Employee Recognition

Employee Recognition – 6 Ways To Show Appreciation To Your Hard Working Staff.

Employee recognition doesn’t have to be all about paid bonuses and monetary rewards, sometimes it’s the smaller things that can be more meaningful and make employees feel more appreciated. However it can be hard to think of ways to incorporate recognition into the workplace so here are a few ideas:

  1. Show Appreciation In Team Meetings 

A lot of the time, people overlook verbal praise as a way to show appreciation. Set aside just 20 minutes a week to meet with your team. Talk about their strengths of the week and remind them of how much you appreciate the work that they do for the team.

Everybody loves to hear about the “great job” that they’re doing and to be quite honest, good feedback from a manager can sometimes lead to an employee working even harder because they want to make you happy and continue to be recognised. It’s a very important cycle. If you are happy with their work you and you let them know, they will be happy with you for giving that feedback and they will work hard. The cycle will continue.

  1. Reward Special Achievements 

Show that you recognize someone’s overtime hours by giving them extra free time during the work day. Offer a 2-hour lunch, a late arrival or an early finish. Most of our Three Q Team love an early Friday! It costs you nothing but it goes a long way in communicating your gratitude. It will also push other employees to work hard because everyone will want to be rewarded!

  1. Send a Deserving Employee Snail Mail

Admit it, it makes you feel good when you see a letter in your mailbox (not your e-mail – your actual mailbox) with your name on it (When you know it’s not a bill, that is). So imagine you get that envelope, and you open it to find a letter from your employer, singing your praises. How good would YOU feel? So why not?  Use this in work for employee recognition. It takes absolutely no time to write a short note and it’s all for the cost of a stamp, but it will make a big statement.

  1. Everyone Loves A Meme 

Catch your staff off guard by creating a funny, personalized meme about them and e-mailing it out to everyone. Choose your image and type a funny message that includes the recipient’s name and a congrats for all the great work they have done. This one takes a little creativity but it’s free and it’s funny and it will make your employees happy. So just give it a try!

  1. Motivation Mascot

Provide your team with a mascot! Buy a big, cheap, silly object and make it a symbol for the employee of the week! Every Monday, put it on a different person’s door or desk to show that they are the chosen one. Don’t fear if, at first, your staff acts like it’s cheesy because it is but within a couple of weeks they’ll be anxious to see where it is at the start of every week.

Here at Three Q, we ring a bell when a team member wins big! The individual themselves will ring it and the team usually come running to see and hear what there win is! We love to celebrate our successes as a team!

  1. Reward With A Duvet Day

The joy of sleeping a little longer and working in pyjamas cannot be overstated. So let this be a reward! Choose an employee that has been going above and beyond and reward them! It would be interesting to see just how many of your employees follow suit! You’ll have your whole team on their best behaviour battling for this reward no doubt!

The truth is, it doesn’t really matter what you do to show your appreciation. Rewards and gratitude can take just about any form. As long as you show that you have noticed the hard work within your team. These ideas are not revolutionary, but if you utilize them frequently, they could have a dramatic impact on relationships and productivity.

GDPR for ADONs and CNMs

Are you a Director of Nursing or a Clinical Nurse Manager?

You should know the following about the EU General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR).

There has been a lot of buzz in the HR sector around the new data protection regulations that come into force next year. Last week, I got down to reading up on the GDPR and what struck me was the fact that these changes could potentially affect many of the companies we work with.

What is it and does it affect me?

New data protection regulations are due to come into force in May 2018. These regulations define how organisations use personal data. Personal data is any information that can be used to directly or indirectly identify a person. This includes: names, photographs, email addresses, bank account details, social media posts, medical information and even computer IP addresses.

This also includes medical identifiers such as specific genetic, physical, physiological and mental factors.

Further, health data is held to an even higher protection standard. Therefore, whether you work in a hospice, nursing home or provide day or home-care services, the GDPR will affect you.

The GDPR specifically mentions three health related data sets:

  1.  Data Concerning HealthThis refers to physical and mental health data. This includes information that reveals a person’s health status; such as information about the provision of healthcare services. Case sheets, patients’ records and diagnostic reports all contain health data. If your place of work accesses and stores this kind of information, it’s important to be aware of GDPR and the changes to obtaining, storing and using personal data.
  2. Genetic DataThis refers to data regarding inherited or acquired characteristics which reveal information about the health or physiology of a person. This particularly deals with data that’s been obtained from the analysis of a biological sample from the person in question.
  3. Biometric DataThis refers to physical, physiological and behavioural data that’s been obtained through specific technical processing and allows the identification of a person. If part of your security, sign-in or clocking procedures involves fingerprint or iris scanning, this constitutes biometric data.

The processing of these 3 data types is prohibited unless one of the following conditions applies:

  1.  The person whose data you’ve collected must have given explicit consent to the processing.
  2. The processing is necessary for preventive or occupational medicine in order to assess the working capacity of the employee, for medical diagnosis, the provision of health and social care or for the treatment and management of health and social care system and services.
  3. It is necessary for  the public interested in the area of public healthcare.

If you work in a healthcare setting and either:

  • keep patient records.
  • collect and store information regarding patient and service users’ medical history.
  • perform and store medical test results and/or behavioural and physiological assessments.

Then the GDPR is certainly something you should be aware of.

As a CNM or DON you may have access to your staffs’ personnel files and while this may not be health-specific, it may still fall under the GDPR.
At Three Q Perms & Temps, we’re getting GDPR ready. If you would like to find out more, the EU GDPR website has additional resources and Absolute Security Solutions has published a Whitepaper about the EU GDPR in Healthcare.
Have you started preparing for the GDPR? In the coming weeks, I’ll discuss what’s different about the GDPR and what to do to ensure that you’re compliant so if you’re already in the process of changing data-protection policy, let me know how it’s going for you; whether it’s been smooth sailing or difficult to put into place.