Courtney Shipshock, Author at PerkSpot

4 Ways to Help Employees Stay Grounded This Winter

Courtney Shipshock February 14, 2022

The winter months often are accompanied by decreased motivation, a lull in energy, and a lot less sunshine. During this season, it’s crucial to keep employees’ wellness at the forefront and provide opportunities to increase morale. Below are easy to implement, meaningful opportunities to help your employees stay grounded this winter.

Encourage Incorporating Movement Into Every Day

Staying active in the cooler months can be a daunting task. Luckily, there are plenty of options available to promote adding movement into your employees’ daily routine. For example, movement can be as simple as taking breaks from your desk or as complex as structuring a cycling class into each day. According to LiveStrong, one way that exercise can help boost productivity at work is through alertness. When you exercise, you are also increasing blood flow to the brain, which can help sharpen your awareness and make you more ready to tackle your next big project. With PerkSpot, employees have access to exclusive perks geared toward a variety of fitness activities that can assist in achieving movement.

Support Employees Taking Advantage of Time Off

What better time to plan ahead than during the winter season! Encourage your employees to leverage their time off benefits and spend time away from their daily work routine. Time off can range from a day here and there to a week-long vacation. Either way, time away will play a positive role in helping employees avoid burnout. In addition, having something to look forward to oftentimes will also boost your employees’ morale and keep motivation steady.

Prioritize Downtime

It can be easy to get caught up in the hustle of everyday life. Downtime during the workday provides employees the necessary time to reflect and come back to tasks with an open mind. Prioritizing employees’ downtime can include things like implementing meeting-free hours, encouraging lunch breaks, or promoting adding pauses directly to their calendar. Psychology Today found that taking breaks refreshes the mind, replenishes your mental resources, and helps you become more creative. Taking the necessary downtime to refresh and regroup is a critical factor for staying grounded this winter.

Inspire Employees to Invest In a New Hobby

With less activities taking place during the winter months, it’s still a good time for investing in a new hobby. Some examples of ways to inspire hobbies virtually or in-person in the workplace include: hosting a monthly book club, gathering for a routine meditation class, bringing teammates together for a cooking competition, amongst many others. A discount program through PerkSpot makes finding new hobbies to enjoy together simple, with categorized savings from Home & Garden to Outdoors & Recreation.

This winter, grasp the opportunity to improve your employees’ overall wellness. Not only will staying grounded improve overall health, it will lead to an increase in determination, improved wellbeing, and a happier team.

Check out more of the perks that PerkSpot has available for your employees. Let’s work together to beat the winter blues!

Building a Better Workplace: Employee Appreciation

Courtney Shipshock September 30, 2021

Let’s imagine your business is a car. It’s not just any car, though. It’s a best-in-class model with all the bells and whistles to really make it soar. But what happens when you don’t have any fuel? This fancy automobile may look great and sound great, but it’s not going anywhere. Here’s where employee appreciation comes in.

What is Employee Appreciation?

Think of employee appreciation as the fuel that drives your business. You can have a car built with all the best parts, but without fuel, it won’t move. We need to continuously keep our employees full by “refilling their tank” with appreciation and recognition for their achievements. Eighty percent of employees say they are motivated to work harder and stay at their jobs longer when they receive recognition for their work. That’s why making employees feel valued and appreciated is one of the best things we can do to build a better workplace.

How Can You Utilize Employee Appreciation?

So, your business is the car. If you’ve successfully recruited, onboarded, and trained the best talent for your organization, then you’ve definitely got all of the best parts. But as we mentioned before, without fuel, you’re not going anywhere.

Make It Regular

Refueling a car once will only get it so far. Eventually, that fuel runs out and the tank is empty. Recognizing employees is similar. While being recognized once is great, for employee appreciation to be truly effective, it needs to come regularly. At PerkSpot, we strive to recognize employees at least once every two weeks, and more if we feel it’s deserved!

Make It Valuable

If you’re driving a car all day, every day, it’s eventually going to need a break. The same goes for your employees! We all need a break every now and then, and a great way to utilize recognition is to give out those breaks. Offer a collective day of rest for your employees or recognize someone’s hard work with an additional day of PTO, allowing them to refuel and reenergize themselves.

Make It Useful

We may love adding new trinkets and fun embellishments to our cars, but the fact of the matter is, they won’t help the car run any faster or more efficiently. Similarly, employees want recognition in the form of something that feels useful. Skip the desk tchotchkes and find something that shows both your appreciation and a better understanding of your employees’ needs.

Build a better workplace with employee appreciation that matters and you’ll have the best car out there.

