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Engagement Marketing

Employee Recognition Backfires

As a follow up to my last post on Employee Appreciation Day, I was reminded of a positive-turned-negative recognition experience I had earlier in my career.

The positive recognition came from the American Marketing Association in appreciation of my service as a volunteer leader. AMA’s executive staff acknowledged its volunteer leaders (at both the national and chapter board levels) with a letter of thanks. In addition, staff asked for the name of the chief contact where the volunteer was employed so AMA could acknowledge the company’s support as well. (AMA was smart to realize that in many cases volunteers relied on company resources and/or were allowed time to be involved in such professional development activities.)

The message conveyed in this letter was basically: We appreciate the leadership contributions of your employee [name] who served as [volunteer leadership position] … and we appreciate your support of their efforts in advancing marketing practice.”

What did you say your name was?

The bank I worked for was undergoing a merger, so I gave AMA the name of the CEO of the merged bank. I even forgot about this recognition until several months later when my boss showed me a copy of AMA’s letter that had been sent to the bank CEO. Not knowing who I was (or even taking the time to find out and respond), he wrote a note across the top of the letter: “What’s this about?” The letter was sent to HR, forwarded to the senior VP in charge of the region where I worked, sent to my boss’s boss, and eventually landed on my boss’s desk. My boss then asked me to provide a write-up about my AMA involvement for the higher-ups … and I never heard about it again.

Come on, how difficult would it have been for the CEO or one of his regional officers to have followed up with a note or phone call? (Someone in the executive suite could have at least whited-out the “What’s this about?” at the top of the letter, scribbled “Nice job” in its place, and sent me a copy.)

My husband teased me as I wrote this post, “Get over it, already!” I did a long time ago. I just wanted to share this story because it reminded me that effective recognition doesn’t have to be expensive or extensive in terms of what it involves. The irony here is that AMA’s letter gave my employer an easy way to recognize an employee … but the CEO didn’t care. That was the message I took away from this experience.

Your turn

Have you ever been in a situation where employee recognition backfired? Would love to hear about it.

Categories
Engagement Marketing

Employee Appreciation Day

What are your plans for celebrating Employee Appreciation Day coming up Friday, March 6, 2009?

Yes, Virginia, there is special day set aside for this. Given how stressed out many employees are these days, the event is worth considering.

You can find some great recognition ideas ranging from lunch with a mentor to a handwritten thank you note – ideas that are applicable at any time beyond this designated day.

And if you want to have fun recognizing employees, check out Funny Employee Awards’ gag trophies. (My personal favorites include “The Spammie Award” for an employee who excels in e-mail and “The Burning Rubber Award” to recognize the employee who’s out the door the fastest at closing time. You can also present this award to honor the team that helps the company speed past the competition or completes a project the fastest.)

I’m giving serious thought to personally celebrating this day. As a soloprenuer, I treat myself on Boss’s Day and Administrative Professionals Day, so why not Employee Appreciation Day? Especially since I qualify for my company’s Employee of the Month/Year award!

Categories
Engagement Marketing

Engaging Talent

Before I get to the heart of this post, I’m thrilled to unveil my blog’s new look! I’ve been working on this for the past few months with graphic art designer Karin Choi, who’s extremely talented AND patient. Bless her and all creative design professionals who work with clients like me who know what we want, yet can’t articulate it. Thanks, Karin!

This week’s internal marketing message

Our current economic meltdown has given rise to a new urgency on engaging employees. Here are two perspectives on this issue.

In this month’s Tom Peters Times, consultant Valarie Willis reminds us that “the talent is the brand.”

“It is the talent in an organization that brings its brand to life. If the talent are no longer happy, if they are concerned about their own welfare, or they’ve hunkered down to stay out of sight, the brand may be on its last breath as well. And when the brand is struggling to survive, the impact is on the customer experience.”

To minimize brand dilution, she recommends organizations realign and reconnect the brand promise, employees [AKA “talent”], and customers.

In his white paper, Engagement and Appreciation in a Time of Crisis, Maritz employee engagement consultant Mel Van Dyke also acknowledges a growing number of employees are suffering from anxiety about job security and financial well-being. It’s hard to engage folks who find themselves on the lower rungs of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. To address this challenge, Van Dyke offers employee-focused appreciation and recognition strategies.

