools, training and careers.

Now let's compare these investments to those investments of a financial nature.

VCs consider the principals of a startup as their key criteria.

What if your employees considered your leadership as a key criteria for theirs? Weird, isn’t it? Scary, too.

But they already do. Their level of engagement is their endorsement of you. And like VCs they withhold another round of investing, raising their commitment and engagement, where they see a deficiency in leadership and management.

So if you honor the greater investment of your employees, including their higher opportunity costs, by treating them as your most important investor you’ll generate the returns your other investors want to see. That’ll inspire both investors to step for another round when they’re asked. Your employees will step up with more engagement; your other investors will write another check.

Related articles

Offer Your Brand Evangelists The Best Parking Spaces

Make Disability Insurance a Brand Evangelist Benefit

Recognize Your Brand Evangelists as Your Biggest Investor; They Are

Celebrate Your Brand Evangelists' Successes Daily

Successes are all around us. We, as leaders and managers of our businesses and personal lives, only need to look for them.

In business, the current strategies of highlighting mistakes and faults and weaknesses has helped create a disengaged workforce whose KPI’s or Key Performance Indicators include:

* 19% of employees may be actively sabotaging the efforts of others - Gallup Employee Engagement Index;

* less than 30% of employees are engaged in their work, emotionally and intellectually - Gallup Employee Engagement Index;

* a decline of 75% in their Return on Assets among public companies since 1965. Edge Perspectives

If focusing on errors, faults, mistakes and weaknesses generates those kinds of results, maybe doing the opposite, maybe finding and recognizing our successes, will have the opposite effect.

Wherever we put our attention, that same place grows stronger in our lives.

What gets measured gets done.

Marcus Buckingham, in his book - Go Put Your Strengths to Work - described a study of 198,000 employees from thirty-six companies who were asked whether they had the chance to play to their strengths every day. Those who strongly agreed that they did 'were 50 percent more likely to work in teams with lower employee turnover, 38 percent more likely to work in more productive teams and 44 percent more likely to working teams with higher customer satisfaction scores. And over time, those teams that increased the number of employees who strongly agreed saw comparable increases in productivity, customer loyalty, and employee retention.'

Companies with above-average levels of engagement show faster rates of growth, higher equity valuations, lower employee turnover rates, better profits and cash-flows. - The Corporate Lattice.

Playing to one’s strength allows those strengths to flourish and spread. It's a built-in positive feedback loop, a virtuous circle of successes, measurement, celebration, more successes, measurement, celebration.

In order for the daily successes to continue, your celebrations can’t last all day. But, what about:

• an email blast to your team or department celebrating today’s success

• a private celebration with the person responsible for the success. These can last 5-10 minutes, initiated with a quick call asking Hey, do you have a minute?

• a note to your bosses, celebrating a recent success of your team or team member and cc’ing that team or team member.

• a group celebration for a group-wide success.

I know what you’re probably thinking; I’ve thought the same. Well, how do we get our work done if all we do is celebrate? Consider these points:

• There's a declining return on your most important asset with the culture of fault-finding and weakness tracking that creates a disengaged and demoralized organization.

• 70% of employees aren't finding this fault-finding, weakness-emphasizing, approach to be a motivator. Matter of fact, motivation seems to survive despite management's best efforts to strangle it in a culture of criticism.

Somewhere between these two extremes is the perfect balance of recognizing and celebrating strengths and successes while sustaining and even increasing their depth and frequency. Only you know where that balance resides and what steps you can take to reach it and stay there.

This simple step, celebrate a success every day, walks you in the right direction at a sustainable pace while sharing it with others.

All you have to do is take the first step: look for these successes. Then take the next step: celebrate those successes. Then do it again the next day. and your creativity in how you celebrate them.

Be Their Ronald Reagan: Help Them Tear Down Those Walls!

Former President Ronald Reagan spoke these now famous words on June 12, 1987:

General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

Look at it closely. Can you imagine you or someone in your business giving a similar speech?

