Donna Flagg

Employee Appreciation: Making Everyone Count
January 18, 2008

A lot of companies focus on employee appreciation programs on a macro level and even more of them put considerable effort and resources behind customer appreciation programs.  Where the challenges occur however is in drilling down to create a sense of value for employees on the micro or individual levels.

It reminds me of a sales meeting I attended earlier in my career when the topic of employee appreciation came up as an outgrowth of a presentation that I’d been asked to give on customer appreciation and loyalty. I’d managed a large sales territory and was highly ranked in customer relationships and retention.

My boss, the owner of the company, decidedly said that we needed to be better at valuing our employees in the same vein that we valued (and retained) our customers. He challenged all of us to figure out a way to better engage employees, making it sound as though we’d have to go back to our offices and calculate some complex set of formulaic variables.

The conversation went something like this:

Boss: “Donna, how do you create loyalty on your team?”

Me: “Well I appreciate them and the contributions they make.”

Boss: “And how do you do that?”

Me: “I make sure they know they are valued.”

Boss: “But how exactly?”

Me: “I tell them...?”

Boss: “But what do you say?”

Me: “What do you mean ‘what do I say?’ I don’t understand. I say, ‘I value you’ and then I usually thank them for all of their hard work. 

His face dropped. He was stunned by its simplicity. I guess it is often true that something so simple can also be hard when it’s not a regular part of our daily habits and practices.

Posted by Donna Flagg on January 18, 2008 | Comments (0)