Employee Recognition Ideas That Work on a Small Budget

Full Webinar Transcript

Transcript lightly edited for clarity and readability while preserving the speakers’ meaning and conversational tone.

Welcome and Introductions

Anne Cesak: All right. Hello, everybody, and welcome to our Insights webinar. I’m just watching all of the people joining and seeing where everybody is joining from, so thank you very much for being with us. In our series of Insights webinars this year, we’ve been focusing on what we call the Great Place To Work Effect, and the session is really designed as a conversation with some HR and leadership professionals to share practical learnings that you can implement right away.

Anne Cesak: My name is Anne Cesak. I’m a Senior Consultant here at Great Place To Work, and a Certified Human Resources Leader here in Ontario, and I’m going to be your host for today. At Great Place To Work, our mission is to build a better world by helping organizations become great places to work for all. We do that by providing tools to assess the experience of your employees and resources to act on that data — to help organizations protect what’s going well and look for those areas of opportunity to improve on. And we believe that trust is at the heart of an exceptional workplace.

Anne Cesak: Before we start with our panelists, just a couple of things to note. If you do have any questions, we will get to them at the end — please use the Q&A in the Zoom platform. And our producer is in the back end, and she’ll be helping with any technical challenges today. So thank you for being here.

The Great Place To Work Effect

Anne Cesak: As I said, our theme for our Insights webinars this year is the Great Place To Work Effect. This is the idea that great leaders build trust, trust shapes culture, and culture drives performance. So every month we’re focusing on a specific high-trust leader behaviour. Today we’re going to focus on thanking — and specifically, employee recognition on a budget. Some low-cost ways to improve engagement.

Anne Cesak: Just to anchor us in the Great Place To Work Effect and those high-trust leader behaviours, I’m going to share some slides, so bear with me for a second while I do that. There we go.

Anne Cesak: So this is what we call the Great Place To Work Effect. As you can see here, it’s a really simplified process, if you will. Great starts with leadership. Some research from Gallup — it might not even be all that recent — says that 70% of an employee’s experience is based on leadership. And we’re not just talking about their individual leader. We’re talking about organizational leadership. Certainly it may be more influenced by their individual leader, but it’s leadership in the organization that influences 70% of an employee’s experience. So it’s fairly significant.

Anne Cesak: Why is it significant? Because leadership shapes that day-to-day experience, and that’s what employees are learning from. And why is experience important? Experience shapes culture. Anybody who has heard me before has heard me say that I look at culture as an outcome of the behaviours that we reward, encourage and ignore. It’s how things get done around here. It’s the norms and traditions in our organizations. And why is culture important — why should we be intentional about culture? Because culture drives performance. In any organization you have your own dashboard, you probably have performance metrics that your organization is tracking every month and reporting on, because that’s important to you.

Anne Cesak: I’ll just go to this next slide. This really builds out the Great Place To Work Effect, where I talked about the nine high-trust leader behaviours. Again, we’ve been focusing on those this year, and today we’re going to be talking about thanking. The others are here, and we have some other webinars that you can go back and watch.

Anne Cesak: Those nine high-trust leader behaviours are listening, speaking, inspiring, caring, developing, thanking, sharing, celebrating and hiring. Those leadership behaviours impact the experience that employees are having — and that experience is about trusting the people that we work for, taking pride in the work that we do, and enjoying the people that we work with. And then also really important is: is this a consistent experience for everybody? I talked about Great Place To Work for All, so we’re looking for organizations to provide a consistently good experience.

Anne Cesak: That experience then contributes to culture — some elements of culture around collaboration, innovation, agility, opportunity, belonging, well-being. You could ask anybody in your organization to describe your culture right now and you will probably get a lot of different answers. And that’s okay, it’s very personalized. But organizations can look at that and go, okay, is that the culture we were looking for, or maybe we need to make some tweaks.