“Thank you can never be said enough, especially now … Acknowledging not only the environment that key employees are now facing but also their individual contributions to success is a great way to keep employees focused on a positive work experience rather than an external labor market.”

Although their specific coping suggestions vary, both Willis and Van Dyke advocate the need to be more attentive and responsive to employees. We can’t afford to ignore our employees – those we’ve chosen to retain as well as those who’ve chosen to stay with us. We need their ideas, support, and perseverance to get through this financial mess.

 

Categories
Engagement Marketing

Blog Milestone & Motivational Quote

This is truly a special week as it marks my 4th anniversary of blogging and my 250th post! Thanks to all my blog readers and fellow bloggers for your continued support and inspiration.

It’s time to refresh this blog’s looks, and I’m excited to announce my blog redesign is in the works and should be ready soon.

To honor the start of my 5th year blogging about internal marketing & communications, I chose to quote Frances Hesselbein about the underlying elements of an engaged workplace.

“Our behavior as well as our words build a climate of trust, a climate of respect, and a climate where mission, values, and equal access permeate the organization.

That is how we build the healthy, inclusive, and embracing relationships that unleash the human spirit. We can dismiss this as soft management and soft talk, but I challenge us to measure the performance of a team whose work is underscored by trust, civility, and good manners against a team where mistrust, disrespect, and lack of consideration are the rule of the day. No contest. Spirit, motivation, respect, and appreciation win every time. Dispirited, unmotivated, unappreciated workers cannot compete in a highly competitive world.”

This excerpt is from her 1992 book Hesselbein on Leadership, and her message is as relevant as ever.

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Customer service Engagement Marketing

Reflections in The Employee Customer Mirror

To describe the impact that employees have on customers, I often use a mirror metaphor. This “employee-customer mirror” reflects the reality that customers are affected by what employees experience on the job. If employees are frustrated by company policy or internal politics, their attitudes can be projected onto dealings with customers. And who wants to be served by disgruntled employees? It takes only one or two such encounters (depending on the customer’s tolerance threshold) before a customer takes his/her business elsewhere. And who knows how many other customers will hear of the experience?

It’s an easy principle to remember: the way employees feel is the way customers will feel – and if our employees don’t feel valued, neither will our customers. Unfortunately, too many organizations take this relationship for granted. (Don’t even think about using current economic conditions as an excuse.)

How do you manage employee-customer care? I’m talking the basics here:

  • open the lines of organizational communications (top-down, bottom-up, and laterally)
  • involve employees in improving the business operations – whatever is needed to survive and thrive
  • provide opportunities for continued learning and professional development
  • recognize employees who continue to rally the energy and enthusiasm to serve customers and co-workers despite limited resources.

What do you see when looking into your organization’s Employee-Customer Mirror?

  • a shiny reflection of employee- and customer-satisfaction?
  • a blurred image that needs polishing to be more employee- and customer-focused? or
  • a cracked image opening up opportunities for your competitors?
Categories
Engagement

Employee Engagement & Meaningful Work

Without a compelling cause, our employees are just putting in time. Their minds might be engaged, but their hearts are not. Meaning  precedes motivation.  – Lee J. Colan

Special thanks to my colleague Jane Vanderhorst for sharing this quote. Here’s why it resonated with me.

In my experience, employees who are passionate about their organization’s mission are most likely also passionate about their work – especially those who work in nonprofits and faith-based companies. I’ve seen similarly strong levels of commitment by employees in for-profit firms where their values and the company’s brand values are aligned.

Note: These situations pre-suppose effective communication and reinforcement of an organization’s mission, vision, and values.

It’s something to think about in this new year: what “meaning” do employees find in your organization (beyond a paycheck)?

Categories
Musings

What I Hope to Accomplish This Year

New Year’s resolutions, best intentions, and assorted goals for 2009 – here’s a sample of what’s on my list for this year.

Professional

  • Update the look of my blog – watch for this sometime in February with the help of Karin Choi, Choice Designs, and Yvonne DiVita & Tom Collins, my publisher & friends at Windsor Media Enterprises..
  • Write an e-book or series of special reports that provide additional tools and ideas on how to engage employees with internal marketing. This publication (whatever form it ultimately takes) will continue to build on the foundation, strategy, and tools provided in my book Taking Care of the People Who Matter Most: A Guide to Employee-Customer Care.
  • Determine if I’m going to be a “late adopter” of the Twitter phenomenon. Lots of colleagues are encouraging me to tweet, but I’m still not sure whether it’s right for me or not. (Pardon me, but my technophobia is showing.)

