If recruiting employees is about empowering, retaining employees is about celebrating—showing gratitude and appreciation. Keeping your employees happy and encouraging them to want to stay isn’t magic. Business owners should celebrate the new people coming on, and include their families. You want people to want to come to work. You want people who want to work in the environment that you’re creating. But how do you create that kind of environment?
By establishing the right culture and putting a laser focus on employee appreciation.
Paul and I know very well that it takes great effort and dedication to build a beautiful, healthy culture…and next to nothing to rip it apart. One small incident that takes place in a corporation that the leadership turns a blind eye to, doesn’t address and doesn’t fix, and that culture can turn sour overnight.
Employee appreciation is a key element for maintaining culture. Paul and I have created various internal awards to acknowledge exceptional work. But we do much more than just say, “Hey, thanks, here’s a certificate.” Instead, we give the employee some type of monetary gift, $250 or $500 depending on the context of the award, a nice bonus to take the family out to dinner and maybe go buy a little something special they might not have spent their own money on.
In fact, we believe so strongly in the concept of employee appreciation and recognition that the bottom of our policy manual has written in big, black, bold letters: “If we get it right with you, you’ll get it right with the customer.”
Don’t believe me? A recent article entitled “10 Powerful Employee Recognition Stats” showed that as much as 40 percent of employed Americans say they’d put more energy into their work if they were recognized more often. And how about this: “If organizations double the number of employees who receive recognition for their work on a weekly basis, they will experience a 24 percent improvement in quality, a 27 percent reduction in absenteeism, and a 10 percent reduction in shrinkage.”
As a business owner, hiring people is very much like investing. But putting employees first means investing in them beyond just a paycheck. Paul and I both have attended dozens wedding showers, baby showers, first houses, and even U.S. citizenship ceremonies because we consider our employees family.
Paul and I may have put this culture in motion, but the employees have embraced it and owned it, and now it’s taken on a life of its own. For the employees, it’s their culture, it’s their company. We don’t organize Halloween events, or the chili cookoffs, or the Thanksgiving Day potlucks, or the ongoing fundraisers. The employees do. Because they feel that they are a part of something meaningful, and they know we put them first.
John Mackey, the CEO and co-founder of Whole Foods Market said it best: “If you are lucky enough to be someone’s employer, then you have a moral obligation to make sure people do look forward to coming to work in the morning.”