The holidays are upon us and while you’re making your list (and checking it twice) ensuring you’ve got gifts for Mom, the kids and the neighbor who waters your plants when you’re gone, you should also be thinking hard about your employees. Traditionally, a monetary holiday bonus was a treat and a solid way to let employees know their hard work was recognized and appreciated.
Over the years, though, an end-of-year bonus has become somewhat expected. Clark Griswold anticipated a large bonus check to fund a backyard pool for his family. Hilarity ensued when his employer instead gave a one-year membership to the Jelly of the Month Club.
Today things are changing rapidly in terms of employee retention and recognition. A standard 10% monetary bonus is nice, but lacks the personal touch that so many younger employees appreciate. This year, think about novel ways to personalize your employee recognitions not just at the holidays, but for work anniversaries, project completion, birthdays and more.
One employer I work with is providing Spanish lessons to their employees. It’s a meaningful benefit they receive each week during their lunch break, and can help them in their jobs and outside of work. It’s an experience the employees can take with them. And that word “experience” is important. Millennial and Gen Z employees embrace experiential perks that corporations have rarely had on their radars.
For a music-minded employee, it might mean tickets for four (to include one’s family or friends in the experience) to the opera or a local theater production. For a married employee, it might be an extra plane ticket for their spouse to accompany them on a work trip, along with an extra hotel night or two so the couple can enjoy the sights. For an employee who likes to garden, it could be a seminar about local soils hosted by a nearby nursery or cooperative extension outlet. For one who styles themselves as the family historian, it could be a subscription to a genealogy website.
These things don’t typically cost any more money than a monetary bonus, but when selected with thought and care for an employee’s interests, truly shows your employees you value them as people with lives outside of the office walls. It personalizes their contributions to your company and the perceived value is typically more than the dollar amount spent.
You’ve got to do your homework, though. Not every employee will enjoy that Jelly of the Month Club the same as not every employee will enjoy kayak lessons at the lake or two hours off each month to volunteer at the food bank. An individual employee recognition is an investment of time by you and your and your managers. Figuring out that an employee always wanted to take an anthropology class doesn’t often come up in chats around the water cooler. You’ve got to make extra efforts to have deeper, longer conversations with your employees and really connect with them in order to make a big impact through an experiential gift.
At MRC we’re advising every company right now to look at their bonus structures and while not unilaterally do away with monetary bonuses (you don’t know who already made the down payment on a backyard pool), to perhaps slowly wean off them and spend the money to personalize employee recognitions.
If you’re looking to make a career change, MRC can help connect with us or submit your resume.