Staffing Trends
How to Give Your Business a Culture of Gratitude This Thanksgiving Season
As soon as last month’s leftover Jack-o-lanterns cleared the stage, holiday season decorations immediately began to pop up everywhere. And while I’m no Grinch, and I certainly enjoy seeing the pretty lights and getting into that year-end holiday spirit as much as the next guy, I also like to hit the pause button every November and remember that we have the wonderful observance of Thanksgiving wedged in between these two other major décor-heavy seasons. And frankly, I hate to see Thanksgiving given any short shrift, because this month’s uniquely American holiday provides a bounty of blessings for us in our personal lives and in our business lives.
So let me offer these three quick tips on ways that your business can embrace the spirit of Thanksgiving to help you create a culture of gratitude in your workplace that can endure throughout the year.
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Link Gratitude to Your Core Values: Many businesses go through a “values” exercise as they’re developing a Strategic Plan, articulating the core values that are most important to them. (Labor Finders is no exception – among our 7 stated core values, “Customer-Centricity” and “Servant Leadership” are closely linked with gratitude – we recognize that the employers and the job-seekers whom we serve are our reason for existence and that our primary job as leaders is to serve and support the teams whom we lead.) It is important that you not let this hard work just sit there in a binder on a shelf, gathering dust. This Thanksgiving, I encourage all business leaders to take a moment to open your “values” page if you have one and determine which of your company values link closely to Thanksgiving. (And if you haven’t gone through that values exercise yet, there’s literally no better time than right now.)
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Write It Down and Share It: Going through the activity above does your organization little good if you just keep it to yourself. Find a way to share it. How to best accomplish this will vary by business. You can make Gratitude a topic to discuss at a team meeting or department status session. Or, if you have an internal newsletter or email update, make Gratitude a lead topic, to bring it top of mind to all. By injecting a mundane, routine meeting with something that can elevate the dialogue, you move your team’s culture forward. Remember that a company’s culture is values in action – so that binder sitting on a shelf does no good unless you do something with it on a regular basis.
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Don’t Just Say It; Live It: At the risk of contradicting point #2, remember also that “talk is cheap”. You have hired, on-boarded, and trained some pretty smart, savvy people. Most of them have some pretty good “bull detectors”. (Yeah, I cleaned that up in the holiday spirit.) If you pay lip service to the concept of Gratitude, but the walk doesn’t match the talk, you may be doing more harm than good. So how do we LIVE the values? Author Daniel Pink, in his superb book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us points out (and supports extensively) that people are motivated by internal rewards and “intrinsic motivation” way more than external awards alone, including monetary compensation. While year-end bonuses are certainly generally well-received, what’s even more fundamental is to understand the role that “autonomy”, “mastery”, and “purpose” play in motivating our teams.
What does this last part have to do with Thanksgiving and Gratitude? The more you’re able to help your entire workforce link up with the meaningful purpose behind your business, the more gratitude they’re able to feel for being a part of the organization. At Labor Finders we try to create internal dialogue about our purpose – the noble value of putting people to work – as well as our mission – driving success and changing lives through meaningful employment partnerships. If you were to interview any of our longer-tenured branch teams or any of our longer-tenured staff here at our Branch Support Center, you’d hear this cited as one of the key reasons they’ve stayed with the organization for so long. Everyone has a story about an Associate whose life they were able to help change, or a customer who was able to be more successful in driving the economy around them because of something we were able to help them with.
That’s incredibly motivating to me. It makes me proud to be here, serving our community, and grateful for the opportunity to have this kind of impact. Whatever it is that brings out the spirit of gratitude in YOU, I hope you have the opportunity to embrace that and lean into it this Thanksgiving season!
Happy Thanksgiving to you all!