Anne Cesak: And then again, how does culture impact performance? You can see here, these are just some examples of performance metrics that organizations might track. So really going back to: what is that leader behaviour, and what is the impact on experience? And today we’re going to be talking about those leadership behaviours around thanking and appreciation. So I’m going to stop sharing my screen now, and we are going to get back into our content and our panelists — because I know those are the people that you’re here to see, not me.

Meet the Panelists

Anne Cesak: So let’s meet the two individuals who are going to be sharing with us today. Maria Sial is Manager of Marketing and Communications at Southwire Canada. Southwire is North America’s leading wire and cable company, providing solutions including building wire and cable, metal-clad cable, utility products, portable electrical cord products, OEM wire products, electrical products, and engineered solutions and field support services. So a lot of interesting information is going to come out from Maria today — certainly lots of different employees working in that organization.

Anne Cesak: And also joining us is Kuusta Laird. She is the Director of People and Culture at HD Mutual Insurance Company. They are a property and casualty insurance company operating in southwestern Ontario, and they are backed by over 160 years of dedicated service and expertise. I was fascinated by that when I went to your website, Kuusta — just that longevity of the organization, and all the different iterations.

Anne Cesak: So really excited to have you both with us today. You’ve lived this, and you’re going to talk us through what your organizations are doing.

Poll: What Matters Most When Budgets Are Tight

Anne Cesak: Now, before we get into hearing from our panelists, I’d like to engage everybody who’s joined us today, and we’re going to do a poll. I’m just going to ask our producer on the back end to bring that up.

Anne Cesak: The question is: when budgets are tight, what recognition practice do you think has the biggest impact on employees? You can see there are five choices here — you pick one. So it’s a timely, specific thank you from a leader; peer-to-peer appreciation; public recognition tied to company values; flexibility, time or support that shows care; or opportunities for growth or visibility.

Anne Cesak: If you had to pick just one of these when budgets are tight, what do you think? Which recognition practice do you think has the biggest impact on employees? We’ll give you a minute or two, and we’ll see what folks think. Again, it’s just one choice. There may be a number that you think would be relevant, but we’re just asking for one. Okay, if I can get you to close that, and let’s see those.

Anne Cesak: Okay. So: when budgets are tight, what recognition practice do you think has the biggest impact on employees? Number one was a timely, specific thank you from a leader — leadership experience, right? We were just talking about how important leaders are to the employee experience.

Anne Cesak: The second one is around flexibility, time or support that shows care — certainly probably directed at leadership as well. And then third was public recognition tied to company values, and then opportunities for growth or visibility. And then the last one was peer-to-peer appreciation. But very, very high on timely, specific thank you from a leader. So that’s awesome. Thank you, everybody, for participating in that.

What Employees Are Saying Right Now

Anne Cesak: All right. Now, before I ask my first question — Kuusta and Maria, again, thank you so much for being here today. I like to start off our Insights webinars just understanding from you, when it comes to the work that you’re doing: what are you hearing from employees? What’s going on in your workplace? What are you hearing from people — and not necessarily related to recognition, but just in general. Kuusta, I’ll start with you. What’s your day-to-day like? What are you hearing?

Kuusta Laird: Yeah, thanks. First of all, thanks for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk on a subject that is obviously near and dear to my heart as the Director of People and Culture here at HD Mutual.

Kuusta Laird: Something that I’m hearing a lot from staff is really just change fatigue and uncertainty. I think the economic and political environments — even if we’re not in a business that’s directly impacted by some of those things — everybody is just getting tired of seeing bad news in the news, of having uncertainty kind of be the predominant characteristic that’s impacting all of our lives. And I think that’s trickling into how people are showing up at work.

Anne Cesak: Yeah, thank you for sharing that. I’ve heard that in my network as well. Maria, how about you? What are you hearing or seeing with the folks that you interact with?

Maria Sial: Yeah. Firstly, I’d like to say thank you for having me. Just really agreeing with Kuusta — it’s a lot of uncertainty in the market right now. But internally, we’re hearing from employees that they just want to be informed, be in the loop and stay connected. I think it’s really — even if it’s bad news or good news or whatever that looks like — just being transparent with them and providing them with as much information as you possibly can.

