How to Appreciate and Motivate Your Employees With Personalized Notes and Gifts

The legendary Greek philosopher, Aristotle, once said, “Man is a social animal.” This simply means that we thrive in a coordinated and inclusive society. While digital technology was only invented to make our lives better, it has also forced us to alienate from real societies to spend more time in virtual ones. From our workplace to college reunions, office parties to family gatherings, everything has become virtual and we do not know how long it is going to stay the same.

As our virtual society grows, our social circle in the real world has started to shrink. And with that, our physical interactions in our workplace may also decrease and we may not share the same rapport with our colleagues as we have done in the past normal, non-virtual times.

As an enterprise leader, this situation becomes especially tricky. No matter how cool you are, bosses are always perceived as strict or unapproachable, even more so, in a virtual set-up.

Hence, it becomes important to develop meaningful relationships with your colleagues. A healthy and trustworthy relationship between a boss and an employee is extremely important for the company’s productivity. Lack of cohesiveness in this relationship can lead to decreased productivity and talent retention rates may get affected due to this.

However, when you are not even meeting your employee regularly, and are interacting with them through screens, developing a relationship becomes kind of a task.

Under such situations, it is essential to make gestures that show your appreciation towards your employees. It creates a positive organizational culture and strengthens your relationship with your employee. Many studies have revealed that appreciation towards your employees is a proven method to motivate them to be more committed and productive towards their jobs.

Personalized Employee Gifts: The Power of Employee Recognition

Employee recognition is the most evident form of motivation for an employee. As a leader, you might have experienced that small gestures like an email acknowledgment, a firm handshake, or a call for a team lunch make a huge impact on the performance of your employees.

As your company and staff strength grow, you may miss out on these one to one interactions with your employees, and often, employees may feel that their efforts are not well recognized.

One needs to remember that unknowingly missing out on someone’s efforts is as good as ignoring their efforts. Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and business economics mentioned in his Ted Talk in 2012 that after money, recognition and appreciation are the biggest keys to one’s motivation. “Ignoring the performance of the people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes”, he further added.

“Ignoring the performance of the people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes.” – Dan Ariely

Recognizing an employee’s efforts and appreciating them leads to not just motivation, but also has the following benefits:

1. Higher productivity

When your employee is appreciated by their senior and the management, they are likely to feel motivated to work better, and hence, become more productive at work.

2. Error reduction

An employee working with a positive spirit and focused mind is not likely to make any errors, and hence, you can expect faster and error-free turn-outs.

3. Cost reduction

Ultimately, as productivity has increased, and the projects are getting turned-in faster, the overall cost per project reduces.

4. Talent retention

As employees are getting appreciated for their work, they are motivated to work better, and also loyally for you. This automatically results in employees willing to continue and build their respective careers with you.

5. Positive Workplace Culture

When employee efforts are acknowledged with due recognition, the organizational culture becomes performance-oriented. And not just you, your employees will also soon start imbibing the culture of gratitude and appreciation.

6. Collaborative Work Environment

When you recognize your employees for the work they do, they would feel valued. They would also reflect the recognition and value towards their peers. This would, in turn, result in frequent and effortless collaborations between the employees.

Showing Appreciation in the Digital World with Eva

With remote work taking over the world, it is even easier to make your teams grow. And as your teams grow, and as your organization shifts towards remote culture, the individual attention to each employee gets disrupted.

In such a scenario, sending virtual appreciation to your employee seems like to most viable option. With Eva, you can send personalized, hand-written notes to your employees. You can simply tell us your message and it shall be communicated to your employee. And since Evabot will select the gifts for your employee based on their individual preferences, you won’t even have to go through the hassle of thinking about what to gift or picking up the gift.

For your convenience, we have listed down some ideas that can help you develop a culture of motivation driven by appreciation in your organization:

1. Employer-Employee Appreciation

After all, it is your employees who coordinate and work as a team to take your brand to success. As an employer, you can send out hand-written notes or personalized gifts to your employee.

2. Manager-Subordinate Appreciation

Gifting culture shouldn’t be restricted to the bosses only. Another way to ensure that the appreciation branches out well in the organization is to ensure that all the managers indulge in the active appreciation of their team members.

You can encourage the mid-management level employees to start sending out gestures of appreciation to their subordinates. A great way to start this would be to initiate the appreciation chain that branches out further. Effectively the onus of appreciating and motivating every individual will also shift from you to the respective team-lead/manager/senior.

3. Peer-to-peer Appreciation

As you build a collaborative culture at the workplace for your employees, they will get encouraged to build meaningful relationships with their peers as well. With a peer-to-peer appreciation program, you can rest assured that no employee will feel that their efforts went unrecognized.

So, what are you waiting for? You can start the chain of motivation driven by appreciation right away. Get started with our free 14-day trial and unleash the power of recognition.