Worker Happiness

Many believe that worker happiness can lead to employee satisfaction, to better employee engagement and then on to increased productivity.  It’s easy to feel this way and kind of hard to refute that a happy employee is a more engaged employee.

However New York’s Conference Board, a century-old research firm, began studying employee satisfaction and engagement 25 years ago. Their work shows that worker happiness has fallen every year since–in good economic times and bad. Today, over half of American workers effectively hate their jobs.  So what’s going on?

In our opinion many companies have lost sight of what matters most to people at work. Appreciation. Support. Recognition. Respect. Every company thinks that they have these values and act accordingly.  If so why are so many employees still disengaged?

To begin to understand this conundrum there are three things that management needs to re-learn and never forget:

1. What makes people happiest in their jobs are all profoundly personal. According to a Towers Watson study, the single highest driver of employee engagement is whether the employees feel their managers are genuinely interested in their well being.  Today only 40% of workers feel that.
2. People only thrive when they feel recognized and appreciated. To do that management must manage from their hearts.  It’s the heart that connects us us human beings. 
3. Your employees will stay connected to your company if you tell them directly you need them, care about them, and sincerely plan to support them. Any time someone quits a job for a reason other than money, they’re leaving in hope that things will be better somewhere else. 

It was once said that “measuring happiness is about as easy as taking the temperature of the soul or determining the exact color of love.”  Work, as well as everything else in life is likely to make us feel wide range of emotions.  It’s great to feel happiness, but you can’t will it into existence.

For more information on Ultimate Choice Inc.’s products or services or other white papers please contact us at Ultimatechoiceinfo@cox.net

Is a New Award Industry Emerging?

In our last post we discussed the ISO 10018 and what it might mean to the entire subject of employee engagement in the future.  In this post we’ll take a look at what the next generation of the award industry might be, or at least what some of the folks in the industry would like it to be. 

If ISO 10018 sets high standards for employee engagement it will make it more difficult for full service award companies to claim that they can drive sustainable employee engagement unless they demonstrate the knowledge and services required by ISO 10018.  ISO will provide the road map of the standards, with the assumption that companies will have to become ISO certified in order to make the claims.  Of course that doesn’t preclude anyone from selling the many pieces of the engagement process like just the awards, the research etc.

The objective is for ISO 10018 to have the same clout within the award industry as the highly respected ISO 9001 standards which started the total quality management movement in the 1980's.  Today over 1.3 million companies worldwide follow ISO 9001.  The philosophy of employee engagement has developed and grown over the last couple of decades.  But by all measures customer and employee engagement have risen very little over that time. 

Some believe that when ISO standards are launched in an organization that all activities will align in a way that is rarely applied today.  All or most companies are still separate with regard to customers, employees, finance, sales and marketing, operations vendors and human resources, et. al.  Unless and until employee engagement is proven to have dramatic effect on the bottom line, pulling all of these disparate units together could be insurmountable. 

Employee Engagement can be a far reaching strategy as we move forward. But until it becomes that strategy that drives an organization, the vast majority of engagement vendors will continue to sell pieces of it.  Certainly ISO 10018 may help to change that, and while there are handful of full service award companies that do have the resources to sell a total EE package, our guess is that much will remain the same. 

There will always be companies like us who claim, rightfully so, that our product can be very effective in improving employee engagement. 

For more information on Ultimate Choice Inc.’s products or services or other white papers please contact us at Ultimatechoiceinfo@cox.net

ISO 10018 and Employee Engagement

ISO 10018 is a new ISO standard for organizations of all sizes, types and activities to provide a framework for getting the best out of people in the implementation of quality management systems based on ISO 9001.

It is also something that some in the traditional incentive, rewards and recognition industry feel has the potential to elevate our industry to new levels of expertise never seen before.  I certainly hope so but so many things have to happen before that can come to fruition.  

ISO 9000 fostered thousands of consultants who work within that arena.  Many feel that when ISO 10018 finalizes their standards for employee engagement that it will open a market for thousands of award companies who claim today that their products and services engage people. That’s a big jump!

There’s little dispute that more investors are demanding that public companies invest in human capital and engagement. Will the arrival of ISO 10018 provide us with a better, more scientific way of developing engagement strategies capable of achieving incontestable solutions?  And will it produce award companies who have the capability to provide the full service necessary to make it all work? 

