Celebrate to Motivate

It was January 2018, and I was standing on a stage at a beautiful resort in Cancun, Mexico. Sitting in the audience were 200 of our sales and services people, along with 150 of their guests. We were all there on our annual Legend Makers trip, intended to reward top-performing Kronites for their efforts. One highlight of the trip is the awards banquet, at which we present a series of long-term Milestone awards recognizing employees who have earned the Legend Makers trip multiple times.

At events like these, senior leaders often recognize high-achieving individuals, shake their hands, and say some words of thanks. On this evening, I went further and asked each Kronite who was celebrating 15 years as a Legend Maker award winner to join me on stage one at a time in front of all attendees. I spent a few minutes with each of them, reviewing highlights of his or her career—my memories of significant customer wins, how he or she went above and beyond for customers, and so on. During this personal exchange, I also explained the impact that the individual employee had achieved at Kronos.

One Kronite, Jay, confessed upon coming to the stage that he was worried he looked older up there. I joked around with him, telling him that he looked the same as when I first met him. Then I got down to business. Reminding everyone that Jay was a boomerang, I told him that “everything you’ve ever done at Kronos has been remarkable,” including opening up new territories and selling our biggest accounts and newest products. I recognized his “endless courage, commitment, focus,” and the “magical way [he had] of getting other people to feel great about working with you, and they want to help you, and they want to be part of your team, and they want to be successful with you, and they want to be around you,” and that included me. On an even more personal note, I also told him that I admired how he looked out for his parents, his wife, Jill, and his boys, and that he was a beacon at Kronos for the extraordinary dedication he showed to his family. I closed by recounting a story of how he persevered with a prospective client, working for months before closing a multimillion-dollar deal for us with a major hotel brand.

After Jay left the stage, I called up Peter, who runs our Australian operations. I recounted how we’d met 19 years prior in Sydney, and how he’d transformed a small operation into a leader in Australia and New Zealand. I recognized his immense professional courage, and his ability to build a special team. “You spend as much time telling me how your people are doing as you do telling me how you’re doing,” I said. “You get more pride in the success of your team members than your own success.” I told him that this is why his team is so devoted to him—because he’d do anything for them. “I want to thank you,” I said. “You know how I feel about you, how special you are to me,” and that we “would not be the company we are” without his efforts.

After these presentations, we adjourned for dinner. As I circulated among the Legend Maker winners and their invited guests, I found that many people in the room were astonished that the CEO of a global company knew so much about a sales or service person and could speak about him or her with such familiarity and passion. “I’ve never seen anything like that,” people said to me afterward. I thought, “Wow. Never? That’s a shame.”

As I’ve learned over my career, it’s critical to recognize people for their professional accomplishments and personal milestones. It goes to the core of performance. Employees appreciate recognition from others, and they’re more motivated to perform when they receive it. As one of our Legend Maker recipients put it, the event is motivating because “you’re at a spectacular resort, you’re hanging out with the best of the best in the company, and it makes you really feel good that you’re at the top echelon of your peers.” Do you suppose this Kronite would return from a Legend Makers trip feeling only so-so about his job and our company? Of course not!

Conversely, when employees don’t receive recognition, they become demotivated and begin seeking work elsewhere. In 2015, our corporate think tank, The Workforce Institute at Kronos, polled 855 U.S. employees, asking them questions about the factors that led to their day-to-day happiness on the job. The industry thought leadership survey found a direct correlation between employees who felt underappreciated and those actively looking for a new job. Of the 61 percent of respondents who said that they had thought about looking for a new job within the past 12 months, a majority—59 percent—felt either unappreciated or only somewhat appreciated at work. A mere 11 percent felt strongly appreciated.¹

Many organizations and teams have programs in place to reward outstanding performance, offering trips, bonuses, and the like. Yet these standard programs might not go far enough, especially when leaders don’t become personally involved in extending recognition and gratitude. As our industry survey found, 50 percent of employees either didn’t feel appreciated or felt only a little appreciated. Over 40 percent reported that their company was only “average” in the appreciation it showed to employees, and a good slice of respondents—20 percent—said their company was “one of the worst” in this area.

Is employee recognition lackluster or an afterthought in your organization? If you’re a manager, is thanking and celebrating team members something you do as a matter of course, rather than a focus of real enthusiasm, creativity, and innovation? To build engagement and enhance performance, managers have to make legends out of their most deserving employees, and organizations must create an array of formal mechanisms to recognize the greatness of individual employees and to mark turning points in their lives. It’s about creating a culture of gratitude and acknowledgment. Your organization has extraordinary contributors working for it, and you have so much to gain by taking notice and celebrating them.

