Automate your recruiting efforts on a shoestring budget

Daniel Blaser (00:06):

Hello and welcome to On the Clock presented by Workstream. If you care about hiring and retaining hourly employees, you're in the right place for today's episode. We thought we'd try something a little bit different over the last year. One of the top performing blog posts on the Workstream blog was all about employee recognition. Given that we just celebrated Thanksgiving in the United States, it seemed like a good time to resurface that blog post. As a reminder, or if you've never heard it before, given that this is a podcast, we're gonna bring you the audio version of that same article, and hopefully you think my voice is okay because it's going to be narrated by me. Enjoy employee recognition. Seven Ways to Show Appreciation for deskless workers. Hourly workers often hop from company to company, but more and more organizations are realizing that prioritizing employee recognition could be the key to retaining workers.

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Employers want to make employees happy to reduce turnover, avoid knowledge loss, and manage recruitment. Spending something as small as saying thank you can have a profound impact, so how do you ensure you're doing all you can to make workers feel appreciated and recognized? Before we dive into some of the strategies your business can use to improve recognition, let's talk about why it's vital in the first place. First, it's essential to realize how impactful a recognition strategy can be for companies. At Nectar, an employee recognition company, they surveyed 800 full-time employees to gather employee recognition statistics. The results from this survey highlighted the impact that recognition has on employees. 84% of employees feel that recognition affects their motivation to succeed at work. 78% of employees would be more productive if they were recognized more frequently, and 82% of employees agree that praise for their contributions improves their employee engagement.

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Companies also continue to deal with staffing issues. Many organizations are trying to find ways to reduce turnover, and they're trying things like gathering and acting on employee feedback, offering the right benefits and wages, removing toxic management and employees working on building a stronger company culture and improving workforce engagement. Thankfully, employee recognition helps you to advance a lot of these retention goals. So now that you understand a little bit more why you need to invest in recognizing workers, how do you make it a reality? Here are some strategies your company can use no matter your team size. Number one, rethink your beliefs about how often you should recognize workers. Have you ever heard the phrase Won't giving out more recognition? Make our team members value it less. While providing more recognition can feel like spoiling your employees, the data doesn't support that. Those same nectar employee recognition statistics found that employees felt more valued by their employer when they received recognition more frequently.

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While 94% of employees felt valued when receiving weekly praise, only 68% felt valued when receiving quarterly recognition. When employees received recognition just yearly, the outcomes were much worse with only 37% of employees feeling valued. If you are depriving your team of frequent praise, consider what providing it more often could do for your bottom line. Number two, define goals for your recognition program. Before investing in appreciation, it's essential to understand and define your goals. Once you understand your goals, you can track the right metrics and create a program that helps you meet your intended results. Here are a few examples of the goals you might have. Number one, improve retention in your organization. Number two, spot potential workplace leaders for deeper mentorship. Number three, encourage employees in between yearly review cycles. Or number four, build comradery in the workplace. Training your people, managers. Managers are one of your best assets when it comes to giving recognition of the survey.

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Results discussed earlier, 47% of hourly workers valued recognition from managers over peers. If you want to improve the impact of your recognition program, managers need to understand how to give timely and specific feedback. Training managers on how to make time for recognition, what a good worker shout out looks like, and how to understand their workers' praise. Preferences are key. Encourage peers to get involved. Colleagues are often able to see things that managers and executives don't. For example, they know when a colleague went above and beyond to serve a customer or help a coworker by picking up a shift. Here's often highlight the type of praise that leaders want to see. How do workers act when managers aren't around to see them? But getting peers involved also takes effort. Some workers might be afraid to recognize each other, especially if you've created an environment based on heavy competition For scarce company resources.

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Workers also value recognition from peers, but you have to set them up for success. Before implementing a peer recognition program, make sure workers know you value their input. Show each team member how to send a good shout out and give team members time during each shift to recognize each other's efforts. Lead by example. Praise isn't a one and done experience. It needs to be something you continually push and promote. If company leaders aren't actively giving out recognition, eventually others will stop too. Company leaders and executives should focus on creating a recognition habit. Solicit shout outs from your general managers that you share with the entire company on a monthly basis. If you're able to give praise in person, do it. Even five minutes to walk the building and say thank you to an employee can make a huge difference. The goal is to ensure that praise is woven into the fabric of your organization.

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You don't want it to be a last minute afterthought that you pull out when engagement is down. Instead, you want it to happen as often as possible. Tie recognition to tangible gifts and prizes. Once a worker receives recognition, what they do with it, giving workers access to fun prizes like gift cards, company swag and experiences can take praise to the next level. There are many ways that you can tie recognition to tangible gifts. Some companies do something manually like giving out recognition cards that can be accumulated and turned in for fun prizes. While manual processes can work, it can be challenging for employees to keep track of these physical cards. Most of all, it's difficult for companies to budget for these rewards and track where the cards go. Could you end up rewarding the wrong employee because they happen to pick up a lost card?

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Many companies are turning to employee recognition tools to make the process easier to manage and more cost effective. Invest in an employee recognition software. After you've invested energy in workplace praise, it makes sense to transition to employee recognition. Software technology can help you streamline the process across your organization effectively, budget, reward, spending, and help your workers feel valued at work. Here are a couple of must haves for picking the right employee recognition platform. Number one, ease of use. How much training will workers need to use the tool effectively? Will administrators spend hours learning how to use your chosen platform? The platform you pick should be straightforward and easy to use. Number two, mobile access. Many hourly workers don't have access to a company computer, but most all of them have a mobile phone. You should make sure that any software you consider has a platform that can be accessed via a mobile phone browser or application.

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Number three, email address. Flexibility in your business. Managers and leaders may be the only people who have official email addresses, but you need everyone to have access to a recognition tool. Look for programs that give you flexibility on which emails go to that program. For example, can you use a Gmail or Yahoo address or does the platform require that? Every email address is company branded. Number four, integrations. You want a platform that can easily sync up with your existing HRIS platform so you have one source of truth for the workers in your company. Number five, analytics. Lastly, you need a tool that can give you basic analytics. Just strengthen your employee recognition process. Recognition can be improved, but keeping up with the shoutouts shared across your organization is often challenging. When you use a recognition tool, you'll be able to understand precisely where praise is flowing throughout your organization.

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For example, if recognition is accurately tracked, you can see how individual managers are doing with praise. You can also see how productive those teams are based on other analytics you have access to. As you move to increase retention and improve employee engagement. Recognition often comes up. Hourly workers deserve praise for the work they do every single day. Thankfully, investing in the retention of these workers doesn't cost as much as we think. If you are new to employee recognition, you can start by simply writing thank you notes or providing an occasional gift card to employees while they're working. Once you're ready, you can take praise to the next level by investing in software that helps you streamline the process and give employees a wider variety of rewards, no matter where you are in your journey. Your team will appreciate your focus on improving engagement and retention. Thank you for listening to On the Clock. If you enjoyed this audio version of our blog, let us know and we'll do more of them. Until next time, we're clocking out.