Anne Cesak: Yeah, awesome, thank you. And certainly that’s part of our high-trust leader behaviours — that communication piece. So thank you very much for sharing that.

Inside the Programs: Peer Recognition at HD Mutual

Anne Cesak: So now let’s talk about what your organizations are actually doing when it comes to appreciation and recognition. I like to look at appreciation as a spectrum. There’s appreciation — the everyday thank you, which came up in our poll, that instant thank you from a leader — and then there’s a recognition piece, which may be more tied to an outcome. There might be some sort of financial incentive or some other type of recognition.

Anne Cesak: So Kuusta, I’ll start with you. Do you want to just explain to us some of the programs that currently exist in your organization? And also — we had a conversation yesterday — I’m wondering if you can share some of the learnings that you’ve had as you have implemented some reward and recognition programs.

Kuusta Laird: Absolutely, thanks, Anne. Just to give folks on the call a little bit more background into how we are an authority on this subject and why I’m here: we are five years running Great Place To Work Certified. Really, super proud that this past summer we received a 99% approval rating on our Great Place To Work survey, and our Managerial Index score particularly is incredibly high.

Kuusta Laird: So given that we have such a strong culture and a really good leadership team here, we’ve been able to really build out a strong culture of recognition. And that culture has evolved over time. You can start really small. I think the takeaway that I want people on the call to have from this is that good leadership programs don’t have to be complicated and they don’t have to be very expensive.

Kuusta Laird: A good recognition program, in my view, is genuine, it’s visible, it’s specific, and it’s easy for people to participate in.

Kuusta Laird: The primary mode of recognition for us at HD Mutual is actually a peer recognition program that’s really successful here. We have between 70 and 90% of our staff participate in our peer recognition program on an annual basis. I have a dashboard that I can pull that shows, for example, we have 495 recognitions sent out for this year already. Our staff is about 95. So it’s a pretty big number.

Kuusta Laird: That peer recognition program revolves around just being able to shout out your peers for anything. The idea is having a really low bar for criteria — not being too stringent on it, that it has to be this type of thing or that type of thing. If you’re really trying to build a culture of recognition, it’s really just about trying to get people to buy in and be enthusiastic about thanking each other, even if it’s for things that you think, ah, it’s not really worth the time. You celebrate those small things and make a really big deal of it.

Kuusta Laird: Even from the beginning, the program started with a really simple email form — send an email in, and then we had a couple of people that were administering the program, and they would go over and give the person a little thank you, and they would get entered into a draw. So very low lift. It only takes a couple of people to administer that. You’re using an email server, and our annual budget was something like $500. That’s where we started, and we embedded it into all-staff meetings. We’re doing shout-outs, and we’re having the team recognize the different things that people are shouting out their peers for, so that we’re building some awareness that nothing’s too small. You can shout out for holding a door. It doesn’t have to be a big grand gesture.

Kuusta Laird: Over time, we’ve evolved that. One important addition we made was the ballot entry for the gift card draw. So we’ll do a gift card draw once a month, and the sender and the receiver of our peer-to-peer recognition both get entered into that draw. That was just to level it up, to be able to promote and encourage this recognition behaviour across our team.

Kuusta Laird: We’ve also added that the direct leader or their manager will get cc’d on the email so that there’s an awareness. So it’s not just one person that’s silently collecting all these accolades but nobody really knows about it — make sure that it’s visible to their leader so that they’re able to get properly recognized for that.

Kuusta Laird: So I would say the peer recognition program has really been the cornerstone of our program here at HD. And even though the poll mentioned that peer-to-peer recognition is the least important, I do think that it’s the way that you build it as a culture — because we’re dealing with our peers so much. The average individual contributor is having dozens of interactions per day with their peers, but maybe one touchpoint a week with their leader, for example.

