How it works...
Finding a perfect work-life balance is hard. We spend a good part of our life around the workplace, including time spent working at home or remaining late. With all that time away from key social aspects of our lifes, it is critical to ensure that employees feel appreciated and valued at work. However, showing appreciation doesn't come naturally to everyone. It is hard to find the right words face to face, transforming a positive meeting into and akward scramble. Between customer meetings, travel and a day by day unpredictable schedule, it tends to be difficult to make "saying thanks" a priority.
Are your team members accomplishing their month to month or quarterly targets? Even with great salaries and realistic OKRs in place, it is often hard to find the right level of enthusiasm and commitment in a team. We have been programmed to think more cash and better planning automatically leads to happier and more productive engineers but experiments have shown over and over that money isn't the best motivator. What employees value most is self-guidance and appreciation at the workplace. When is the last time you told your co-worker that he mattered and that you couldn't do the job without him or her? It is time to make a change to how we deliver incentives, away from large cash sums, towards small but meaningful gestures.
Company core values are often key to how a company perceives itself and wants to grow. They are cornerstones to employee behaviour and can influence everything from hiring to planning and day-to-day interactions. But when is the last time your employees thought about these all so important values? Is it really enough to simply reiterate them once every quarter? By associating "saying thanks" with core values we not only bring values to the attention of every employee, we can also measure how much the company is really following them. If a core value isn't mentioned it might be time to invest into it through training or mentoring.
Teams are like families - they fight, they argue and the make up. But how do we know when a team has gone sour? 1 to 1 meetings can highlight issues but often team culture is overlooked. It is simply hard to bring up "things aren't working well" in a conversation. Instead it is important to have the right measures in place to bring up issues proactively. An employee is much more likely to answer truthfully if asked directly about a problem: "Are you and John working less often together these days?" is a better conversation starter than just plainly asking if anything isn't right. Measuring interaction between colleagues through their appreciation messages can be a great early indicator for problems. And every family has them after all.
From startups to mature companies: process is a motivation killer. There is nothing more daunting than filling out a 10 page review on all the positives and negatives of a quarter. Not only is half of all work forgotten, many small interactions that were critical to a project are not added to reports. Instead small messages, added directly when they happened, and characterized by their impact, are easier to create and actually paint a much clearer picture of performance. It takes less than 30 seconds to fill out a small message and send it off. Compare that to the dreaded end of quarter review process.