The Importance of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Your Workplace

Courtney Shipshock September 24, 2021

The last year and a half have brought to light what many of us already knew: we need to be making a more concerted, concentrated, and permanent effort to incorporate not just diversity, but also inclusion and equity, into our workplace. Furthermore, this needs to be implemented across every stage and area within your organization. Recruitment, hiring, and professional development are all great examples of instances in which your company would benefit from DE&I.

Remember, these three concepts, while typically grouped under one umbrella, still differ significantly.

Diversity

A diverse workplace is one that has a wide variety of ages, races, genders, sexual orientations, ethnicities, and more. Diversity is typically the first step a workplace takes. However, it must be accompanied by both inclusivity and equitability to have a meaningful and lasting impact.

Inclusivity

An inclusive workplace takes this one step further by ensuring that the organization’s diverse workforce is regularly brought into the conversation. This means that decisions and strategies are developed with input from those with different backgrounds, perspectives, and opinions.

Equitability

Finally, an equitable workplace is one that fully understands that not everyone is placed on a level playing field and works to offer support and the necessary tools to give equal opportunities to those without access to them.

How to Implement DE&I in Your Workplace

To develop a workplace and culture that understands and incorporates DE&I, review your current workforce and its demographics so you can find and fill gaps, which is the first step in creating a more well-rounded workforce. Educate your employees on the meaning of each term and what they mean personally and broadly for your organization. Actively welcome the input of every team member. Search for ways to lift up and support those in need to create a more equitable workplace. Be transparent and open about your current workplace’s state regarding DEI. Create a thought out and actionable that can be implemented, complete with measurable goals, to ensure that you hold yourself and your organization accountable when it comes to diversity, equity, and inclusion in your workplace.

How To Put Your Employees at the Center of Your Benefits

Courtney Shipshock August 16, 2021

As HR professionals, it’s easy to get bogged down in the world of employee benefits. Which are right for my company? And my budget? What gaps do I need to fill in my offering? Often, these questions allow us to lose focus on the most important thing—our employees.

Join PerkSpot’s CEO, founder, and Executive Chairman, Chris Hill, as he dives into what an employee-centric benefit offering looks like. Then, explore the important connection between your employees and the benefits they most utilize, and why. From there, understand how you can use that understanding to seek out and implement better employee benefits and benefits strategies that tap into what your employees really want.

Interested in creating an employee benefits strategy and developing an offering that truly serves your employees? Take the first step by checking out Chris’s most recent webinar here.

Learn to Boost Employee Engagement, Loyalty, and Retention

Courtney Shipshock August 11, 2021

Sometimes, the journey to improving your employee engagement, loyalty, and retention is simpler than you realize. Explore how to do just that with experts Justin Cardillo, PerkSpot’s Vice President of Sales, and Becky Byler, PerkSpot’s Director of Client Success, who put their heads together to come up with a simple and easy guide to boosting employee engagement, loyalty, and retention with a Rewards & Recognition Program.

Catch up on last month’s webinar to learn about the significant impact a rewards and recognition program can have. Plus, discover the benefits of incentivizing employees and why a program like this is essential to your workplace and business.

Interested? Check out the webinar here to learn more!

Happy 15th Anniversary, PerkSpot!

Courtney Shipshock June 30, 2021

PerkSpot was incredibly proud to celebrate its 15th anniversary this June.

In 2006, PerkSpot was founded by good people with a great mission—to inspire people to love where they work. Fifteen years later, we continue to do just that. In the time since we were founded, we’ve grown our team to over 100 incredible PerkSpotters. We’ve developed new products, established new partnerships, increased our userbase to more than 17M PerkSpot Members, and kept doing what we do best, which is helping employees make the most out of every dollar they spend.

To celebrate our 15th anniversary, we threw an amazing picnic in Chicago, where we were able to come together in person with our families and friends. We enjoyed some delicious food, participated in fun games, and basked in the beautiful weather. Together, we reminisced on 15 amazing years and looked forward to many more to come.

How Leaders Contribute to Building a Better Workplace

Courtney Shipshock June 8, 2021

In recent posts, we’ve explained how things like recruitment, training, and development contribute to building a better workplace. Now, let’s dive into how the leaders of your workplace play a part as well.

Leadership’s Role in Building a Better Workplace

Better leadership is a crucial factor in building a better workplace. Having leaders who know how to cast vision and address employee concerns can make or break the employee experience. Unfortunately, perception is not always reality. A recent study actually reveals some of the disparity between employee-manager relationships:

80% of managers say they’re transparent with direct reports; but, only 55% of employees agree.
75% of employees feel that approachability is an essential quality for a manager, but only 50% say this is a reality for them.
71% of managers say they know how to motivate their team, while only 44% of employees agree.
89% of bosses believe employees quit for more money. The truth? Only 12% of employees actually leave for this reason.

