We’re nearing the end of the global health crisis, which means that many businesses across the States – and indeed the rest of the world – will be getting back to work and going back to the offices. Going back to the offices may be something that the management is really looking forward to, but for many employees, it means going back to the daily grind of feeling underappreciated and undervalued.
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How to Reward Your Team
It’s a sad fact that in many businesses today, being part of a team and working hard is just not seen as something that is worth value in. This has to change. Here are five reasons to reward your team for boosting their morale and the benefits of doing so.
1. Great Customer Service
Your customer service team faces some challenging times, practically every day. Teams that are on the front lines helping customers over the phone over social media, or evening person, they are likely to face a lot of negativity and a lot of stressful situations.
By recognizing team members who have done a particularly good job at customer service and who have been pre-emptive in their delivery of great customer service, you can actively encourage other team members to do the same and increase the reputation of your customer service team, and your business, both internally and externally.
2. Engaged In Meetings
Sometimes it’s hard to recognize employees who are just doing their job and doing it well, especially if they are doing it quietly! This is why rewarding people for being engaged is a great idea, especially being engaged in meetings.
There aren’t many people in business who enjoy endless meetings, especially long meetings in stuffy office rooms about topics that are not particularly interesting.
If you feel like one of your employees is being particularly good at being engaged, giving helpful feedback, and generally being involved in the meeting even when it doesn’t really affect them, then it’s worth considering rewarding this behavior so that other members of your team and have your business may take note.
3. Upholding Company Values
Getting your company values right is an important step for all businesses, and it should be something that every one of your employees takes seriously. When hiring new employees, be sure to communicate your company values and assess whether or not your new employees will uphold the values both inside and outside the workplace.
That’s not to say that outside the workplace, in their private place of living, employees should be towing the company line, but if you feel like at work one of your employees is being particularly inclusive when it comes to your company values and displaying the sort of values that you are after in your employees, this is really worth rewarding.
While it may be difficult to recognize somebody upholding your company values, being more precise in your wording and your mission statement will help, as this means you can judge your employees’ actions and words against your values more specifically, and you will be able to point out exact times when your employees were behaving in a model way.
This may take the shape of spending extra time helping a disabled customer to carry their coffee to their table or taking a proactive approach to supplier relations by speaking on the phone rather than emailing. It’s these little things that you decide are highly important to your business that should be rewarded at every turn to encourage the rest of your team to act in the same way.
4. Being A Great Team Player
Moving straight on from upholding your company values is being a good team member. Being a good team member is almost like being a good sportsman or good sportswoman, it involves supporting other team members, doing great work, being engaged, and generally being ready to jump in both feet first. While it might seem easy to reward people who are very forthright in their teamwork, it must also be said that your more introverted team members can also be great assets, just in a different way.
For introverts, the very idea of being vocal and putting themselves forward might fill them with dread, but they usually help in different ways, such as getting extra work done that needs to be done or quietly improving on projects in ways that you may not have noticed.
It’s vital that, as a manager, you are on the ball when it comes to recognizing all of the different types of talent your team has and rewarding that talent for doing well.
5. Having Great Ideas
A quote often attributed to the incredible mathematician Albert Einstein is:
“Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
While this quote may be inspirational, it also speaks of the need for great ideas and for trying things out, even if the ideas seem a little bit like “out of the box” thinking.
Employees who have all of the qualifications and experience but who never try to innovate and only do things by the book may not be getting your company the best returns, which is why it’s worth rewarding your employees for having ideas and for following their inspiration. Even tech giant Google encourages their employees to have personal projects and gives them paid time to pursue these in the hopes that they can capitalize on their findings later.
Benefits of Rewarding Your Team
Any one of these above reasons to reward your employees does offer benefits to you, just as much as them and so is worth doing. Employees these days are not looking for a monetary or cash reward just for doing their job, but a little bit of recognition goes a long way, and it can really help build and boost motivation. Rewarding your team makes individuals feel valued. Others feel like they should work harder. It generally builds up competition within teams and within the business so that everyone is working to the best of their abilities. Feeling valued and wanted in your place of work is also a great boost to mental health at work and can help to reduce symptoms of stress and anxiety within high-performance teams.