Kuusta Laird: And then, to complement that, we do have a spot bonus program that’s tied to our values. That’s more top-down, leadership-driven, and it’s based on either an accomplishment or demonstration of one of our core values. Those are typically small amounts that are really just given as a thank you for extra effort that aligns with our company values. So those are the two streams of our recognition program at HD.

Anne Cesak: Yeah. So many things I could pick up on there. It’s that peer-to-peer piece — like you just said, we work a lot with our peers. Our leaders don’t necessarily see what we’re doing day to day. So that could be really helpful for leaders, to see those recognitions for the people who report to them and understand more about the impact that they’re having.

Anne Cesak: And those results too — you mentioned you’re tracking usage. There’s nothing worse than launching a program and then not being able to give any sort of data on: is it getting what we want, or not?

Anne Cesak: One of my favourite expressions is, what gets recognized gets repeated. And you mentioned that the recognition is for the person who is recognized, but also the person who did the recognizing — because that’s the behaviour that you want to see as well, that people are participating in it.

Anne Cesak: And really, I’m just going to use the expression “moments that matter.” What are those moments that matter, and then how do we pick up on those and recognize people for those moments? So thank you very much for sharing that.

Connection and Community at Southwire Canada

Anne Cesak: Maria, tell us about what goes on at Southwire when it comes to recognition.

Maria Sial: Yeah. We believe the people are the power behind what we do. And there are so many different things that we do that employees can choose from.

Maria Sial: So for example, I would say one thing that we do really well is create opportunities for people to connect and contribute beyond their day-to-day roles. Whether it’s employee resource groups that support networking or professional development, or initiatives like — we have an initiative called Project Gift that brings team members together from across different communities to give back to the community.

Maria Sial: Those experiences really help people feel valued, they make people feel connected. And I think that might also be one of the main reasons we’re also five years Great Place To Work recognized. So I’m really, really proud of that. And it’s because our employees have these opportunities that are beyond — obviously the day-to-day work is important, but then also that feeling of belonging and connecting, and that leverage of giving back to the community and having that support from your company.

Maria Sial: Yes, of course, it’s an opportunity cost. Sure, there’s a productivity loss for that day. But then you’re using that time to give back to the community, volunteering at places that you deeply care about, and that really fuels your passion again. And then you come back to work as a newly renewed person where you’re like, you know what, my work here is about something that I’m so deeply passionate about, and that makes me want to do better at my work.

Maria Sial: So it’s just a reminder that employee appreciation isn’t just about recognizing achievements — it’s more about creating the culture where people feel like they belong and they know their contributions matter.

Anne Cesak: Love that, thank you for sharing. And I just jotted down — when you think about recognition, sometimes in organizations we get caught up in, it’s a lunch, it’s a statue, it’s a financial bonus or something. But when you think about recognition, I would encourage everybody to think really broadly. Like both of you have talked about, it could be a learning opportunity for somebody, it could be giving back to the community.

Anne Cesak: We’re going to talk in a minute about how you figure out what’s important to people, but don’t just think about recognition in terms of some kind of bonus or financial incentive. There are so many ways that you can bring recognition into your organization.

How Busy Leaders Stay Consistent

Anne Cesak: So I am going to talk about leadership, because we talked about how great starts with leaders. And we’ve already recognized that leaders don’t necessarily see what’s going on with their people — especially if you’re in an organization with field employees, like salespeople, people who are not visible to you on a regular basis.

Anne Cesak: So Maria, I’ll start with you. The question is: how can leaders who are busy, stretched thin, and not physically in the same space as people be consistent in how they recognize the people that work for them and report to them?

Maria Sial: Ah, great question. We think of it like in our daily lives. For me, in my case, my example is that nowadays we are working managers. So it’s not like you’re only managing people — you’re managing people, but then you also have your tasks that you have to complete by a certain time or end of day. So it’s hard to do, and when you’re stretched thin it is difficult.