SIX TECHNIQUES FOR SAYING “THANK YOU”

In recent years, as we’ve worked on building our WorkInspired culture, we’ve updated and enhanced our corporate programs recognizing and rewarding great performance. Employees now single them out as a reason why they love working at our organization. But why keep them a secret? Companies of any size and sector can use the following strategies to foster a strong, creative, and enduring culture of employee celebration.

Create Forums for Employees to Thank One Another

One Friday morning in 2017, shortly before her team relocated to our new headquarters in Lowell, Massachusetts, one of our employees, Melissa, stopped by the new offices to take a look. She was blown away by how beautiful and functional the space was, and felt moved to say thanks to the dozens of Kronites who in one way or another had helped design and outfit the new headquarters. In many organizations of any size, it’s difficult for employees to express public gratitude—there isn’t a forum for it. For Melissa, though, it was easy: just jump on our internal collaboration platform, and write a post. “I just wanted to share some thoughts and give kudos to all involved in our 5HIFT to Lowell,” Melissa wrote. “I am utterly impressed with how much thought went into the design.” Others posted comments affirming her sentiments, with one writing: “Love this enthusiasm on a Friday!”

Gratitude shouldn’t just flow from the top of the organization down, but horizontally as well. In our 2015 Workforce Institute study, over two-thirds of respondents told us that they felt a sense of satisfaction when fielding positive feedback from other employees.

Kronites thank one another all the time on our collaboration tool, and they have also used 5HIFT Shout-Outs, a global peer-to-peer recognition program that allows employees to acknowledge the efforts of colleagues cross-functionally and in any region. We unrolled Shout-Outs as part of our continued efforts to become a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company. All Kronites have the unlimited opportunity to recognize colleagues for one of our five “5HIFT Behaviors” we needed to see for our SaaS transformation to succeed: “customer first, humility, empowerment, collaboration, and courage.”² Kronites fill out a brief online form, describing the employee and the behavior they want to recognize, and the company sends a congratulatory thank-you e-mail to the Shout-Out recipient and his or her manager. The recipient’s name also appears on our Make the 5HIFT site for all Kronites to see, and we enter him or her as well as the name of the Shout-Out nominator into a monthly drawing to receive a gift card. At the end of the year, we select three grand prize winners from among Shout-Out nominators and recipients to receive weekend getaways of their choosing.

It didn’t take long for the program to catch on. To keep senior leaders updated on the program’s impact, we send them monthly data dashboards. During the program’s first year, Kronites sent over 5,000 Shout-Outs. As one Kronite told us, “Of all the recognition programs I’ve seen, this one is my favorite—simple and effective!” A manager told us that Shout-Outs were a “good way to reach out to people [who] might be remote or [whom] you might have never met before, but [who] helped you out big time with something little or at the last minute.”

Allow Teams, Departments, and Business Units to Offer Their Own Recognition

Several departments layered their own Shout-Out programs on top of our corporate contest, giving Kronites within their team extra opportunities for recognition and rewards. Marketing, for instance, ran separate cash raffles at each of its quarterly update meetings for employees who gave or received Shout-Outs during the quarter. Two other departments within Kronos ran monthly recognition programs, while one department ran a weekly Shout-Out program. These programs recognized Kronites for meaningful contributions they made in the course of their daily work. One particular Kronite received a Shout-Out for collaborating on a customer issue after hours, staying on the phone with the customer for more than two hours. Another Kronite received one for being the “point person” for a unit’s move to our new headquarters, working diligently to ensure that the move went smoothly.

Corporate doesn’t have to “own” recognition. Rather, it can serve as an instigator and promoter of other grassroots recognition programs that spontaneously develop across the organization. Leaders should also encourage departments and teams to develop their own internal awards programs tailored to their discrete goals and initiatives. Our finance department, for instance, publicly recognizes a number of team members at the end of its quarterly meetings for exemplifying our core competencies of character, competence, and collaboration, with each winner receiving a bonus. Our product, technology, and cloud group has pursued a manager-to-employee recognition program called High Five. Managers recognize achievement during the work week, handing out High Five chips as well as verbal recognition. Once an employee receives a chip, he or she is added to an online ranking board. At the end of the year, team members who have amassed the most chips receive rewards.

With both corporate and team or department programs in place, Kronites can be recognized multiple times in the same quarterly cycle, and that recognition can come from multiple sources. The way we see it, the more recognition, the better!