It’s no wonder 75% of employees leave their job because of reasons their managers can influence. Their realities do not align with what a better workplace should be. In today’s world, 45% of managers don’t receive formal management training and it shows. In order to build better workplaces, we need to train and develop our leadership to be effective and approachable.

To learn more about how you can build a better workplace for you and your employees, download our free e-book here!

Well-being Over Wellness

Courtney Shipshock May 10, 2021

Pushing for healthy snacks and fitness programs is no longer the only focus for wellness initiatives. Well-being is the new buzzword for the workplace. It encompasses more than just fad diets or workout regimes. Instead, it looks to serve the whole person. Mental health awareness has gained increasing popularity over the years. As a result, the onus it has placed on employers is becoming more and more evident. A better workplace in 2021 and beyond is one that fosters health not only for the body but the mind as well.

If you want to learn more about what it takes to build a better place to work, download our free e-book!

How Can You Build a Better Workplace?

Courtney Shipshock April 30, 2021

There are so many ways to build a better workplace. We’ll discuss a couple here, including ways to improve recruitment and training, but a deeper discussion could be held on each of these points. Building a better workplace doesn’t happen overnight and we’re constantly growing and moving forward as we learn what it takes to inspire employees to love where they work—first through the way that they are recruited, trained, and onboarded.

Recruitment

When discussing a better workplace, it makes sense to start with an employee’s experience on day one, or better yet, on their negative 10th day, before they’ve actually begun. The recruitment process can be the first taste an employee gets of a company’s culture. Plus, who we hire can make a major impact on our culture as well. It’s important to examine both of these factors when looking to build a better and stronger place to work.

Culture Add, Not Culture Fit

A lot of companies talk about “culture fit” when they are hiring new staff. While the intention is there, perhaps a better approach is to look for “culture add.” Culture fit can often create a homogenous culture that doesn’t foster diversity and growth. Looking for people who can actually add to your current culture, not just fit in, will enhance your diversity efforts and bring in new perspectives that help your business grow.

Training and Development

After you’ve established a solid team of talented people, it’s important that you implement the training and development they need to succeed. Building a better workplace isn’t a finite process. A better workplace continuously pushes its employees to do better and be better, giving them the tools they need to be successful.

Focus on Corporate Goals

When it comes to training our workforce, we should begin by aligning their work with our company mission. While we may put these words in fancy fonts on our webpage, only 40% of the workforce reported knowing their company’s goals, strategies, and tactics. When employees understand how their work is impacting the big picture, they’ll feel better coming into work every day. This is how we build a better workforce – we cast vision and help our employees understand their role in reaching these goals.

Interested in learning more about what it takes to build a better workplace? Check out our free e-book to continue exploring how you can implement these tips in your workplace!

Answering All Your Employee Recognition Questions

Courtney Shipshock April 1, 2021

Regular employee recognition can inspire increased employee productivity, satisfaction, and retention. But if you’re not an employee recognition pro, you may not realize some of the important details about why, when, and how you should be regularly, formally, and informally recognizing your employees!

Why Should You Recognize?

As we mentioned above, the impacts of employee recognition cannot be overstated. Furthermore, the impacts hit nearly every aspect of your organization. From improved employee satisfaction to increased retention and reduced turnover to boosting your culture, recognition positively affects an entire organization. Plus, this is the case for any type of recognition. Employee recognition in the form of positive feedback, public acknowledgment of great work on a project or task, or a monetary reward are all great ways to say “thank you” to your high-performing employees.

When Should You Recognize?

Remember, employees should be recognized at least once every two weeks for various things, such as great performance, a job well done on a certain project or initiative, collaborating with a teammate, or hopping in to lend an extra hand. However, it’s vital that the recognition takes place soon after the event for which they’re being recognized. Employee recognition that quickly follows a great performance can help draw a connection for employees between their job well done and the positive feedback, thus increasing the possibility that they continue to perform at the same high level.

How Should You Recognize?

For many HR professionals, the ‘how’ can often be the most difficult part of recognizing employees. Understandably, it’s tough to single-handedly develop, implement, and maintain an employee recognition program. That’s why PerkSpot is managing that process for you. With PerkSpot’s Rewards and Recognition Program, you get an easy system for regularly recognizing employees. Plus, you’ll have the option to include a monetary reward as well. We’ve even developed a calendar that provides tips, suggestions, and weekly reminders for recognizing your employees!

Recognize your employees in a uniform manner with our Q2 Recognition calendar. Want to learn more about partnering with PerkSpot to start offering your employees the recognition they deserve, in a way that matches your organization’s culture and budget? Request a demo here!