At RedBalloon we talk about Recognition all the time, not only what we do at work, but what we are learning from our clients. Matt the RedBalloon head of corporate has put 52 recognition ideas into a handy little business card size piece. It is really quite fun – filled with great suggestions of how easy it is to make people feel great at work.

I’m in Auckland visiting clients today with our Kiwi Manager, Laurel, and I met one of the finalists in the Unlimited / JRA Best places to work awards for 2009, Kerry from PAKnSAVE Henderson. (PAKnSAVE is a discount supermarket franchise group – Henderson is the suburb) – with more than 150 staff he was pretty pleased to be named as a finalist; up there with the big global brands, that you’d expect to see at these awards.

We asked him what’s the key… he outlined that he was making a considerable investment in training, that people liked to hang out together, and they had done a fair bit of work on their ‘values’, that is, what they stand for as a business in the community. He also talked about what he does to recognize exemplary contribution from his team.

Laurel spoke of some of the fun things that Matt had put in the 52 ideas piece – #3 ‘have the boss give up his car space’. Kerry chuckled and said one of his fellow managers had done that and even extended to recognition to include not just the car space for the week, but the bosses BMW 740 to go with it.

The winner was a Storeman, who starts work every morning at 4.am…. So as the storeman was proudly driving to work one day in the BMW (dressed in his work attire of stubbies and singlet, ‘looking pretty rough’) the police pulled him over asking to explain who owned the car. The storeman announced it was his bosses and he had been given the use of it for a week because he was the employee of the month… the Police didn’t believe him. So the police made the appropriate calls (getting the boss out of bed) to verify that he was actually telling the truth and the car was not stolen…

I don’t know what the storeman thought of being pulled over, but he sure has told everyone about it… the experience and the story created, means this story has become part of the ‘folk law’ in that business. And that business is now ‘known’ as one that recognizes it’s people.

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