Provide Special Opportunities for Employees to Thank Their Managers

Many organizations don’t think to publicly celebrate successful managers the way they might celebrate their top sales leaders. But we do. As I related in Chapter 4, we believe that every Kronite deserves a great manager, and we have invested in management development across the organization through our Courage to Lead training program. Perceiving celebration to be an important and necessary part of this investment, we created a Courage to Lead Award program to recognize outstanding managers. All managers at Kronos are eligible, with nominations coming directly from employees via an online portal. Each year, our executive committee selects up to 25 winners from among our approximately 800 people managers, bringing them to Boston near our corporate headquarters for a special awards ceremony, and giving each recipient a vacation getaway. After the awards ceremony, we further promote the year’s Courage to Lead winners in various ways.

Besides motivating managers to improve, a formal program that enables employees to thank their managers accomplishes a number of important objectives at once. It injects gratitude into our culture and sends a message about how much we value and support managers. It also enables us to highlight the specific manager behaviors we’re trying to encourage. Perhaps most important, it gives employees a voice, affirming the notion that our leadership team is listening directly to them, and that they can help build the culture that they want.

Provide Public Recognition, Not Just Rewards

Kronites like receiving gift cards and other rewards—who doesn’t? But pure public recognition goes a long way, too.

A member of our legal team, Lauren, began in our marketing department but had always dreamed of becoming a lawyer, so she went to law school at night while continuing to work for us full time. Our legal team heard that Lauren had enrolled as a law student, and began discussing her studies with her in the hallway. Over time, friendships grew. When Lauren graduated, we happened to have an opening in our legal department, and jumped to hire her. Lauren was thrilled, as it was difficult for newly minted attorneys to find a job as a corporate counsel without having put in years first at outside law firms. Today, Lauren helps us with customer contracts, applying the knowledge about our sales process she’s gained from her earlier marketing work.

One of Lauren’s colleagues found her story so inspiring that she nominated Lauren to be profiled on “Career Spotlight,” a special feature we produce that profiles Kronites and their career stories. Any Kronite at any level can nominate a fellow employee. Our communications team then interviews the person nominating the employee, the nominee, and the nominee’s manager and writes an inspiring story. This recognition not only raises the profile of the featured Kronite within the organization, but also promotes our culture of caring. Further, the profiles provide examples of professional and personal growth that serve as road maps for younger Kronites contemplating their career direction.

Lauren’s profile ran under the headline “Attorney at Law, Chaser of Dreams.” Other Kronites were so inspired by her story that they posted comments on our internal collaboration platform, where we promoted the profile, to congratulate her on the recognition and all she had accomplished. “[Lauren] is an inspiration to me,” one wrote. “She is fiercely intelligent and driven—and at the same time a great teammate. I am thrilled that she has been able to realize her dream while remaining part of the Kronos family.” Imagine how valued Lauren must have felt to have been validated in this way not just by the organization but by her colleagues.

Recognize Your People for Referring New Employees

Many companies offer bonuses or other incentives to employees for helping the organization recruit new talent. For years, we gave out cash rewards when we hired employee referrals. In 2016, we revamped this program to maximize its impact. Whenever a Kronite refers a potential hire, we enter him or her into a quarterly drawing, giving him or her a chance to win merchandise from our company store. If we hire the referral, the referring Kronite receives a cash reward. At the end of the year, we enter all hired referrals and Kronites who referred them into a Hiring Hero Recognition drawing. The winning duo (a new hire and the Kronite who referred him or her) can choose more items from our store. Significantly, this program rewards and acknowledges all Kronite referrals equally (we used to pay more of a bonus for people hired into senior level positions). This feature reflects our belief that great businesses are powered by great people at every level, and that we as a company should care for all people
equally.

Practice Mass Gratitude

Another tactic we deploy is to hold events that allow us to express gratitude to large groups of Kronites all at once. Each summer, more than 1,500 Kronites at our corporate headquarters take an afternoon off from work to attend an employee appreciation picnic. It’s an enormous BBQ extravaganza, with music, carnival games, volleyball, corn hole toss, and a basketball tournament. Departments often plan team meetings around the picnic, too, so Kronites from other regions can attend while visiting our headquarters. In 2017, we introduced a new event, the Souper Bowl, in which Kronites make chili or soup for their colleagues to try. Each Kronite paid a five-dollar fee (to taste the culinary creations), which we donated to a local food pantry. We have also historically held a Thanksgiving luncheon in November during which our executive team, including me, dons chef coats and hats to serve lunch to employees at our corporate headquarters. We likewise encourage our regional offices to host their own similar events. Many companies have events such as these, but if yours doesn’t, or if your events are lackluster and uninspiring, I would suggest making an investment here. As we’ve found, these events are wonderful opportunities not merely to show gratitude and affirm it as one of our key values, but also to support strong bonds among our employees, a sense that we’re all one big family.

