Generally, whenever employees work more progressively
and enthusiastically in an organization, they inevitably expect to get noticed
and appreciated by the top management and other related administrators. When
organizational employees strive harder to meet the given targets and the set
goals, they show a natural tendency to expect greater thankfulness and honor
from their workplace in addition to the promised benefits and awards from the organizations.
Therefore, organizations try to put great efforts into improving their
relationships with their employees making the workplace more comfortable for
them.
Appreciation and thankfulness can be given to workers
in various forms. For instance, many organizations provide their gratitude to
their best performers by offering them better growth opportunities, job
rotations, promotions, and replacements. However, employees seek verbal
appreciation and admiration even more in addition to rewards for good
performance.
So what should organizations do to satisfy the
appreciation urge of their employees? How should they respond to their
expectations?
In my opinion, which is largely based on knowledge bases
and working experiences smart employers must always try to provide their
employees, especially, the best performers with strategic gratitude. Strategic
gratitude in my working experience as an employer consists of verbal
appreciation being strategically aligned with organizational culture. It
includes the involvement of organizational strategic authorities to carry out the
process of appreciation in close collaboration with the employees. The process
is needed to be carried out in both formal and informal ways. Since
organizations are busy carrying out formal official procedures on daily basis,
providing formal processes of appreciation on daily grounds may not be possible
for many organizations. Therefore, I recommend organizations design and operate
chunks of strategic employee gratitude programs periodically.
Now, what does this strategic employee’s gratitude
program consist of? Here is a brief overview of what essential elements it
should contain. Organizations may alter the elements as per their
organizational needs. In addition to what an organization discusses about the goal
of achieving perks with its employees, special appreciative measures must be
taken by the authoritative personnel in this regard. For instance, conducting appreciative
programs inviting the best performers to give a speech and have dinner, uploading
their success stories as a part of an organizational social platform, and displaying
the best performers’ records on billboards of various organizational departments,
creating a moment of applause formally and informally for the achievers, giving
a free short trip or vacations to the extra-ordinary performers, holding their
special conversation sessions with the top management, allowing them to grasp
more lucrative or luxurious offers by setting new strategic targets to be achieved by them, allowing
them to write for the organizational newsletter or magazine, and so one.
One can think of new and better appreciative measures for the employees where they are being offered new opportunities to win in return for achieving new strategic goals. Organizations must try to make them feel splendid working for the organization where they get new chances to learn, improve and get better recognition for achieving more strategic targets. Employees who feel a sense of engagement with the organization tend to perform better. This raises their level of satisfaction and retention within the same workplace.