Department heads, team leaders and team members, if we seek success, if we seek prosperity for each other and our company, if we seek new ideas for new products and services to serve new markets: Come here to this meeting! Let’s open our office doors! All of us together, let’s tear down the walls that keep us from sharing ideas, sharing credit, sharing challenges and resources to conquer them. Let’s tear down those walls!

Silos of expertise leveraged the power of focus and specialization with their walls, rules and physical separation and budgets, blocking any unruly distractions from entering. They were successful when competitors were few, price of entry was high and the pace of change moved s-l-o-w-l-y. But, as those elements changed, the unruly distractions were recognized as valuable conversations and collaborations and connections.

However, change is not spread evenly. The author William Gibson summed this up nicely when he said:

The future is already here - it’s just not very evenly distributed.

The silos of expertise are imbalanced against the silos of resentment, bureaucracy, lack of training and resources and talent. Those silos become cesspools of disengagement, mostly active, holding your members and their organization from their full potential.

There will be those declining numbers who will resist this future. They will insist their silos, real or imagined, remain in place. There future is here and it's theirs and any change is bad.

Recognize your future and their appropriate strengths and begin to tear down those walls. Show every silo how those walls, their walls, hold them back. Show them the future is reached together or not at all. 

Be their leader. Be their Ronald Reagan. Inspire them to tear down those walls!

While this is simple to write, it is challenging to execute. You will be surprised at how much dust is kicked up, how much baggage is unloaded...on you, the leader. Backlashes often arise as the change and disruptions move past slogans and timelines into meaningful actions.

And, who wants more confrontations? We have enough to confront with constant innovations, competitive pressures, the challenge of leading an organization. Confronting the privileged, setting limits for the entitled, delaying children's gratifications, is almost always unpleasant. There's never a guarantee of success, anyway.

However, you are guaranteed to fail if you choose instead to perpetuate those pathologies and choose silence.

The benefit for you? Well, your organization will survive and thrive. They’ll recognize you as a leader, one who communicated a vision and a purpose that brought out their best, uniting competing interests and skills and passions towards a common goal. Your leadership, their strengths, are confirmed as projects come to completion sooner, customers and employees stay longer, cash flows grow stronger.

You're a leader. You have the strengths to find solutions for these challenges. You see the mountaintop. You see the futures waiting around the corner. One is success and a thriving, engaged organization. Who cares what the other one is, right?

My Story.

As CEO of a small company I was amazed to see silos develop within the first year. IT did this, but not that. Customer Service that, but not this. Accounting and Sales followed suit. Praise for one created jealousy in the others.

Platitudes of We're in this together. It's our company. We have the chance to do things the right way...went as far as the conversation in changing the above attitudes.

Over time, I did a few smart things.

1. Continued recognizing their achievements.

2. Linked each achievement with the peripheral, background successes of everyone else, showing how small victories over here led to huge victories, here, that we celebrated that day. 

2. Created a Company Snitch Program which helped everyone look for and share the peripheral, background, successes of each other. These monthly recitations turned into a virtuous circle of achievements, big and small, ending the meeting in a rousing cheer leaving us with enough enthusiasm to last for days.

Respect The Time of Your Brand Evangelists

Here is one near absolute* truth in life:

Time is the one resource we can never regain.

Recognize the precious quality of time in your employees’ day and you recognize the precious quality of their strengths, dreams and desires as they deliver solutions all day, every day.

You build a culture of recognition leading to engaged employees when you recognize the time-constraints under which they work. How can you expect engagement by your employees if you allow their time to constantly be...misused, wasted, lost?

Their one resource you cannot add to, lengthen or strengthen, is time. Their time.

You can recognize them by recognizing the importance of their time.

If you need a meeting, make it useful. Be prepared. Start and end on time. Declare an agenda before the meeting. Ask if these meetings are helpful.

Fight for policies that respect their dignity, maturity, abilities and time.

Incentivize correctly.

Celebrate or correct the key metrics.

Leave them alone. Be there when you are needed.