Personal

  • Keep up with my walking for both physical & mental health. (No treadmill for me, I prefer walking outside in the fresh air where I can also get my vitamin D naturally.)
  • I also want to get back to yoga and/or learn meditation. (I attended an intro yoga class a number of years ago and loved it; I just need to find a local class that I can fit it into my schedule.)
  • Get serious about executive downsizing – that’s solopreneur-speak for wanting to lose weight. (I prefer to think of myself as “upscale” rather than overweight.)

What are you planning to do in this New Year? Equally important, how good are you at keeping to your resolutions? (Hint, hint: suggestions are welcome!)

Categories
Musings

Year End Reflection & Tribute

Earlier this month, my husband & I enjoyed a brief pre-holiday respite at Mohonk Mountain House. My husband took these incredible photos there during the first-in-a-series of ice storms that hit the northeast.

These breathtakingly beautiful images evoke serene beauty and wonder, and I feel a similar sense of wonderment – as well as pain – as I reflect on this past year.

2008 has been a most difficult one for me personally as I managed to get through the first year without having my beloved mother in my life. She passed away one year ago today, and my life will never be the same.

So I look forward to the New Year knowing that I survived the emotional pain of this past year and hope the heartbreaking memories of her deteriorating health will begin to fade and be replaced by better memories. I’m not as emotionally raw as I was earlier this year, but the emptiness still remains and I miss her more than ever. A dear friend of mine told me what she learned about coping with such loss: “You never get over it, but somehow you get through it.”

I’m getting better in accepting the many triggers that evoke sadness (and, increasingly, smiles) as I appreciate the wonder of having had her in my life for a little over 50 years. In the new year and those to come, I want to focus more on happier memories and the profound impact she had on me … an impact that continues as she lives in my heart.

Best wishes for a happy, healthy, and peaceful New Year.
[Photos by Michael Stershic]

Categories
Musings

Amass Less, Value More (A Lesson for the Holiday & Everyday)

I’ve been trying to focus on the positive during the holidays despite constant media attention to the economic crisis. And I’ve found an upside to the down economy: we’re learning to live with less ‘stuff.’

To help us cope better with less, business & life coach Steve Davis advocates that instead of continually amassing more stuff, we learn how to better use what we really need.

According to Steve:

“Unconscious compulsions for “more input” seldom satisfy our true needs. Nor will having piles of unread books and magazines ringing our desks reduce the nagging sense that there is some piece of information that will really change everything for us.

Satisfaction comes from fully digesting and extracting the fine nutrients from what we already have, and making choices for new input based on our true values and passions, not our casual likes and vague interests.”

This is an excerpt from his excellent article, Assimilation vs. Accumulation – The practice of getting full nourishment from everything in your life. It’s worth reading to learn how we can better assimilate what’s important such as: relationships, customers, ideas, information, and experience. (Note: While written for an audience of facilitators, his message is applicable to everyone.)

Best wishes to all for a happy & safe holiday!

Categories
Musings

Where is the “Human” in Human Resources?

Tina Hamilton, founder & CEO of hireVision (an HR and hiring management firm) and a colleague of mine, asked the question, “Does the ‘human’ in Human Resources still exist?”

She’s worried about “the emotional element of HR. The empathetic approach to dealing with employees as living people versus machines that we control and maneuver to produce our goods and services.”  Her concern is based on what she sees as “an epidemic of HR professionals being desensitized.”

Tina attributes part of this epidemic to the required attention to regulatory compliance and monitoring of a growing assortment of labor laws. Part of it also comes from years of HR downsizing and/or outsourcing with technology filling in the gaps. (Have an HR issue? Call the HR Hotline: press 1 for payroll … press 2 for employee benefits … press 3 for employee relations … )

It’s good that someone in HR is asking about the “human” element in human resources. I also think this question needs to be addressed at the executive level. After all, it’s the leadership of an organization that is ultimately responsible for its human resources, not just the HR staff.

If top management really cares about its employees, it will enable the HR staff and all managers to treat the company’s employees as humanly as possible – with dignity and respect for them as real people with real concerns, not unfeeling minions.