Publisher’s Note: We are a week away from Turkey Day! It’s a good time to be thankful for those who help us succeed in the CSRA, like customers, co-workers, employees, vendors, and the community. Dr. Rick Franza breaks down each group and how to show gratitude to those folks who help you!
While for many, giving thanks has a religious and spiritual component, there are personal benefits to being grateful for all individuals, whether their thanks are directed at God or not. Therefore, being thankful, while highlighted this time of the year, is something that should be practiced year-round.
Many psychological research studies have demonstrated a positive link between gratitude and a person’s physical, mental, and emotional well-being. Gratitude can take a multitude of forms, including appreciating the good in one’s life, being conscientious about thankfulness, and acknowledging that the good in one’s life often comes from factors outside of ourselves. That latter item might be the most important, which is recognizing the contributions of other people and external events to the goodness in our lives. According to these studies, gratitude is associated with greater optimism, happiness, alertness, and overall positivity. Appreciation for the good things tends to limit anxiety, depression, and negativism. Finally, in terms of physical health, gratitude has been linked to lower blood pressure, improved immune function, and greater energy levels. So, as noted above, practicing thankfulness, while highlighted around this holiday, can benefit us individually all year-round.
However, while we all certainly want to improve our individual physical, mental, and emotional well-being, we also want to improve our businesses. Like the benefits experienced by individuals who are thankful, businesses who are grateful also receive demonstrative benefits. For businesses, it is important to demonstrate its gratitude to four important constituencies:
- Employees: It is of critical importance to be thankful for your employees, because without your employees, you cannot execute your mission and operations. Even in job markets in which there are more candidates than open positions, it is beneficial to retain your current employees. Searching for new employees, getting them up to speed, and making sure they are a cultural fit can be much more costly than retaining current employees. Showing gratitude to your employees will increase your retention, improve institutional knowledge, boost productivity, and enhance company culture. You can show your gratitude to them through:
- Intangible rewards such as acknowledgement of accomplishments in meetings and/or organizational communications.
- Tangible rewards such as gifts, bonuses, and additional personal time off (PTO).
- Investment in employee development to help advance them professionally and personally.
- Customers: Like your employees, your business’s success is dependent on your customers. Without customers, you will fail, so show them that you are grateful for their role in your success. Again, like your employees, it is much easier to retain existing customers than finding new ones. Demonstrating gratitude to your customers will make them feel more valued and increase their loyalty to you. Some of the ways you can show gratitude to your customers are through:
- Gifts or Thank-you Notes which will make the customer aware of how much you value them. For many, it will be a pleasant surprise.
- Other Benefits: You can show customers how much they are valued by providing them a “no strings attached” benefit, such as early access to new products, special sales only available to a select groups, and other things not available to new customers.
- Acknowledgement: Let others know about the great customers you have through social media. Everyone likes a little publicity, and acknowledging great customers is a nice intangible reward.
- Partners and Vendors: I have just finished teaching a lesson on Supply Chain Management to my students, and in the lesson, we learned how a company’s success is often dependent on how well it is served by its suppliers and distributors. It is crucial for a company to have strong relationships with these partners, and gratitude goes a long way toward making these relationships stronger. Some ways of demonstrating gratitude to supply chain partners are:
- Publicly Endorse Their Services: Nothing helps a business get more clients than the positive endorsement of a current client.
- Be Flexible When You Can: Assuming that your partner has served you well, it may help them out at times to allow for some flexibility in delivery times or quantities. While it should not be a regular thing, helping a partner during a difficult time clearly shows gratitude for past performance.
- Regularly Acknowledge Their Contributions: Let your partners know that they are instrumental in your success. This will likely motivate them to continue to perform well for you.
- Community: It is important to show your gratitude to the community in which your business is located, as the community is what provides you with the employees and customers that make you successful. You can show such gratitude by giving back, by involving yourself and your company in non-profits and local government to make your community better. At this time of year, contributions to the Golden Harvest Food Bank would be a great way to give back to this community.
Thanksgiving is a clear reminder for us to be grateful both for what we have as individuals and what we have as businesses. However, to improve both our lives and businesses, it is critically important to be thankful to those who contribute to you and your business.
For me, I am thankful for many things; in particular, you, my readers, who provide me encouragement and feedback at every turn. I am also thankful to Neil Gordon for providing me this space to share my thoughts with you and his insightful editing (and Mitzi Oxford before him), which makes me look like a better writer than I am. I wish you all a most blessed Thanksgiving, and I will see you back in this space in two weeks.
Publisher’s Note: Rick, ABD and our readership are blessed to have you on the team, sharing your expertise. Happy Thanksgiving!