Keep a lookout for opportunities to thank them, specifically. But other than that, err on the side of leaving them alone.

Respect their time.

Simplify, Simplify, Simplify...Your Brand Evangelist's Day

Seems pretty simple.

Yet, for the majority of us it remains an unattainable goal. While we strive or idealize or smile in fond remembrance of that goal, our organizations abandoned that goal decades ago, it seems.

Simple does not mean simplistic. Simple means focused, one-pointed, clear.

Simple means aligned goals: personal > team > department > organization ... > LIFE.

Simplifying a day means:

• removing obstacles

• serving as a buffer, a barrier, a fire-wall against, well, those distractions that creep into corporate life.

• eliminating useless meetings, useless metrics, useless reports.

A simplified day is marked by a clear purpose, shared by the group members, pursued with a simple strategy implemented with simple tactics using the correct tools.

A simplified structure is marked with timely knowledge reaching the correct decision-makers.

A simplified organizational chart is filled with the strengths of its members showcased on a daily, if not hourly, basis.

Simplify, simplify...simplify the day.

WARNING: Self-Promotion.

If you want to know more ways to engage with your employees, my book RECOGNIZE THEM: 52 Ways to Recognize Your Employees in Ways They Value offers 52 ways to recognize your employees, easy exercises to reinforce those habits and skills and inspirational quotes to keep you going.

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#MyStartupStory: Guy Kawasaki, Former Apple Chief Evangelist and Alltop Founder

Better to Simplify

Simplify

Repurpose Customer Testimonials Around Your Company

Repurpose. That's an odd word. It's the digital media's equivalent of  leftovers, serving the same purpose: "Hey, they're still good; maybe better after a day or two. Don't waste 'em."

Don't. Don't waste a customer's testimonial, sharing it once. A customer’s testimonial recognizes your employee and their achievements in delivering your brand’s promise, in delighting that customer, inspiring them to invest the time to communicate what their achievement meant to them. It recognizes their:

• strengths

• successes

• commitment

• passion

• creativity

• RESULTS

You have several options:

• read it out loud at your next meeting.

• springboard off it into a discussion of how everyone's achievements generated that testimony.

• write a blog post for the public, sharing the testimony and that story of how it's a team effort.

• send it to your boss or your board of directors.

• do all of the above and share it on social media.

For me, I imagine it's Christmas evening and there's still turkey, lots of turkey, left. There's turkey sandwiches, turkey meatloaf, turkey potpie, turkey casserole, send some home with your kids, freeze some for later...You might prefer to imagine it's the feasts of  El Eid or Chanukah. Afterwards, after the sumptuous meal shared with your family and friends...there is still more to share.

The important point? You have a feast of achievements to enjoy and share. It's your choice how you do that. After that, just enjoy the results.

Disclaimer: Metaphors tend towards food when I'm really hungry. I'm really hungry right now.

Grow Your Net Promoters

What is a Net Promoter? A Net Promoter is one who is very likely to recommend your company to a friend or colleague. On a scale of 0 - 10, they rate their likelihood to recommend your company to a friend or colleague as 8 or higher, where 10 is very likely and 0 is very unlikely.

The Net Promoter Score is a powerful, simple, survey and metric that starts with The Ultimate Question.

1. On a scale of 0 - 10, how likely would you be to recommend our company to a friend or colleague?

• If they rate their likelihood an 8 or higher, you ask: What do you say when you recommend us?

• If they rate their likelihood a 5 or lower, you ask: What do we need to do to change this to an 8 or higher?

Your Net Promoter Score is the percentage of Promoters ( 8 or higher) - the percentage of Detractors (5 or lower).

Why's that important? According to Fred Reichheld, recognized as one of the world's leading authorities on business loyalty, and the author of The Ultimate Question,

…analysis shows that sustained value creators—companies that achieve long-term profitable growth—have Net Promoter Scores (NPS) two times higher than the average company. And NPS leaders outgrow their competitors in most industries—by an average of 2.5 times.