That would seem to assume that the industry has not been able to do that up to this time.  Frankly, most suppliers in the industry can’t.  They just provide pieces of the solution or act as sub-contractors to those who say that they can.  They are not really involved in strategy, merely tactics.  And many of us love it that way.  We sell commodities, we know and understand that and will never be standing in the boardroom talking those intricate strategies?

The award industry has craved the demand and respect earned by the marketing and advertising industry for years.  Unfortunately, most award companies can’t afford to or won’t invest in the expertise and manpower to deserve that respect.  They would also have to completely change their way of thinking regarding how they earn their money, from making profit on selling commodities to consulting fees for designing and implementing strategies that are effective. 

When the ISO 10018 standards finally come about and establish an accepted strategic framework, we hope some of the award companies can make that transition.  It would be nice to see. 

Gift Cards Preferred Gift for Special Occasions

In 2017, research by InComm, the market leader in new payment technologies and solutions, found that consumers turn to gift cards for many life events not just the holidays

For years the award industry judiciously fought the onslaught of gift cards as a reward in incentive or recognition programs.  They asserted that because they are cash like, they are the same as cash and should not be used for awards for the same reasons you really shouldn’t use cash for awards.  The real reason for that debate was that the traditional incentive award companies had profits exceeding 80% onmerchandise awards and 10% or less on gift cards. 

Gift cards succeeded because they have become a way of life in our culture.  It’s what many award winners want because they can get the award they really want in the most cost effective way.

Now, according to the research we find that gift cards are being used for 82% of birthdays, 39% for graduations and 52% as a thank you. 

In these instances the 92% of the survey respondents gave two or more gift cards and 54% gave five or more.

In addition, 82% said they would appreciate receiving a gift card for those occasions as well.

Younger consumers are finding even more occasions in which to give a gift card.  Millennia respondents between 25 and 34 noted they often give cards for things such as new babies and new home ownership.

Gift cards are appropriate for any number of occasions, alleviating much of the stress that can come with shopping for “just the right gift.”  This versatility benefits both the giver and the recipient. 

For more information on Ultimate Choice Inc.’s gift card products or services or other white papers please contact us at Ultimatechoiceinfo@cox.net

If It’s Right – It’s Right

The incentive industry, or motivation industry, or award industry (call it what you want) has been discussing all the reasons why you should implement a non-cash employee award program for years.  Long before the term employee engagement became so fashionable, they were extolling the benefits of recognizing and awarding employees for their performance. 

The incentive industry has been trying to prove a hard dollar ROI for these types of programs since the beginning.  Why, simply because that’s what the financial management wanted to see before they would approve the budgets for the awards.  So the industry scrambled around for years and spent millions on research just to prove that hypothesis. 

Sorry, in all we’ve seen, you can’t draw a straight line from giving an employee a $50 gift card for superior performance and the fact that what they did resulted in $127 to the bottom line. Sure it can be part of it, but there are too many pieces to the profit puzzle interconnected with employee awards to show the empirical evidence.

So stop doing it!  As Paul Hebert, a friend and extremely knowledgeable in the awards industry and enlightened contributor on “Fistful of Talent” said not so long ago…

“If you’re looking for business rationale to recognize people in your organization, you’re doing it wrong.”

Start looking at employee recognition as something other than a way to give your employees more stuff and start looking at it as something to do because it simply the right thing to do.  It makes sense, it does engage your employees, it does make them feel good, it does keep them motivated and on the job and they will stay with your company longer than the disgruntled employees who won’t. 

Have you ever noticed an employee from a supplier you work with, or service person in a retail store, or the receptionist or nurse in your doctor’s office, or teller or assistant manager in your bank, that was always smiling and genuinely ready to provide you with great service?  Sure you have.  And when you did, did you thank them for their service, or remark on how nice they were or how well they performed?  Did you ask them if they were ever thanked and rewarded for their service by their management?  You might be surprised at their answer.  Some industry research would indicate that at least 50% probably weren’t.

If your management won’t take the time to recognize good performance it’s a shame, too many don’t.  But if you want to retain and grow your best employees you should, if not someone else surely will.

As Paul Hebert says…

”don’t worry about the ROI…worry about the ROH…the return on humanity.”

For more information on Ultimate Choice Inc.’s products or services or other white papers please contact us at Ultimatechoiceinfo@cox.net