The importance of recognition
You can prepare employees for their jobs, give them the tools to succeed and communicate with them every day. But it’s only part of the
battle.
Once employees have taken all the ammunition you’ve given them
and turned it into something that benefits the company, Boeckmann
says you must recognize what they’ve done, or they won’t repeat it.
“Regardless of who you are, you’d like to know you’re doing the
job the way the people you work for want the job done,” he says. “All
of us like to be recognized if we’re trying very hard to accomplish
something and are successful at it.”
He says that if you want to reward employees for going above and
beyond the call of duty, you must first define what the call of duty is,
then acknowledge when someone does more than that.
“It’s important that the person knows what their job is. Any time they
do their job very successfully or exceed what we would expect, it’s
important to recognize them, particularly in front of others.”
At Galpin, employees are awarded a pin for their anniversaries of
employment every five years. Salespeople receive recognition rings
for meeting certain sales objectives.
Boeckmann says it’s not really about the material gifts. The gifts are
symbolic of management’s gratitude for a job well done. That is what
employees are seeking above all — even if a monetary gift does help
to sweeten the pot.
“If a guy does something that made a lot of money for the company
and they thank him, that would be nice. If they give him some kind of
financial reward to go with that, it would be very nice. But there might
have been some circumstance where he treated a customer very well
and they wrote back a glowing letter, and he certainly wouldn’t have
expected a $20 bill included with that.”
But the best kind of recognition to Boeckmann is the kind that signifies that a company is going to have a strong customer base for a
long time. All the individual recognition Galpin gives to its employees
is aimed at encouraging them to provide a level of service that keeps
customers — the lifeblood of any business — coming back.
“When I walked into my office recently, there was a letter sitting on
my desk that had just arrived,” he says. “It said, ‘We’re still with you 41
years and 24 cars later.’ That’s really where our focus is and where we
come from.”
HOW TO REACH: Galpin Motors Inc., www.galpin.com