Investing in your employee relationships during the holiday season is one easy way to set yourself up for success, but true surprise and delight goes so much further than that! You have opportunities all year long to build loyalty and improve job satisfaction with small gifting moments.
Why Surprise & Delight?
Many people struggle in modern society – after all, we are literally not adapted to our environment. A human being today is overloaded with information, inundated with data, and almost constantly staring at screens. In fact, Forbes found that the average American sees up to 10,000 ads a day! This wreaks havoc on our brains leaving us feeling overwhelmed and disconnected.
In other words, your employees are bombarded every day with new messages, more products to consider, and literally thousands of decisions to make, leaving them feeling overwhelmed and disconnected.
Layer on top of this worrisome employment trends like outsourcing and automation, and you have a recipe for STRESS, which is considered to be the basic cause of over 60% of human illnesses.
So what are our brains adapted to deal with? In a word: relationships. We are outstanding at creating, categorizing, and understanding complex relationships. We are, after all, social creatures, and this skill was essential to survival in a world where cooperation and trust meant food and security whereas isolation and deception meant almost certain death.
Understanding and utilizing our innate ability to foster relationships can be both personally and professionally rewarding. By investing in surprise and delight, you can unlock greater productivity, higher job satisfaction, and improved employee morale.
At its core, Strategic Surprise & Delight is about building authentic relationships in a scalable and sustainable way that benefits everyone involved, including the business itself. It applies the best of human psychology, evolutionary biology, sound business principles, and cutting edge technology to create a Strategic Surprise & Delight process to unlock the full potential of a successful business.
Gifting Throughout the Year
It’s hard to argue with the concept of Strategic Surprise & Delight – there’s just too much evidence that backs it up; plus, it just feels right. But how do you actually implement this approach in a way that moves the needle for your business (without driving yourself crazy!)? The good news is there are so many moments to connect with your employees during the year that AREN’T in the December holiday season. (Better news? The Greetabl team is here to help!).
Option 1: Holidays & Seasonal Moments
Celebrate fun seasonal moments with your employees to make work a little more fun – and to show them you care.
- Q1: Happy New Year, Valentine’s Day, Employee Appreciation Day, St. Patrick’s Day
- Q2: Fun at Work Day, Eat What You Want Day, Celebration of Summer, Say Something Nice Day
- Q3: International Joke Day, Relaxation Day, Just Because, Happy Fall
- Q4: Sweetest Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, World Kindness Day
Option 2: Milestones
Recognizing your employees on birthdays, half-birthdays, employment anniversaries, and other key milestones is another fun way to engage your employees.
Greetabl has a special Special Moments package for corporate clients that enables you to place one bulk send per month. All you have to do is send us your recipient information for birthdays, anniversaries, milestones, or random reasons to celebrate. From there, we will submit the order on your behalf.
Option 3: Employee Recognition
Another way to incorporate gifting into your employee engagement strategy is for recognition awards. Many Greetabl clients use gifting as a way to honor their high performing employees and motivate the team to work toward common goals.
Here are a few of our favorite ways to use gifting for employee recognition:
- Core Values Awards – give gifts on a monthly or quarterly basis to employees who demonstrate your company core values. Many companies choose to use a peer-nomination system for core value awards and give them out at quarterly All Hands meetings.
- Completion of Large Projects – have a team that has worked overtime for months to get a big project over the finish line? Send gifts at the end of the project to thank them for all their hard work and dedication. Alternatively, you could send gifts to everyone in the company after a particularly large or meaningful project comes to a close.
- Company Spirit. If you’re looking to surprise your people with a little swag, we recommend checking out our friends at swag.com. They’ll take care of all your branded gear needs, aka something your employees will actually use or wear!