As we move through the first months of 2021, a sense of measured optimism about the Covid-19 pandemic coming to an end in the coming months seems to be occurring. While it can be hard to see light at the end of the tunnel, the increasing availability of vaccines certainly provides cause for hope as the year unfolds.
At the same time, the anxiety and uncertainty that practically everyone has felt for the past year won’t go away anytime soon. That’s why helping employees navigate through the challenging situations and circumstances brought on by Covid-19 remains a critical issue for staffing firms and organizations in practically every industry.
At TalentBridge, one of the approaches that we’ve followed to help employees through these extraordinary times might seem a little counterintuitive at first. Yet, it’s a perspective we believe is essential to supporting our team members’ mental health, well-being, and productivity: encouraging and fostering celebration.
Our philosophy is that there are plenty of reasons to celebrate, every day, for each of us individually and for our company collectively. And during these unprecedented times, celebrations are needed more than ever to keep spirits up and inspire motivation. We focus on three reasons to celebrate.
Celebrating Recent Successes
Let’s face it. This has been the toughest, most unpredictable period that any of us have had to work through. Across the board, everything has been more difficult. That’s why we make it a point to celebrate each and every success and recognize our team members for their contributions.
Whether it’s partnering with a client to fill a big order, bringing a new customer on board, placing a batch of candidates in jobs, putting in extra hours to meet deadlines, helping colleagues with a project, or any other achievement of any type, we want to always acknowledge and thank the teams and individuals who made it happen. We do that in a number of ways.
For example, we celebrate wins at every all-staff weekly town hall meeting. Successes are also celebrated at each department meeting and companywide through our popular Feel-Good Friday emails. Every Friday morning, a colleague begins the process by sending out an email recognizing a colleague for a job well done. Others join in with similar words of praise and appreciation for team members, creating a string of emails that often becomes very lengthy.
And, our top performers are awarded and rewarded at our annual President’s Conference, which celebrates individual and team accomplishments over the preceding twelve months.
Celebrating What’s Next
While managing through the here and now challenges of the pandemic, we’ve also kept our team firmly focused on the bright future ahead and how we can support employees today to help ensure a strong tomorrow. As part of our commitment to the overall well-being of our staff, we recently expanded our health and wellness programs to include more offerings, incentives, and reimbursements.
From a professional growth and development standpoint, we’re adding more modules for remote training and creating customized training offerings. We’re also expanding our mentoring program as well as helping facilitate more peer-to-peer learning.
Another important way that we’re preparing to achieve future successes is by including everyone in the process of determining what the company will look like when we move into the post-Covid era. What are some of the practices we implemented because of Covid-19 that we want to continue? How do we take what we learned and experienced to help our business survive over the past year and apply it to our future? What are the things we did well before Covid that we want to be even better at going forward? Are there ways of doing things that were in place prior to Covid that we don’t want to bring back? These are the types of questions we’re asking employees to weigh in on as we plan for the future.
Celebrating Every Day
Perhaps most importantly, we encourage team members to make time to celebrate something that’s personally meaningful to them. Taking a few moments each day to reflect and appreciate good health, loved ones, or anything else that you’re grateful for goes a long way.
During Covid-19 and beyond, celebrating while navigating is a sure way to make this journey a success.