2. The words of your customers. What you’re doing right or wrong is described in the words of your customers, not the words of your market research firm and its limited information gleaned from unlimited questions.

That is key. The open-ended nature of the 2nd question recognizes the importance of your customer's opinions. You ask for their opinion. They quantify it, then clarify using their words.

Their words tell you what you're doing right....So, do more of it.

Their words tell you what you're doing wrong....So, stop. Fix it.

Until now, only customers, external customers, have been asked The Ultimate Question to generate the Net Promoter Score.

But, c'mon. Who's your most important customer?

The one who buy your products?
Or
The ones who invest majority of their waking hours delivering your brand’s promise?

Exactly. The 2nd customer group. That's your internal customers, aka, your brand evangelists or your key stakeholders, aka, your employees.

Recognize them and ask them...

1. On a scale of 0 - 10, how likely would you be to recommend working at our company to a friend or colleague?

• If they rate their likelihood as 8 or higher, you ask: What do you say when you recommend us?

• If they rate their likelihood as 5 or lower: What do we need to do to change this to an 8 or higher?

Then...recognize their answers with the right response:

• Do more of what inspires them to recommend their company.

• Stop and fix what inspires them to not recommend their company.

Because as Fred Reichheld reports:

…analysis shows that sustained value creators—companies that achieve long-term profitable growth—have Net Promoter Scores (NPS) two times higher than the average company. And NPS leaders outgrow their competitors in most industries—by an average of 2.5 times.

And you recognize your employees as your most important customers.

Recognize Your Employees on Social Media

With social media, all day every day is prime-time.

Why not leverage the reach of social media to recognize to the world those who build and deliver the brand? That’s right. Use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, your company’s website..Pinterest, Instagram, WhatsApp, LinkedIn to recognize all the achievements of your brand evangelists...for the world to see. Just. Use. One of them.

First off, your employees deserve that your recognition be shared publicly.

Second, it offers a person for your customers and prospects to connect with...personally.

Third, it shows you care. It shows the world you care enough to put in your own words how you care about your employees.

Fourth, it will cut through the clutter of cliche’s about ‘we care’ or ‘world-class customer service.’ (Especially if those cliches are backed with stock photos of happy, smiling, nameless models.)

Fifth, you position your brand as a leader showing your peers how to use social media in a personal and meaningful manner aligned with personal and corporate missions.

We follow people, not brands or logos. Make it easy to follow those who build and deliver that experience: that's your employees.

Here's how Patrick O'Keefe* handled it on his Facebook page.

Consider the impact on Danielle Williams when Patrick recognized her to the world and his community members.

That's called leadership by example.

Thanks, Patrick.

* Patrick O'Keefe is founder of the iFroggy Network, author of Managing Online Forums: Everything You Need to Know to Create and Run successful community Boards. And he was also a guest on my radio show. You can listen to our conversation here.

 

Show How Their Accomplishments Affect Everyone.

How do you create meaning?

• You say what matters.
• You show what matters.
• You share what matters.

Accomplishments in isolation are threads left on the floor. Who knows of their colors or textures? Sharing them is like weaving them to into a brilliant tapestry. In business it’s called ‘culture.’

The all-nighter by the IT department to save the servers and purge them of a virus, a worm, or the diligence in building a secure series of protocols goes unrecognized.

The creativity, persistence and diligence by the customer service department to save that valuable customer who then turns into a loyal and volunteer sales person for the company goes unrecognized.

The savings found by the eagle-eyed accountant or CFO that serves to fund an innovative project that then adds another 5-10% of revenues goes unappreciated and future innovations remain unfunded.

Explain why the servers always serving, never crashing, allows the creativity and diligence of customer service reps to be delivered in a timely manner which in turn saved that customer whose resulting word-of-mouth testimonials generated more referrals for sales who saw a rising conversion rate, higher commissions from higher sales generating higher revenues for the company.

