Recognition

[Far from newbie]

1. Is it happening enough in your store ?
2. What is the best kind ?
3. Any new ideas on how to recognize tm’s ?
4. Any special events for the Christmas season ?
Please share some ideas.

 

[Black Sheep 214]

1. No. Current leadership apparently can’t be bothered. The team didn’t even get food on Black Friday.
2. My team always liked food. Sometimes it was pastries, doughnuts, candy, ice cream bars on hot days, chips and sodas, right up to full meals for special occasions, all provided by the TLs. Starbucks and gift cards were also favorites.
3. No new ideas, unfortunately.
4. We (the TLs, sometimes with the ETL, sometimes not) had a Holiday party for our team in the conference room every year, with the team’s favorite type of food, a full meal with special desserts. Everyone also received a holiday gift
from the TLs. We had a great team, they deserved all the recognition we could give them, and then some.

 

[JAShands]

1. We pull down a full #YOU recognition cards wall every month so we’re doing good there. I hear plenty of shout out thank yous in the walkie as well. We catered from thanksgiving through Cyber Monday and the Team was super appreciative and felt loved. I think we’ve managed to keep morale up, we just have exhausted TMs.
2. Either food or gift cards valued at $10 and up. We’re trying hard to bring and maintain a fun culture to our store so we’ve been having little contests. We made a Team recipe book and everyone who contributed was in the running for a prize. We did Halloween costume contest, and pictures of pets, we’re going to have an ugly sweater contest. We have an Elf in the Shelf the Team takes out and prints selfies of our Elf helping them zone or pick or pull batches. Plus we have Holiday Trivia all December (have for years) and everyday the winner gets a prize. This gets the Team engaged and helps the culture. I heard TMs discussing dreidels the other day on break when normally they wouldn’t have talked to each other!
3. Keep it fun, casual, relaxed, and rewarded. Back the the #YOU board - we draw one card every month and the To/From each get a $5 gc. We have a template we post it with so everyone knows the little things matter and nothing is too small to say thank you for. These cards are more about TMs thanking each other which has helped our culture tremendously.
4. Back up to 2, lots of little contests with $5-10 prizes. I have a new in role ETL who was being super careful with the budget until I had him pull up reports to see what we had to spend. When he saw that I pinched a few pennies throughout the year to save for Q4 there was a definite shift in what we could plan for the Team lol. The recipes were fun for older TMs, the selfies are for a generation younger than mine. The trivia covers everything from Christmas to Kwanzaa to Chanukah to Solstice. By being all inclusive it gets TMs talking to each other to figure things out. Google gets used of course but they’re talking to each other!! We have a new contest every week from thanksgiving to New Years so everyone has a chance to participate and it keeps it interesting.

 

[mizl]

1. No, but we're getting better. We're doing a lot more callouts over the walkies to recognize people. Recognized my TM doing Drive Ups the other day for getting our average time that day down from red in the morning (2:30 or something) down to green (1:50). We're a low volume store so it's not annoyingly frequent.
2. I don't know! I'm assuming the best kind is personalized, because it shows we're paying attention, and something public other people can witness is a nice ego boost? If you mean in terms of what it actually is, I'm still figuring that out for my team. Definitely something fun. Food is always good. I used to hand out candy when I was GSA when people did well or even just around like 2-3pm when people started to slump, and even small gestures like that made a big difference. I recently got the okay from our SD to start doing that again, I've gotta remember to requisition some candy. It's hard to pick what to give out because some people don't like chocolate, some don't want pure sugar, I don't want it to be something like M&Ms that could spill, it needs to be something they can eat fast so they're not eating if a guest walks up...
3. I'm putting together a bingo game for my front end team with some fun squares and some service-focused squares (getting a RedCard, etc) and I have small prizes for winners. (I actually have enough prizes for just about everyone, I think, I want everyone to get something even if they don't get bingo, because it's about recognizing them, it's not a serious competition.)
4. I'm trying to think of other ideas, maybe something along the lines of the United Way stuff, like if we hit X goal then someone has to wear a goofy costume, or we all get to wear Bullseye holiday headbands for a day, or something. I've been mulling the idea for a while that we could maybe have a competition to pick a "front end mascot", inspired by all the times we get some weird thing we can't find a DPCI for and it temporarily lives at the service desk as a little mascot friend. Around Halloween we had a little Hello Kitty McDonald's toy that sat on a register for a while. But I don't know if forcing it would take the fun out of the spontaneity of the weird things that turn up.

 

[Times Up]

We pull down a full #YOU recognition cards wall every month so we’re doing good there

My store does that too. However, I've never written up a card or even read the board to know if someone left one for me... lol. If I'm off the clock, I'm not reading it. I always assumed that after I punched in Target wasn't going to pay me to be in the TSC reading the board.

 

[JAShands]

My store does that too. However, I've never written up a card or even read the board to know if someone left one for me... lol. If I'm off the clock, I'm not reading it. I always assumed that after I punched in Target wasn't going to pay me to be in the TSC reading the board.

Oh I try and get them sorted as quickly as I can once they’re off the board. When each TM has theirs for the month stapled together and all of the cards are sorted I give them to the TLs to hand out to their Team. If it meant enough to someone else to write it down it means enough to make sure the person gets it. **But I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve gone upwards of three months before without sorting them and distributing them.

 

[workinghard]

We used to give "recognition" in person at "the Huddle". Now it's just the board in HR. On one particularly rough day, I wrote myself a recognition card and posted it. (lol), just because...

 

[SpilledTea]

We send thank you cards via USPS to our TMs homes for recognition in addition to our "You Card" board. Personally, I'll buy my TMs something from sbux out of my own pocket because my store is pretty tight-fisted with the purse strings outside of Q4.