Appreciate Means to Grow

As the labor market tightens, employers are seeking innovative ways to preempt the damaging costs associated with disengagement and high turnover. While past efforts to keep employees focused have centered on pay, today’s most successful leaders are exploring more non-traditional methods of battling turnover. Many of today’s best companies are turning to strategic efforts in engagement and recognition practices to assure the most valuable employees not only stay, but stay engaged.

Grow Your People

When top companies encourage leaders to appreciate great work at the right times in the right ways it brings out the best in every employee turning talent into expertise; potential into performance.

One of the greatest obstacles to truly growing people and their ability to contribute to any organization is holding onto talent. Buzzword or not, onboarding has become the accepted term to describe a process that demands increasing attention from organizations all over the world. Why? Because although it’s true employees have been regularly welcomed and onboarded into companies throughout history, the critical nature of effectively onboarding new employees has taken on new significance in the workplace as average tenure shortens and new generations with new expectations enter the workforce. Couple that with recent research from the U.S. Department of Labor indicating that 25% of the American workforce has been in their current position for less than a year, and it becomes apparent why today’s workplaces are taking notice of onboarding as a critical business issue.

In fact, the effective practice on successful onboarding techniques, or lack of it, is making headlines across the business press: “Few companies give much thought to creating the right onboarding experience. Unfortunately, this oversight might be the biggest mistake employers make. New employees are 69% more likely to stay after three years if they’ve experienced a well-structured onboarding program.”

As a result, organizations committed to battling early turnover and increasing engagement are finding ways to layer manager recognition of new hires early in their careers on top of current administration-oriented processes to elevate the effectiveness of their efforts and create a synergy that helps them realize important results for the organization and, ultimately, its customers.

According to 2008 research by The Aberdeen Group, only 4% of employees decide to stay or leave on the first day, but 86% of new hires make the decision to stay or leave within the first six months. That creates a critical window wherein the best companies continually reinforce the hire’s success and engage them in the cause of the organization.

Today’s best organizations determine key milestones well into the employee’s first year on the job where recognition can heighten the experience and create positive manager employee relationships. They then train managers either internally, or with the help of a recognition consultant, to make the most of those moments.

For North America’s leading independent distributor of commercial printing and business papers , Unisource Worldwide, Inc., 90 days is a critical milestone and recognizing employee accomplishments to that point provides a rich opportunity to give and get feedback.

Unisource company managers are trained in the best methods for welcoming new recruits including awards for appreciating great work early on. Each award comes complete with specific manager talking points designed to strengthen manager-employee relationships within the first 90 days on the job.

Within the first six months of implementing its new onboarding approach, Unisource experienced a significant drop in turnover. The company expects early recognition strategies to improve business results by encouraging managers to engage new employees quickly in working toward clearly defined goals.

Grow Your Brand

Your brand is only as strong as the people who represent it. As a major force in the soft drink industry and the second largest anchor bottler for PepsiCo., PepsiAmerica’s focus on appreciation helps employees understand what they can do to better represent the Pepsi brand. Coaching employees to exemplify the Pepsi brand is key for this worldwide brand leader especially when the appreciation effort also results in increased employee engagement, retention, and other impressive results.

“To say they were receptive to what I was showing them would be an understatement,” says Rudy Will, sales manager for PepsiAmericas, speaking of his experience introducing the company’s new suite of recognition programs to his team. “When I finished introducing all the programs PepsiAmericas had in place to recognize them, they all stood up and cheered. Literally cheered – in a weekly meeting? Things have been different ever since.”

PepsiAmericas decision to launch a suite of recognition programs came after the company’s most recent climate survey. The question, “My company’s formal recognition programs are motivational to me,” came in as one of the surveys bottom three responses.

“We had a lot of programs in place,” explains David Tipton, recognition program creator and Manager of Organizational Capability for PepsiAmericas. “But those many different recognition programs were carried out in many different ways across the organization. The results of our climate survey got our attention and we realized that despite having so many recognition programs, something needed to change.”

Tipton and his team carefully considered the demographics of its employee population before deciding on the best ways to show appreciation to employees. Through their research PepsiAmericas discovered that as a whole m ost employees decide to stay or leave a company between years one and five. PepsiAmericas turnover statistics told the same story.

“When we took a close look at turnover at PepsiAmericas we found that 69% of those who leave the company do it within the first three years. And over 46% of those who leave left with less than one year of service,” reports Tipton. “Knowing that turnover is one of the business metrics we expect recognition to help improve, we asked what is a strategic lever we can pull there? The answer for us was earlier milestone recognition – honoring employees with a welcome award when they begin here, again at 90 days, one year, two years, three years, and of course, performance recognition in between.”

Designed by O.C. Tanner recognition consultants, PepsiAmericas’ programs connect employees with core corporate values and help them understand what it means to exemplify the core of Pepsi’s brand. By helping employees recognize actions that deliver on the organization’s mission, strategic recognition programs promote engagement and have an impact on bottom line results.

“We want to ensure the recognition strategy includes something special and meaningful for every employee,” says Barbara Kallay, VP of HR for PepsiAmericas. “When we took a look at it, we were able to see that recognition helps to drive employee engagement which ultimately drives discretionary effort leading to higher productivity. Greater productivity leads to better results for PepsiAmericas. That made it the right thing to do for everyone.”

Grow Your Bottom Line

Appreciating people and applying their talent to business goals is a practice common to all of the world’s top-performing companies. Now more than ever, businesses are measuring the impact of effective appreciation on real results. According to The Jackson Organization, companies that appreciate and recognize excellence show a return on shareholder equity three times that of companies that don’t. And those are numbers that have companies large and small paying attention to the impact of appreciation.

One of those reaping the benefits of a culture of appreciation is Ohio Presbyterian Retirement Services (OPRS). An 80-year-old non-profit healthcare provider that specializes in a wide range of services from retirement centers to hospice care throughout Ohio, OPRS serves 15,000 patients each day and relies on its staff of doctors, nurses, administrators, and other health professionals to deliver critical care to patients and their families.

“We have been able to go beyond connecting great recognition practices to the typical metrics – turnover, satisfaction, engagement,” says SVP of Human Resources Dana Ullom-Vucelich. “Not that those things are unimportant – they are very important. But what really caught our attention is that when locations have high recognition scores, their patients also have fewer incidences of infections, pressure sores, improved health department scores and there is greater continuity of care.”

The biggest financial win for OPRS has been in its ability to reduce turnover at those locations where recognition is used most effectively.

“When recognition is present and practiced effectively, our nursing turnover is reduced by 23%,” says Nancy Koury King, chief operating officer. “No matter how you figure your turnover costs, 23% is a big deal. And it’s an even bigger deal when you’re dealing with a population as important and scarce as nurses. We do everything we can to hang on to them and, aside from the basics, it looks like recognition is having the biggest impact.”

Whether a service, performance, or on-the-spot is the right approach to appreciating great work is the right way to create growth in your organization, O.C. Tanner is uniquely qualified to help you evaluate the most effective way for you to grow your people, your brand, and your bottom line. We will partner to create solutions that engage employees in the growth of your business, align what you appreciate with corporate goals, and determine your greatest potential for growth. O.C. Tanner starts by understanding the possibilities – and then creates the right solution for you to appreciate people who do great work. Because celebrating success inspires people to invent, to create, to discover. And when people are inspired, companies grow.

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