Mentoring Program
A mentoring program is a great way to show employees they are valuable to the organization. Mentoring programs create opportunities for employees to grow and develop in their careers. The mentoring employee develops feather leadership skills and experience. The mentee learns a new competency. Friendships are built and communication heightened. All of these benefits help employees with job engagement. Mentoring programs yield knowledge sharing, greater competency among employees, and greater employee engagement. After an employee has gained a new skill set or competency, the mentor can set up a Quiz in Thanks to show the newfound knowledge. Employees involved in mentoring report greater job satisfaction. In a mentoring relationship, the mentor often challenges and teaches the mentee. The mentee can bring problems or solutions to their coach for a broadened perspective. Both benefit from the relationship.
Invite to Customer Event
Recognize the employee who put in that extra effort to meet deadlines, provide the best service, or made a difference by inviting them to a customer event. Star employees rub elbows with important clients and become part of the face of the company.
Employees gain additional insights, experience, and accolades. Nothing says “I trust you and appreciate you” like bringing employees to public events where they can both celebrate and get to know important clients.
Continuing Ed
Prove you value your employees by awarding each of them with a paid continuing ed class on Employee Appreciation Day. Let the employee choose what they want to learn, don’t mandate that it’s directly job-related. Unlike rewards, which are often used to control employee behavior, spending money on employee education shows employees you value them and their development.
But, it has other benefits also.
Even the spark of creativity that comes from a completely random class can infuse employees with new life, creativity, and growth. Oftentimes, seemingly unrelated events have a big impact at work because people who are growing, learning, and changing are more engaged at work.
By paying for a community ed class, a work-related class, or continuing ed at the local university, you demonstrate that your employee’s growth is important to you. It shows you value them especially because there is an inherent risk of them growing beyond their current position.
Job Swap
Show your employees that you trust them to bring a new perspective to a different team and value their career growth by coordinating job swaps. Job swapping allows an employee to try another position and learn new skills in a hand-on environment. Job swapping can be done when a particular department may be short handed, or as a training function. Employees can job swap with a manager to learn more of what’s required and the decisions required. Look at job swapping as another way for employees to acquire more skills and broaden their experience. There is no better way to show employees you appreciate them and care about them individually than to promote their skills and knowledge.Share Ideas With Leaders
Don’t wait until Employee Appreciation Week to support a rising star employee. Instead, throughout the year, encourage managers to choose an employee to present their ideas at the managers’ meeting. This will both benefit both the company, the managers, and the employee. A fresh perspective can help to keep managers making decisions with a more diverse discussion and avoid group-think. And, employees benefit from getting to know upper managers they wouldn’t normally rub elbows with. They also get to hone in on presentation skills, and learn a perspective that includes a wider view of the entire company’s goals and challenges. The star employee can then take this perspective back to their team. The Idea feature in Thanks can provide a way for employees to share ideas and get feedback from leaders.Boss Office
Recognize a fantastic employee by giving them the boss’s office for a day. Let them use your desk, private office, and hidden refrigerator. Share your perks that day. Sometimes, just the ability to imagine an advanced future inspires an employee to dream bigger and reach for new goals. Giving up your office isn’t easy, but because it’s an inconvenience, it shows your employees how much you care about them.Lunch and Learn
While not as fun to plan as a party, Lunch and Learns, or bag lunches are gaining popularity as a means to provide training to employees who want to learn and grow in their field. Consider investing in your employees by providing lunch and bringing in a speaker, think-leader, or other inspiration in your industry space.
Alternatively, lunch and learns can be used for motivational speakers, to share company vision, or a course to teach your team a new skill such as coding, social media marketing, or overcoming objections in sales. Bring in leaders from other departments to share and teach what they know to interested employees. This grows both the teacher and the learners. Use Polls in Thanks to find out what topics employees are the most interested in learning.
Give employees the option of attending Lunch and Learns. Consider recording them for remote employees. By offering this additional resource, you empower your employees to grow, learn, and broaden their perspectives.
Carve Out Free Time For Creativity
20% Time shows an immense trust and confidence in your employees. This space for creativity has been called 20% times, thinking time, clarity break, and lab fridays. Regardless of what your company calls it, or the number of hours dedicated to it, consider providing your employees with a set amount of paid free times for them to work on a side project.
It allows employees the time and space to work on a side project. It enhances creativity and collaboration. In some companies, it’s as simple as a free hour to go outside and think about problems from another angle. Employees can crowdsource Ideas in Thanks to get ideas and discuss aspects or challenges of their side projects with other colleagues.
But, thinking time only works if deadlines ease up enough that employees feel like they can take a little time for creativity. The greatest reason 20% time fails is because employees don’t want to increase team members’ workload by focusing on side projects. Allowing space for creativity demonstrates to employees that you value their contributions, creativity, and ideas.
Boss For A Day
Choose an employee who has shown extraordinary motivation, who rallies the team, and defuses stressful situations, and promote them to a temporary boss. Leadership isn’t just about the charismatic personalities, but the quiet steady, examples that pull a team together. Add Boss for a Day as an experience in the Company Store on Thanks.
You never know what new ideas, changes, or inspiration your leaders can bring. Being boss for a day might mean allowing them to attend leadership meetings, use your parking space, or run the team meeting. Or, it might mean meeting with important clients, coaching and helping struggling team members, or other leadership building skills.
Role Shadowing
Sometimes it’s best to let an employee see and experience a new position. Job shadowing differs from mentoring in that an employee, often new or prospective, can job shadow to learn more about what a certain job entails. Employees interested in a new position, a different team, or a management opportunity can shadow and learn more about whether a particular role fits their career goals.
Some employees have moved into management only to discover that they really enjoy the creative process of their previous job better. Role shadowing can help employees who want to advance and learn to identify the path best for them.
Role shadowing can help other employees also. Learning the ins and outs of what others in the company do helps team members to realize the processes involved. This can help with greater communication and ease tensions caused by deadlines. When employees realize the full extent of what’s required by other team members, they often work harder to meet their own deadlines so they don’t delay others.
Leadership Training
Provide leadership training to rising stars. Leadership training can be anything from sending star employees to business development opportunities, providing team leadership, job shadowing, or sending them to your managers training program. Conduct Surveys on Thanks to find out what types of leadership training your team is the most interested in taking part.
It can include speaking training, presentation training such as how to use technology for presentations, or assigning greater responsibility and leadership roles to team members.
Regardless of how formal your company’s leadership training programs are, or aren’t, there are many ways to promote the growth of rising stars to become greater leaders.
Conclusion
Developing employees can be inconvenient. Anything that challenges existing structures and habits takes work. And, some employers see employee development as a risk because invariably, some developed employees leave. But, stimulating employees’ growth creates greater engagement among employees, which in turn, increases loyalty and job happiness. That ultimately results in greater employee engagement.
About Thanks
Thanks is a leading provider of a recognition-based platform that increases communication, builds teamwork, and makes recognition a part of company culture. Fast, easy and simple Thanks makes it easy to bring data-driven employee recognition to your entire organization. O.C. Tanner purchased the Thanks platform in 2019 to fulfill the recognition needs of smaller businesses.
Thanks customers benefit from the same decades of research in employee motivation and company culture that O.C. Tanner enterprise clients enjoy, but in a product that is geared for fast, easy and simple deployment. Whether you’re starting a recognition program or improving and expanding on what you already have, Thanks has everything you need to engage your people with effective, scalable recognition.