GiftCard Partners Blog

Our employees and colleagues, whether we like it or not are the people that we spend the most waking hours with during the week. It is crazy to think that sometimes employers don't make the time to develop interpersonal relationships with employees, and ensure that employees are also forming those relationships at a peer level. GiftCard Partners prides itself on functioning as a company, but also as a family, making time to get to know each other outside of work, and spend recreational time together throughout the year. Treating employees like family build a bond, trust, and an environment that is going to make employees productive and keep them satisfied with their jobs for longer. Here are 3 ways to treat your employees like family to make sure they maintain a lasting relationship with your organization:

Employee engagement is on the rise according to the Tempkin Employee Engagement Index. Employee engagement can have many positive effects on an organization. Here are a few examples of the variety of benefits an engaged workforce can have on your organization as a whole.

Undercover cooking talent and reality restaurant shows are on the top of Food Network, lifestyle networks and even major networks these days, and our client Boston Market is taking this opportunity to capture their service and operations issues in order to remain – THE BEST, while growing their brand.

Everyone likes cash, but as a performance reward, it is impersonal and predictable. Giving employees personalized rewards can help your organization retain happy employees who know their organization cares about them and their individual interests. Richard Rosenblatt, Chairman and CEO at Demand Media goes to extended lengths to ensure his top performing employees receive personal rewards by spending a whole day with employees delivering reward experiences, such as a day with a personal shopper at an upscale department store for employees who like shopping and fashion. Rosenblatt explains the importance of delivering personalized rewards for top contributors because it shows that the organization takes a vested interest in employees, the way employees spend their time and energy investing in the organization they work for. This supportive environment keeps employees happy, satisfied, and contributing to your organization for longer. Reward personalization can be scaled down to a more streamlined system. Gift cards can serve as a great alternative to cash rewards, and can provide personalization to employees as well as a "trophy value" that cash bonuses cannot. Providing a choice of a diverse group of retailers for employees to choose their reward, as well as having one physical item to give employees makes gift cards a win/win choice for employee rewards. Being able to provide an AutoZone gift card to the auto enthusiast, and a Cheesecake Factory gift card to the restaurant enthusiast will allow your organization to deliver thoughtful rewards, while streamlining the reward system.

We use disease related terms to communicate how things, whether it is is the next pop hit, or the flu travel through our networks. As we begin to understand the importance and the value of networks within organizations, we begin to understand how organizations can capitalize on how employees interact, and what the quality of those interactions is. Employers and organizations always want to spread innovation. That is what drives any business forward, and keeps employees engaged and satisfied with their jobs. Organizationally, the biggest challenges can be how to figure out how to pass innovation virally, both up and down hierarchies and across teams. It has been proven by Nicholas Christakis, a medical school professor at Harvard, and his team, that high value employees have wide networks within their organizations and when they find an innovative idea or process they spread it both within their working unit, and across the organization. While some employees would want to hide innovation, in order to claim all of their glory of finding it their own, high value employees seek out different points of view within the organization to test their idea and gain criticism to hone their idea and further innovate to make it better. This philosophy uses the same principles of the virality of that pop song, or the way we all seem to be catching the flu this time of year, and applies it to ideal scenarios within an organization. The promotion of these philosophies can be extremely cost effective within your organization. There is no need to invest a lot in this. Promoting viral innovation can be applied by workshops, or "innovation days" in which employees can be put into teams or introduced to other people within the organization that they do not normally work with. Organizations could even award a small prize for the "innovation day" group that came up with the best idea, incenting employees to better the organization, as they expand their network. Providing a new work environment for a short time-frame allows employees to think differently and expand their networks, making them more valuable to your organization.
For more information on Nicholas Christakis' theory on viral innovation check out this article from FastCompany.