Maria Sial: But what helps make it easy is that you have to make appreciation part of your existing routines. You just make it a habit. You just remember to take 60 seconds — be it in a team meeting, or even a one-on-one meeting. It doesn’t take time to just recognize a contribution. Send a quick note after something is successful, like a project or anything. Just acknowledge someone who stepped up to help others. I think consistency matters more than scale in this case.

Anne Cesak: Thank you. Kuusta, how about you?

Kuusta Laird: Yeah, I think that is definitely a big concern. The peer-to-peer recognition program that I described isn’t limited to just individual contributors, so we do have part of our leadership team that participates in that regularly. The front-end form for employees that was built by our team takes about three seconds to submit a recognition. So it’s a very fast and easy process that leaders can leverage as well — and they often do.

Kuusta Laird: But I think that giving your time to your direct reports is one of the best ways that you can show that you care and value their contributions. Just being very attentive in a one-on-one, having regular one-on-ones and keeping them, even if you have competing priorities.

Kuusta Laird: Providing some flexibility — you know your team, and you know what’s going on in their personal lives. If they have a really hectic weekend, and you have the flexibility and autonomy on your team, just reach out to them and say, hey, I know that things are really crazy for you this weekend, log off at three, we’ll make up the time some other time. If you can have that flexibility and just give that person that grace and flexibility around when they’re working, that accommodates and flexes with their life — that really shows genuine care. And it recognizes the whole human being behind the work that they’re doing for you.

Kuusta Laird: I love the sense of community that Maria really focused on. I think that’s also a really big factor of our particular culture of recognition here. We do have a volunteer day that’s available to our staff to use, and often our leaders take it upon themselves to organize a group volunteer activity. So we’ve supported different charitable organizations locally through a shared volunteer day.

Kuusta Laird: And we also have what’s called our charitable donation program, where we actually allow staff to direct $100 of our funds to the registered charity of their choice. And then we keep people apprised of the different organizations that we’ve supported. So in that way, people are able to see, that’s the cause that I care about, and my company is supporting it on my behalf.

Learning What People Actually Value

Anne Cesak: Yeah, love that. And I really like what you said about recognizing people as individuals — we care about what you care about. Maria talked about being intentional: put it in your calendar. There’s nothing wrong with reminding yourself to think about all of the great things that your team is doing. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Nobody expects you to remember everything.

Anne Cesak: And that’s a nice segue into my next question, which is: how do you learn what types of appreciation employees value, instead of assuming what they want? I’ve been in HR for a long time, and it used to be that everybody got the same thing at the holidays. Everybody’s getting the same thing. But then you slowly — well, actually, not that slowly — realize that that doesn’t work. That isn’t a great place to work for all. That’s a great place to work for the majority. So Kuusta, I’ll start with you. How do you learn what types of appreciation employees value?

Kuusta Laird: Yeah, I think that’s a really great point, and it’s often overlooked, especially by well-intended leaders — because we think, oh, we assume everyone’s going to love this, I will shout out their achievement and their project work at our next town hall meeting. And then we do it, and there’s this wicked backlash that we don’t anticipate, because people don’t all like the same things.

Kuusta Laird: Spoiler alert: humans are complex, and we are all different. We have five generations in the workforce right now, everybody’s heard that. So everybody does want something different.

Kuusta Laird: I have learned two ways to do this. One is through their leaders — leaders tend to know their people best. So getting down to the team leader, frontline leadership level and asking, how does your team want to be recognized for this thing you’re working on? And going to the individuals themselves.

Kuusta Laird: I have found some really great resources that I can share with the audience through what’s called Workplace Strategies for Mental Health. It’s a Canada Life platform that provides free resources. And one of those is called a recognition preference form. I’ve leveraged that on my team in order for individuals to sit down with their leaders and actually go through, how do I prefer to be recognized? And then have the leader be able to know from an informed place, and not just assume or guess at what that person wants.

Anne Cesak: Nice, nice. And how about you, Maria — at Southwire, how do your leaders learn what types of appreciation people want?

