Tips, Best Practices, &
All Things Engagement

Hello, everyone! Last year, I wrote a blog about some of the ways to celebrate Employee Appreciation Day in the office.

Organizing the office holiday party can be a lot of fun, and it’s a great way celebrate the achievements that both employees and the organization have reached this year. Here are a few ideas on how to celebrate the holidays at your office. 

Employee recognition, when done well, puts a smile on an employee’s face, leads to deeper engagement and to greater productivity. As employee recognition is one of the first steps to delivering employee engagement, here are five pillars on which employee recognition programmes are built to succeed.

Culture is more than just the biggest workplace buzzword of the year 2015. There is no shortage of definitions of organizational culture.  Seriously, look it up.  After reading about 468 definitions, here is a sampling of my favourite definitions of culture:

As we appreciate the turn of the season, we begin to reflect on the seasons of our colleague’s service. In today’s post, we consider four reward occasions. Each offer a valuable opportunity to recognise, reward and to build greater levels of engagement with individuals and teams, across the whole organisation. In addition to day-to-day recognition, there are many moments to celebrate people’s professional successes, with a variety of rewards.

If you flip through the headlines of any major newspaper, digital or otherwise, you’ll get the impression the corporate world is rife with unsavoury characters, and disgruntled employees. At Kudos, we see things a little differently. Call us optimists, but our experience having dealt with corporations around the world bears a stark contrast to the picture painted by so much of our media. From our vantage point, it’s much less The Wolf of Wall Street and much more The Sound of Music.

Alan Kelly, Ireland’s former Minister for the Environment, presented a report back in 2015 concerning a lack of transparency in planning procedures and poor record keeping. He understood transparency as a function of good governance, which also protected the planning authority against allegations of abuse.

In business, transparency is just as critical and forms an essential pillar of good governance as well as good employee relations. One way to build quality, well-governed employee relations is to offer transparent and visible employee recognition.

Take a moment to think about your last meeting: maybe it was with your team, maybe your superiors, maybe your board. Try to remember what you talked about. Most likely it was the “hard” side of business such as product/service enhancements, financials, and corporate goals. Of course, these aspects of the organization are most often discussed as they are crucial to maintaining (or establishing) your organization’s place in the market. 

It is quite simple to make an immediate impact on engagement – don’t over think it or break the bank. Here is some good advice and quick wins. 

With so much of our lives spent on social media, everyone needs a great avatar or two. These sites can help you make a statement if you want to stand out from the crowd, have a bit of fun with something quirky, or just update your image for a special occasion. 

Kudos to all the thought leaders on Employee Engagement!

It’s not common to hear the words “staff retention” and  “no pay raise” in the same sentence.  And when you do, your instinctive response is… so what’s the trick?