With the Great Resignation in full swing, many business leaders are scrambling to find ways to help prevent their good employees from jumping ship.

One way to help counteract the exodus of talent from organizations is through recognizing and rewarding employees for their service.

Here are 10 creative ways to give kudos to your employees:

1. Share Employee Content on Your Blog

If you have employees that like to write (and that's not their main role), share their content on your company's blog.

2. Recognize Outside-of-Work Success

Share your employees' successes outside of work on social media channels, your internal website, or your company's website.

3. Showcase the Monetary or Volunteer Impact of Employee Efforts

If an employee's efforts on a project contributed positively to the bottom line, highlight that in some manner to your employee base. You can also draw attention to employees who support charitable contributions through either donations or volunteer time.

4. Provide Stipends for Long-Distance Commuters

Employees living far away or who often experience heavy traffic during their commutes could receive stipends to help pay for gas.

5. Use Gamification Apps to Fuel Productivity and Motivation

Gamification gives employees an entertaining way to meet company requirements, such as training. What might often be a tedious process could be transformed into something fun. Check out what Edgagement, Hoopla, and Gametize apps have to offer along these lines.

6. Share Kudos from Customers

Create an Employee Wall of Fame to highlight customer feedback directed at particular employees or teams.

7. Share Employee Kudos

At the start of your meetings, recognize employees for the small, daily wins. These are often overlooked, but these shout-outs can go a long way towards increasing employee morale.

8. Surprise Employees with Snacks or Meals

Bring in or order food during busy workdays. It lets your employees know you appreciate their hard work.

9. Provide Sabbaticals for Long-Timers

For employees who have been with the company for five, seven, or 10 years (for example), consider providing them with sabbaticals. That way, they can take quality time off work to pursue their passion and return to work refreshed and ready to re-engage with your company.

10. Use the Power of a Post-It Note

I left this for last because it's something you can start doing today!

Who doesn't like a personal touch to show appreciation? A simple post-it note with a meaningful message that you place on an employee's desk is a simple act that can go a long way to show appreciation.


These are just a few things you can do to recognize and reward your employees. Doing so can help keep employees happy and can also help build a foundation of increased loyalty to your company.

And what business leader wouldn't want that?

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I have an announcement! I am now providing a new service to prospective and current clients. I'm still determining my messaging, so here's the bare-bones description:

If you or anyone you know are stuck in the middle of a project and don't know how to get it moving forward...

Or, you want to start projects, but don't have the internal bandwidth to undertake them, talk with me!  I have over 30 years of project management expertise, so I can help accelerate projects over the finish line.

Interested in learning more? Click the button below to schedule a chat!

This week I am honored to have Henning Schwinum as my guest writer. He has great thoughts to share on SMARTER Delegation as a Leader!

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Delegation is a core element of successful leadership in companies large and small.

Good delegation saves time, develops people, grooms a successor, and motivates. It provides growth and development opportunities and allows a leader to focus on other priorities.

Poor delegation, on the other hand, will cause you frustration, demotivates and confuses the other person, and fails to achieve the task or purpose itself. Delegation often fails for a number of reasons: lack of clarity, the preparation and resources available to the delegate, and choosing the wrong person in the first place.

As such, delegation is a management skill and a business process that's worth improving. It is a series of deliberate actions or motions leading to results. It is not a gutfeel, spur-of-the-moment type activity.

Let’s start with what to delegate. When deciding, use the same rule you apply for goal setting: SMART or SMARTER.

1. Specific
   
2. Measurable
   
3. Agreed
   
4. Realistic
5. Time-bound
6. Ethical
7. Recordable
   

Then, have a clear understanding between yourself and the delegate because every time you delegate work, three core elements of delegation are in play. (1) Authority, (2) Responsibility, and (3) Accountability form an integrated process and must be applied as a unified whole.

1. Authority Can Be Delegated

As a leader, you can transfer pieces of your formal authority to another teammate when assigning a task to that person. In essence, you can deputize your teammate to take action on your behalf within the boundaries of the delegated (transferred) authority.

2. Responsibility Cannot Be Delegated, but It Can Be Assigned

As a leader, you can assign responsibility to another teammate in terms of the results that need to be achieved. However, you need to keep in mind that you only assigned responsibility to your teammate. You can never entirely hand off any of your responsibilities to someone else. Assigned responsibility should be made in terms of the goals or results to be accomplished, not the detailed specifics for doing the job.

3. Accountability

Accountability is the moral compulsion felt by a teammate to meet the goals and objectives of an assigned task. As a result of accepting a task assignment, your teammate, in effect, gives you a promise—either expressed or implied—to do their best in carrying out the activities associated with it. Having taken on the task, your teammate is obligated to complete it and thus is held accountable by you for the results produced.

And for start-ups and smaller, growth-minded businesses Amy Volas has some very encouraging news:

“Every single scaling company will reach a point where delegation is essential for future growth. …if you can truly empower the brilliant people you've surrounded yourself with to offset what's bogging you down while providing them with a chance to take on more, learn, grow, and thrive, the returns will be tenfold.”

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Contracting an interim or fractional executive is an act of delegation. I encourage you to reach out to Henning to find out how he and his team can make you successful.

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Derwin Dexter Sy – Why Is Delegation So Hard?
LeadingBlog – The 3 Core Elements of Delegation
Amy Volas – Why Delegation Isn’t an Option, But a Necessity in Sales Leadership

I've been talking to a prospective client over the last couple days about the benefits of Scrum and how it would be a great tool to use for their CRM implementation.

Not sure what Scrum is? In short, it's a project management framework is used for developing products.

Anyway, it got me to thinking--it's been awhile since I've talked about the value of Scrum. So, I thought I would share with you an experience I had with a client to illustrate how this Agile tool revolutionized this manufacturer's business.

Prior to my engagement with my client, they had a very cumbersome, rigid product development process. This became evident when it took them two-to-three years to develop their last new product. Considering the complexity of the product involved, it took them waaay too long! They were like a truck stuck in the mud!

The CEO knew there was a better way. That’s why he hired me! And because I'm a certified Professional Scrum Master, this project was right up my alley.

The first thing I did was to carry over lessons learned from their previous development effort into the new process. I did this to prevent those issues from happening again.

Next, I trained them on Scrum and we developed the new process together.

In just two months, the process development piece was complete and I left the project in their very capable hands.

And the results were great! Eight months later, they launched not only their originally planned product, but five other component systems that fit across their whole product line. If you take the additional products they developed into account, they experienced a product speed-to-market increase of over 100%!

They are so thrilled with Scrum, they are implementing it company-wide, including non-product related functions, like Marketing. And the results have been great so far!

So, if you want to prevent your project from getting stuck in in the mud and want to kick it into high gear, Scrum could be your answer.

And if you're interested in learning more about Scrum or how to transform you business, I'd love to have a chat! Just click the button below to schedule a time