Maria Sial: Yeah, I’d like to echo what Kuusta said. The easiest way is to just ask them. Some people enjoy public recognition, while others prefer private — like a one-on-one conversation with you. Some people want development opportunities, or additional responsibility.

Maria Sial: So one thing that really helps us is having those regular check-ins, the employee survey. And then we also do listening sessions. We have round tables with our leadership, and we also have skip-level meetings — so my employee is having a meeting with my manager, or even his manager. Senior leadership gets involved, and these are just open sessions for you to give your feedback on what we are doing and how we can do things better. These sessions really help leaders better understand what resonates with their team. So those are just some of the things that we do, but yeah, it really comes down to just asking people.

Anne Cesak: Yeah. And we have a couple of clients we work with where it’s part of their onboarding — it’s part of getting to know people: how do you like to be recognized? And you just said, in public or in private. Because you mentioned shouting somebody out at an all-company meeting — and if that person, they might just about die. They don’t want it publicly. They want the recognition — this is the thing, they want the recognition — but they don’t necessarily want it in public. So that’s all about getting to know people. I really appreciate you saying that.

Anne Cesak: The other thing I will share, just from my background: when you’re thinking about a monetary reward or a gift card or something — here in Ontario, it’s CRA, but it’s a taxable benefit. We launched a program, and the winner of this program got a $1,000 Visa card, and it got added to their income. Come payday, they were shocked, because of the tax deducted from that gift.

Anne Cesak: So like you said, Kuusta, it was very well intended, to have this reward, but it didn’t have the impact that we hoped. So those are some of the things to keep in mind as well — with anything where there is some sort of financial reward, that it would be a taxable benefit. Any payroll people watching this maybe appreciate me calling that out, I don’t know. I certainly have had my hands slapped before.

Poll: What Gets in the Way of Authentic Appreciation

Anne Cesak: So let’s actually do another poll. I’ll give you a second to pull it up. This poll for our participants is: what most often gets in the way of employee appreciation feeling authentic?

Anne Cesak: So the options are: it’s too generic or scripted; leaders are too busy or stretched thin; appreciation is inconsistent across teams; employees are recognized in ways that they don’t actually value — we talked a little bit about that; and it feels like an HR program rather than part of the culture.

Anne Cesak: So what do you think, or what in your organization most often gets in the way of employee appreciation feeling authentic? Let’s give everyone about 30 seconds to respond to that. Again, you can only pick one. There may be a few that resonate, but let’s just get everybody picking one. Okay, another 10 seconds. Okay, if I can just get you to close that, that would be great, and we’ll see what everybody thinks.

Anne Cesak: Okay, so it’s pretty close here. So, it feels generic or scripted, followed by it feels like an HR program rather than part of the culture — I’m going to come back to that in a second. Then, employees are recognized in ways that they don’t actually value. And then we’ve talked about leaders being too busy or stretched thin, and appreciation being inconsistent across teams.

Anne Cesak: So a couple of things I want to talk about here. Maria, I believe you talked about consistency as well. Certainly very important in organizations. And both of you, as Great Place To Work clients, know that when you look at your results, there is this middle ground where folks are having that inconsistent experience, where they’re not sure. So for organizations, if you’re going to be launching any kind of recognition program, ensure that all leaders are participating.

Audience Question: What If a Leader Isn’t Responsive?

Anne Cesak: And there’s actually a question — this is actually a nice tie-in. There’s a question where an individual on our call is saying, what would you recommend for an organization where leaders are not responsive? They want to share some feedback, but somebody is not responding. So how do we ensure that all leaders are participating? Maria, I’ll start with you.

Maria Sial: That is a great question. I mean, I would just try and reach out. Is it your direct manager who’s not responsive, or just other leaders who are not responsive?

Anne Cesak: It was just a leader not being responsive. They had sent several emails noting great behaviour from a colleague, and nothing happened. So, any thoughts there?

