The One Thing Employees Want Most From Leadership

Hiring and retaining the best talent for your team might be easier if you offered them the one thing they want most.

As someone in a leadership position, you have influence over how successful your employees are and whether or not they reach their highest potential. Your employees’ success is your success, so why not serve up the one thing employees crave the most from you?

Words of Affirmation

According to Gallup, employees like to hear from you when they do a good a job. It’s not more complicated than that. When you reinforce when your employee makes an outstanding contribution, you are having a profound effect on future productivity.

When you make people feel valued and appreciated, it is a powerful motivator for attracting the right talent, retaining your best talent, increasing employee engagement, and elevating employee satisfaction and performance across the organization.

Weave Praise and Recognition into Your Management Style

Offering praise and recognition to your employees when they do a great job is a simple concept, but there are better ways of going about it than others.

Back up your words with action

Telling people they are doing a good job is nice, but following up praise with action is better. Just telling someone they are doing well without a show of appreciation can lack impact. Therefore, next time you recognize an employee’s stellar contribution to the company, do something meaningful. You can offer extra PTO, take him or her out to lunch, reward with gifts of gratitude, and sometimes a great job may be deserving of additional compensation or promotion.

Make it public

Don’t keep your recognition of employees a secret. Making your pleasure known to others offers an extra boost to your employees’ egos, and it demonstrates the type of work that receives positive consequences. Your public display of praise and recognition offers an example of the type of work ethic they can model that is recognized and rewarded.

Create a culture of positivity

Positively recognizing good work doesn’t just have to be your job either. It will undoubtedly start with you, but once you set the example of a clear strategy behind praise, encouraging (and rewarding) everyone to foster a culture of gratitude and recognition can take on a life of its own. There are plenty of moments you won’t see, but that employees working among themselves will. For this reason, consider implementing a system in which you let employees recognize one of their peers on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis.

 Making recognition a celebrated attribute of your leadership style can go a long way in not only transforming the way your employees work but also on how your company evolves over the long-term. We only need to look at company’s like Southwest Airlines and Zappos to see strong examples of how a commitment to employee satisfaction and recognition makes these company’s perceived positively by the public, attractive to potential job candidates, and beloved by existing employees.