Dive Brief:
- Delta Airlines is commending its 80,000 plus employees for their work in a 50-hour Facebook Live marathon, says Adweek. The event features celebrities and a host of entertainers.
- The airline will be calling out the names of all employees during the marathon. To make sure employees don't miss their own name, a microsite was set up to inform each employee when their name would be called.
- In a public statement, Joanne Smith, Delta EVP and chief HR officer, said: “Taking care of our employees is one powerful way to ensure the 180 million customers we serve every year enjoy their Delta experience.”
Dive Insight:
Delta’s marathon might seem over-the-top, but it underscores the importance of recognizing employees for their contributions. To recognize employees is to respect them, the leading cause of job satisfaction in a recent SHRM survey. Such recognition is one reason why happiness is consistently higher at smaller businesses.
Saying “thank you” for a job well done scores high in employee satisfaction surveys, often beating out money and career advancement. But for employee recognition to work, it needs to be consistent and applied beyond one-off events like this. A Harvard Business Review survey of 1,000 employees weighed in on the actions they liked least in managers. The number one action that 63% of the employees liked least was not recognizing employees’ achievements.
Luckily for HR managers, there are quite a few tools at an organization's disposal. Even the simple act of tweeting or posting on Facebook your pride in an employee's accomplishment can go a long way.