THE SEVENTH TECHNIQUE: GRATITUDE FROM THE TOP

As important as these programs are individually, their biggest contribution is to create a greater culture of recognition, in which expressing gratitude at all levels becomes the norm, and everyone feels empowered to say, “Thank you.” As our research has shown, personal expressions of recognition or gratitude from bosses and fellow colleagues mean the most to employees. In our 2015 Workforce Institute poll, 55 percent of respondents reported that having a direct boss thank them left them feeling highly satisfied with their jobs, as compared with only 28 percent who said the same of receiving public recognition from their organization. Respondents preferred to receive thanks from their boss privately, rather than with others present, and in person rather than via electronic means.

As a leader or manager, make a practice of expressing personal gratitude whenever you can. If your team, department, or organization has formal recognition programs in place, maximize your personal engagement and presence. As Mike, one of our Legend Maker winners, said, “It’s a humbling experience to be up in front of all of your peers and [to get] your award from Aron [and other leaders].” Don’t wait for formal award ceremonies to extend your thanks. Look for opportunities to do so in the course of your daily work. Often, it’s just a matter of taking a little extra time. When the manager who helped launch our India operations marked 10 years of employment with us, I wrote him a personal e-mail in which I recalled all he had accomplished.

Likewise, when we provide software to a new customer, we conduct “milestone” surveys over the phone at a certain point in the process to gauge overall experience and general satisfaction with our products and services. I review the results, and whenever I see that customers have given our teams the highest possible rating, I typically send a personal e-mail to employees on the project, acknowledging their great work and thanking them for it. This kind of recognition—in fact, any recognition from outside a Kronite’s team—helps people feel valued. As one of our business unit managers remarked, “I know that when my team gets recognition from outside, they’re like, ‘Wow, the business noticed.’ And that goes a long way.”

In virtually every speech I give to Kronites, I thank them for all the hard work they do to make our company successful. When I walk through our hallways chatting informally with Kronites, I often thank people for their efforts and commitment. And as I mentioned in Chapter 1, I make a point of giving Kronites credit in meetings, especially junior Kronites. As a member of our executive team noted, doing that allows everyone to leave “feeling like a big deal.” That’s as it should be—because at Kronos, everyone is a big deal. Everyone contributes to our success.

In line with our family-first philosophy, I also make sure to thank the family members of Kronites in speeches and on other occasions. As I tell people, “Go home and hug your loved ones and thank them. Because they allow you to put in the effort you do, that in turn helps make Kronos great.”

THE POWER OF “THANK YOU”

When I attend Legend Makers and bring onstage veteran Kronites to receive my personal thanks, I notice something interesting. Some of the individuals we’re honoring revel in the experience. They might be nervous standing up there in front of hundreds of people, including their invited guest, but their faces shine with great pride. They bask in the recognition—it’s a high point of their career. Other winners take less pleasure in the experience. The honor we’re bestowing is immensely meaningful to them, but some feel embarrassed by my public recounting of all that they have accomplished and how much the organization and I value them.

It doesn’t matter what kind of personality you have, or whether specific individuals on your team relish public recognition or not. As a manager who is striving to build an engaged workforce, you have to publicly recognize your people. It’s that important. Some managers may think that salary increases and promotions boost motivation. What matters for the vast majority of people is the appreciation you personally show. People look to the person in charge for guidance, assistance, affirmation, and yes, appreciation. They want to feel valued. And you, more than anyone else, can provide that. Isn’t that incredible? You have the power to make someone feel great about themselves and their work.

Our organizations, too, have this power, albeit to a lesser extent, and they need to use it. If your organization isn’t prepared to recognize, acknowledge, and cheer your teams and individual employees, your workforce won’t be as engaged as it could otherwise be, and your organization won’t be as successful. I’ve seen this connection at play year after year. As one Kronite stated, “Kronos has proven to be very concerned with recognizing and rewarding the people who make exceptional contributions. This makes Kronos a very satisfying place to work and helps individuals to feel appreciated.” Employees will love where they work when you express love for them. And a great place to start is by saying a simple “Thank you.”