Maria Sial: Yeah, that is a bit difficult. But I would just get in touch with other team members or get in touch with other managers personally, and just find out — is there a reason that they’re not responsive? Are they stretched thin? What exactly happened there?

Maria Sial: To me, it all comes down to — from my example of working in the industry — it’s all teamwork, and it’s all professional, not personal. So if somebody is being absent-minded in some ways, is there something happening in their personal life? Maybe talk to someone that you trust, another leader that you have trust in, and talk to them and say, hey, this is what I’m dealing with. Can you help me? Can you give me some ideas on how we can either get this person to respond, or, if this person is not responding, how can we get this program moving? So those are some of the examples of how I personally have dealt with certain situations in my career.

Audience Question: “But We Already Pay People”

Anne Cesak: Nice, thank you for sharing that. And as somebody put in the chat, assume noble intent, but then see what you can do.

Anne Cesak: Another question I’ll go to right now. This individual has a manager who says that thanking team members or recognizing efforts feels insincere, but the team says that it’s important. Some leaders might say, well, we pay people. So — Maria and Kuusta are both nodding here, and people probably on the call as well.

Anne Cesak: Yes, absolutely, we should be compensating people for the work that they do. But like I said, what gets recognized gets repeated. So if we are looking for people to demonstrate certain behaviours or get specific outcomes, if we recognize the behaviour, that is where the power is in saying thank you — hey, I see you, I see the work that you’re doing, I see how hard you’re working, I see the impact that you’re having on our customers.

Anne Cesak: And that’s where I go back to that Great Place To Work Effect. Great starts with leadership, the high-trust leader behaviour of thanking, and then ultimately the impact on performance. So having the conversation with that leader about — it’s not just an HR program. We’re not just saying, oh, you need to thank people. We’re saying that there’s a direct outcome of people feeling appreciated in terms of our performance as an organization. So that would be sort of my thoughts there.

Recognition Across Hybrid and Dispersed Teams

Anne Cesak: Now, I did want to ask about people who work in different locations. Maria, I’m not sure — do you have field employees that work with you? And Kuusta, are your folks hybrid?

Kuusta Laird: Yeah, we’re a hybrid workplace, and actually we amalgamated two years ago. So we had two different office locations for about 18 months before we consolidated down to one office location. So we are a fully hybrid workplace, operating until recently in two different locations.

Anne Cesak: So how do you handle recognition when people don’t see each other? Because if we all worked in organizations where everybody was together, you would see those things. So how do you coach leaders? How do you handle that when people aren’t necessarily in the same physical space?

Kuusta Laird: For us, that was part of evolving that peer recognition program — to make sure that the form and the way to participate was super easy and embedded in all the places. It’s a single link that we put as a button or a hyperlink in all the different platforms that people would be working in, so that it’s very accessible no matter what program or software they’re using.

Kuusta Laird: And secondarily, because of the hybrid nature, we really just found that — we had done quarterly meetings around this Bravo recognition program, and we found that it was too long. People’s attention spans are shorter. With hybrid work, there’s more of a recency bias, where things get forgotten much more quickly. And so we actually shifted this year to a monthly Bravo meeting on Teams. It’s a 10-minute meeting.

Anne Cesak: Okay, nice. And so that connects people on a hybrid basis. And that’s the iteration that you were talking about — evolving things as you go. And Maria, how about your workforce? Explain a little bit about where they are.

Maria Sial: Yeah. And just to go back to your other point about authentic appreciation — how do you know if it’s authentic? You can’t look at it as just a standalone program that we can introduce and say, this is what we’re going to do. As you talked about earlier, I feel like it has to be moving into your culture rather than programs.

Maria Sial: So like I said, at Southwire we do a great job — we have employee resource groups, there are community opportunities, network opportunities. We also have events that we do, and, as I mentioned, we have field services employees who are out in the field and not able to come in all the time. So we try and be creative on how we can still collaborate together.

