When it comes to celebrating success, often it’s those who can demonstrate in monetary terms their contribution that receive the most praise.
In professional services firms that’s the fee earners, in recruitment, it's the top billers. It’s easy to see when they’re performing well and that means it’s usually those individuals who get rewarded.
However, it’s worth remembering that business service teams do the essential work that props up those fee earners, they provide the foundation and infrastructure for their success. Yet when it comes to recognising and rewarding high performers, business services employees can sometimes be overlooked.
This can result in them feeling undervalued, underappreciated and wondering if they’d be better off elsewhere.
It’s crucial that as leaders, we ensure that every individual within the business feels valued. Otherwise, we’ll be looking at higher exit rates and increased levels of disengagement which aren’t good for business.
What is employee engagement (and why does it matter)?
A sense of belonging is one of our fundamental needs as humans. That can be achieved in many ways - family, friends, sports - but given the number of hours we spend at work, people also need to feel like they belong and are valued by their employer.
There’s a plethora of research out there around employee engagement and the direct individual and business benefits. It all comes down to this; engaged employees are happier, they’re more productive and they stay with their employer longer.
Highly engaged employees are 21% more profitable. The question then becomes how do you create engaged employees and how do you sustain that level of engagement? For many, the answer comes down to recognition.
The key to engagement
80% of people say recognition improves their engagement. Recognition doesn’t have to be singing from the rooftops, but particularly in businesses where there are departments which do receive regular recognition and rewards, it’s important to be aware and ensure that every department is equally valued.
What does value mean in the workplace?
As with all feelings, value is subjective to those experiencing it. However, there are commonalities that can be applied across the board.
Firstly, to make someone feel valued, recognition needs to be given on a regular occurrence, rather than an off-the-cuff or one-off-event. Employees need to believe their authenticity and appreciation are real, rather than a box-ticking exercise.
Of course, the difficulty with valuing business service teams is that they aren’t measured by financial goals.
For fee-earning positions you can see clearly whether that person has delivered or not. For business service professionals, there’s more subtext involved and to show value relies on more subjective measures such as their attitude, the way they’ve supported their team or their perseverance.
When we’re looking at these types of measures it’s important that business services teams understand how they’re being evaluated and what they’re being given praise for. Without that context, employees will feel that firms are paying lip service with their recognition.
At Ambition, we focus our recognition around our company values of passion, resourcefulness, integrity, drive and enjoyment. By moving the focus away from individual performance and instead focusing on culture and attitude it creates a more open platform for anyone in the business to shine.
We encourage peers to nominate each other for living out the company values and people at every level or role get taken out by myself for a celebratory breakfast to recognise their efforts in going above and beyond.
Once a quarter we also have a high achievers’ lunch and we make sure that someone from the business services team is chosen to be included. It’s our way of showing people we value them and recognising their hard work.
Whether or not you have a formal programme, there are several steps employers can take to incorporate recognition, value and reward into the firm:
Create the right culture
Building recognition into your working practices starts with your culture. You need to cultivate an environment where regular feedback is provided, where credit is given where it's due and where people are recognised for hard work.
That starts at a team level, but to do so you need to create close knit teams. Making sure they’ve got a budget for socials or treats is an easy way to start forming those bonds.
Professional development opportunities
Do all of your team members have PDPs? Do they know what they’re working towards and how they’re going to get there?
Value isn’t just about what someone is delivering right now, it’s also about building up people’s skills and experience so they remain valuable to you. Within their PDP you can begin to have conversations about how their success is measured to establish clear expectations.
Build relationships
Too often there’s a divide between fee earners and business support teams.
Breaking down that barrier and focusing on building firm-wide relationships disperses animosity and creates a feeling of the whole firm pulling together. Company-wide team-building activities, mixers and socials (when done right) can help with this.
Publicly and privately recognise success
People like to be told thank you, they like to hear they’ve been noticed. This could be in a 1-1 situation, or it could be in a more public way. Building in opportunities for this verbal feedback to happen is so important to boosting employee morale and showing value for your team.
Recognising success shouldn’t just come down to who’s brought in the most money that month. There are many ways that employees can add value to their work and to boost engagement and productivity it’s important to make sure that doesn’t go unnoticed.
As employers, think about recognising all types of success, whether that’s financial or cultural. After all, we need both types to succeed in business.
In the same way, we say thank you to a waiter for bringing us our meal, we should be saying thank you to every single one of our employees, including business services.
Without them, we would be less successful, and by recognising their efforts, we are more likely to retain and motivate people to help our businesses achieve even more success.
