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How writing “love letters” inspires employee recognition

Everyone needs a pat on the back and recognition for a job well done – even you!

A letter I wrote

Every week, I solicit from our managers the names of a couple of individuals who deserve a letter of recognition. I take the names and the details about why they deserve recognition  and write them a hand written note thanking them in detail for what they did and why they are being recognized.

Over the years, these hand-written notes to staff have become known as Andy’s Love Letters. I do this every week, writing notes to anywhere from two to six staff members each week.

Just last week, I had quite a surprise after our managers meeting when I had three envelopes sitting on my desk. Inside each envelope was a motivational card with a hand-written thank you message from each one of my three managers in our Fredericton store. For the past three weeks, I’ve been extremely busy behind the scenes working on a major initiative for the company, and that week, when asked who deserved recognition, they all agreed that it would be me. So upon returning to the office after a meeting, I found three Love Letters addressed to me for a change.

It was a great surprise for me and an action that I truly appreciated. What I found incredible was that they realize that I too would truly appreciate some recognition from time to time. I have to say that I have an amazing team!

Recognition by way of a hand-written note is an extremely powerful tool. I was reminded of just how powerful it is, when I received my hand written thank you notes just last week. Check out the one I attached to this blog post. Its got an amazing feeling of personalization – something email can’t convey.

What do you do to recognize your team when they do something right?

You, and how you conduct yourself are the secrets to your business’ success

Cigarette Left on Sidewalk via Flickr by randa1thor

Presenting yourself for success is vitally important in everything you do.

I love the quote; “How you do anything, is how you do everything”. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing, how you do it will convey to the outside world how you live your life.

Tom Peters, in his book Re-Imagine talks about the importance of paying attention to detail and design. Tom reminds me that regardless of what it is I or someone in my company is doing it should be done to such a degree of detail, precision, and design that someone from outside your company would pay good money for the service.

So it doesn’t matter if I’m leading a meeting of 20 managers, or filing papers from this morning’s work, perform each job to the best of my abilities.

This hits home for me almost daily.

I find myself so busy at times that I might be tempted to skip over certain daily tasks. However I stop myself with this quote – How I do anything is how I do everything. By doing this, I’ll immediately stop, turn around and address the task that I was about to skip over. This can be as significant as preparing for a meeting with a potential bank, or as trivial as picking up a small piece of garbage in front of the store. I have actually walked over a cigarette butt on the ground in front of my store because I was too busy, then a few seconds later, stop myself, turn around and walk back to pick it up and throw it out.

It doesn’t matter what it is, in order to become our best, we must put forth our 100% effort into everything we do, even if it is picking up a cigarette butt.

The Yays and Nays for Marketing a Small Business

Yes, Maybe or No? via Flickr from ‾olǝƃuɐ‾

Marketing is not what it used to be. What used to be all about newspaper, radio and TV advertising, is now all about internet, social media and direct mail marketing.

When you look at your own business, have you changed your marketing strategy in the past five years, or are you still trying to do the same old thing and achieve new results? In my opinion, here are a few Yays and Nays to consider:

Marketing Nays

• Newspaper – news print readership is on the decline, yet advertising is still expensive.
• Radio – with so many stations diluting the market, it no longer has impact.
• TV – very expensive and too much dilution.
• Yellow Pages – (unless yellow pages online) usage of traditional yellow pages has plummeted in recent years, replace with assorted online websites. Carrying ads on their site is also more expensive then other mediums
• Twitter – I haven’t been able to prove the  ROI / economic value to my businesses using Twitter, yet. It can be a time suck, and reach a different market then I’m intending. But, I remain optimistic and continue testing.

Marketing Yays

• Websites – make your website easy to find, informative, up to date and relevant.
• Staff Blogs – builds an online community and encourages people to visit your website regularly.
• Facebook – setup a fan page to help build an online community and to become a part of their online community. It doesn’t take a lot of time, and its an additional place to be found and push out your promotions
• Facebook Ads – a very effective marketing tool that enables you to narrow in on a very small and specific niche in the market place. They’re also less expensive then you think
• Google Adwords – a very effective advertising tool to get in front of people searching for something that you’re hopefully selling. If you know what you’re doing, this can be very effective. There’s lots of help available in this field if you want to outsource.
• YouTube Segments – this can be a very effective tool for providing informative content to your customers, and using a flipcam, video can be fun and easy to create.
• Email Campaigns – not as effective as they once were, as long as you have permission, you keep them relevant and you don’t abuse the privilege, it is still a very useful tool.  When looking at pushing out promotions, email is still king.
• TV Listing Channel Ads – if you must do TV, then do the TV listings channel. It is more reasonably priced and you’ll get more bang for the buck.
• Direct Mail – whether it is via email or snail mail, direct marketing to your customers works every time.  It may be time consuming, but know that the response rate on Direct is the highest of all channels.

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Peer Advisory groups are a great way to discuss business issues confidentially with other owners, CEO’s and like minded business people. They offer the opportunity to get new ideas outside your regular circle of people, and can be useful to test ideas and receive some ‘constructive’ criticism.  There’s likely a group for every type, and several across the country.  We are looking to create a list of these groups across Canada.

I’ll add to this list as we find more sources, but here are some of the larger Canadian Peer Advisory Groups:

Innovators Alliance
www.innovators.org
Coverage: Southern and Eastern Ontario

Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO)
www.eonetwork.org
Coverage: .B.C., Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec

Presidents of Entrepreneurial Organizations (PEO)
www.peo.net
Coverage: Southwestern Ontario

Women Presidents’ Organization (WPO)
www.womenpresidentsorg.com
Coverage: B.C., Ontario, Quebec

TEC The Executive Committee
www.tec-canada.com
Coverage: B.C., Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick

Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO)
www.ypo.org
Coverage: B.C., Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, Newfoundland, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia

Virtus Inc.
www.virtusinc.com
Coverage: Greater Vancouver

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Provided below is a summary of today’s ‘Economic Outlook 2010′ webinar hosted by Canadian Business featuring RBC Chief Economist, Craig Wright.  For more information, visit www.canadianbusiness.com/webinars

Economic Outlook 2010 (Abridged Summary Notes)

OCTOBER 30, 1:30 pm-2:30 pm, EST

To begin,  RBC is taking an overall view of “cautious optimism” towards the economy

• This was not a recession made in Canada, so we need improvements globally and in the US (where the recession began). We expect to see fiscal policy and low inflation and low interest rate will help lift us out of this economic recession.

Our growth is dependent mainly on other factors:

• Global financial market stability
• We can see this in key indexes such as the Volatility Index, TED Spread, Borrowing Cost, and Credit Standard that stability is coming back.
  • Global growth & global economy improving
    • We see an improving tone, Decline of 1.5%. Outlook has stabilized and outlook for next year has improved significantly. Continue to revise higher (3-3.5% growth range). We expect that global growth will be lead by emerging economies.
  • Recovery based on the condition that authorities make the right exit-strategy, but of course there’s a risk that errors are made and they pull out too early before a full recovery, creating a possible double dip in the economy.

Looking Ahead – and caveats in our economic recovery

The Canadian Outlook in detail

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