Maria Sial: Certain things that we’ve done at our sites are having virtual events, or reaching out to the team members before we have an in-person event, making sure what time works for them, or even if they can just come and join us for lunch — we give them a window, just drop in, come say hi. And making sure that if they’re not able to make meetings, we give them virtual shout-outs, or you just give them a call and you recognize them and you thank them. So it is a bit tricky, but I think it’s doable. If you put your mind to it, it can certainly work.

Anne Cesak: Yeah, for sure. And one of the learnings I had was around sales employees, field employees — people who aren’t together. Or if you have a head office, and it seems like head office is always having a barbecue or whatever that is, it’s recognizing that other people don’t have that opportunity.

Anne Cesak: So something that I did in my past was making sure the people in the field had a gift card to go for lunch — or, again, this was a while ago, so now it would be an Uber or something. But just recognizing that, you know what, we appreciate you. We know that you can’t actually join us at this event, but we want you to have a good experience as well.

Closing Advice

Anne Cesak: So we’ve got about five minutes left. I just wanted to ask both of you, as we’re wrapping up: if there’s one thing that you would like participants to take away today about the importance of appreciation, and how you can do it on a low budget — what would be your advice to them? So Kuusta, I’ll start with you.

Kuusta Laird: I think you start somewhere. My best advice, even if it feels daunting, is just start small, and you can build on anything that you’re building. So if you don’t have anything in place right now, start with something really simple. Make sure that you have one or two champions that can start to drive it, and you’ll be able to see that change over time.

Kuusta Laird: It might take a while, but it is hard to get employee loyalty in this hybrid work world. And this is one way that you can really drive retention and employee loyalty, because you’re building deeper relationships by engaging staff in this way. So it’s absolutely worth the effort. And just start where you are, use what you have, do what you can.

Anne Cesak: Yeah, I love that, and I’m just going to jump on that. When you talk about champions — with any HR program, it’s finding those people who can be advocates or the voice of employees. And maybe they’re the people who might be a little bit suspect about it. Engaging people from different parts of the business to say, hey, what do you think? How can you help us?

Anne Cesak: Because we talked about things being an HR program, and it’s taking it out of HR. HR might steward something, HR might come up with the overarching plan, but that implementation and that advocacy — asking employees to help you with that. So yeah, thank you for sharing that. That’s awesome. And Maria, how about you? What would you like our participants to take away today?

Maria Sial: If it were one thing, I would just say — we talked about it this entire webinar — employee appreciation isn’t about spending money. It’s really about helping people feel seen, valued and connected to a bigger purpose. People remember how they’re treated, and whether their contributions are valued.

Maria Sial: So in closing, that’s what I want to say: recognition doesn’t have to be expensive or elaborate. The most meaningful appreciation is often just taking the time to let someone know that their work mattered, and saying thank you.

Wrap-Up

Anne Cesak: Absolutely. I’m just going to check our questions — we’ve answered both of those live. I don’t know if anybody else has a question they want to sneak in for our panelists before we go.

Anne Cesak: This has been a great conversation. We started off talking about thanking and recognition, but I really like how you both have tied this up into: this is part of who you are as an organization, how you treat people, whether people want to stay with the organization because they see that it is somewhere that values the work that they do. So yeah, it doesn’t have to be grand gestures. It’s that thank you — I see you, I see what you’re doing, we appreciate it.

Anne Cesak: I’ll just double-check the questions, but I think we are wrapping up. Anything that either of you didn’t share that you wanted to? I tend to talk too much. Did you cover everything?

Kuusta Laird: I think so, yeah.

Anne Cesak: Good. Well, I want to thank you both so much for being here today, for your insights. I believe your LinkedIn bios were put in the chat. If not, please search out Maria and Kuusta — they’ve got some great tips for you. Keep it small, keep it simple, be intentional. Lots of different ways we can talk about recognition.

Anne Cesak: But again, I want to thank you both so much for being here today. Come and check us out next month — we’ll have another high-trust behaviour that we want to share. And I hope that you enjoy the rest of your day. Thanks, everybody.

Maria Sial: Thank you, bye.