Sharing them weaves them into a beautiful fabric, for everyone to enjoy, and see how they compliment, enhance the value of other threads, accomplishments, of those around them. Sharing these accomplishments empowers them to create their own understanding of their culture, independent of website and annual report platitudes. That’s engagement.

If you explain why their accomplishments matter...for everyone...then you create meaning for their work, recognition for their contributions, a fine fabric of conversations and relationships that...matter.

And their conversation threads can continue, revealing the meaningful web of tasks, relationships,projects and meetings, processes and innovations that result in a culture of achievements. Those conversations are your culture of recognition, up and running independently.

Explain how the savings found by the eagle-eye of the accountant or CFO funded the innovation that resulted in a new product/service/business model that generated x percent revenue growth and more cash-flows which allowed the company to invest in more dependable, faster, bigger servers that meant more customers could be made happy to generate happier prospects that closed faster, converted in shorter times, that further inspired the sales staff, that made the customer service people happier, that generated prompter payments that made the CFO have the time to look closer at finding more internal sources of revenues to innovate newer solutions to sustain the growth of the company.

Explain their accomplishments and why they matter. Because they do. Because too often they labor in isolation but their accomplishments ripple through the company. Explain how you recognize what they do matters and matters to everyone. So everyone can recognize it, so everyone can recognize it each, so you create a culture of recognition. That leads to engagement.

Belatedly, I took this step as CEO of a small company when I saw that even with our small group, everyone remained focused exclusively on their work, their goals, their accomplishments. I was asking, we needed, everyone to do more - to learn more, to change more. They responded well. But, the stress of change increased the need for recognizing not only that day’s accomplishment but the tertiary accomplishments happening in the background that enabled the achievement we celebrated. At every such victory dance, I reminded everyone that Sales was able to do x because IT did Y and Customer Service did Z and Finance did A. As time went on everyone moved to the front of that sentence. It was good. It’s one way we were able to maintain revenue growth and positive cash-flows while retail prices for our industry dropped by over 70%, for new and existing customers.

Related articles

How to Recognize Salespeople [Infographic]

Accomplishments

WARNING: Self-Promotion.

If you want to know more ways to engage with your employees, my book RECOGNIZE THEM: 52 Ways to Recognize Your Employees in Ways They Value offers 52 ways to recognize your employees, easy exercises to reinforce those habits and skills and inspirational quotes to keep you going.

Welcome Your Newest Brand Evangelist with a Grand Reception

Creating a culture of recognition and engagement is a journey. Given that the average company sees less than 30% of its employees engaged, emotionally and intellectually, with the challenges of their workplace, most companies and their leaders and managers wander in the wilderness. Not all who wander are lost, but in the arena of recognition and engagement...the majority of companies wander not even knowing they’re lost.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. So...

Start their first day off with a grand reception. In fact, make the whole day a grand reception.

Call them the night before their first day and let them know how their contributions will matter. Recognize them for what you saw in their talents and skills and potential. Be sure to remind them of their future with the company and why that matters...to you. (They already know...Now, they know you know as well.)

Welcome them at the front door. They'll need to know that's a habit.

Call them by their first name.

Make sure the necessary resources are ready for them. That includes equipment and training, now and in the future.

Have a party. Make it fun.

Why? There are three obvious reasons.

1. A New Hire is a Sign of Progress. Whether this decision was reached to add another person or replace a former star performer, it's a sign of progress. It's exciting. You should always celebrate your progress.

2. Well begun is half done. This sets the tone, building the right expectation for the following days. Imagine their enthusiasm at the end of that day? Imagine what they'll tell their families and friends!

3. This celebrate the start, the first step, for a new journey with everyone else.  It’s in their interests to celebrate the arrival of a new hire even knowing their workday will, at first, be more demanding. Only when this new hire is trained and integrated into the organization’s operations can they take their next career step. Learning comes much faster when both the student and teacher are enthusiastic. When they are able to take their own next step, then another celebration and another series of journeys begin.

So, go ahead. Have a party. Welcome your newest brand evangelist with a grand reception.