By: Kathy Kent Toney, CEO & Founder of Kent Business Solutions

Many business leaders are scratching their heads, wondering how to prevent the Great Reshuffle from negatively impacting their organizations.

One way to help counteract the exodus of talent is through recognizing and rewarding employees for their service.
Here are 10 creative ways to give kudos to your employees:

1. Share Employee Content on Your Blog

If you have employees that like to write (and that's not their main role), share their content on your company's blog.

2. Recognize Outside-of-Work Success 

Share your employees' successes outside of work on social media channels, your internal website, or your company's website.

3. Showcase the Monetary or Volunteer Impact of Employee Efforts

If an employee's efforts on a project contributed positively to the bottom line, highlight that in some manner to your employee base. You can also draw attention to employees who support charitable contributions through either donations or volunteer time.

4. Provide Stipends for Long-Distance Commuters

Employees living far away or who often experience heavy traffic during their commutes could receive stipends to help pay for gas.

5. Use Gamification Apps to Fuel Productivity and Motivation

Gamification gives employees an entertaining way to meet company requirements, such as training. What might often be a tedious process could be transformed into something fun. Check out what Edgagement, Hoopla, and Gametize apps have to offer along these lines.

6. Share Kudos from Customers

Create an Employee Wall of Fame to highlight customer feedback directed at particular employees or teams.

7. Share Employee Kudos

At the start of your meetings, recognize employees for the small, daily wins. These are often overlooked, but these shout-outs can go a long way towards increasing employee morale.

8. Surprise Employees with Snacks or Meals

Bring in or order food during busy workdays. It lets your employees know you appreciate their hard work.

9. Provide Sabbaticals for Long-Timers

For employees who have been with the company for five, seven, or 10 years (for example), consider providing them with sabbaticals. That way, they can take quality time off work to pursue their passion and return to work refreshed and ready to re-engage with your company.

10. Use the Power of a Post-It Note

I left this for last because it's something you can start doing today!

Who doesn't like a personal touch to show appreciation? A simple post-it note with a meaningful message that you place on an employee's desk is a simple act that can go a long way to show appreciation.


These are just a few things you can do to recognize and reward your employees. Doing so can help keep employees happy and can also help build a foundation of increased loyalty to your company. 

And what business leader wouldn't want that?

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If you or anyone you know are stuck in the middle of a project and don't know how to get it moving forward...

OR you want to start projects but don't have the internal bandwidth to undertake them, I'd love to have a chat! I have over 30 years of project management expertise, so I can help accelerate these projects over the finish line.

Interested in learning more? Click the button below to schedule a time!

As a business leader, it can be daunting to plan for and implement a digital transformation initiative. How do you ensure that you start off on the right foot?

There is one essential thing to consider…ensuring your team has the right mindset. It’s a vital aspect for ensuring project success and keeping your ideology fit.

It’s great to have a good plan, great people, processes, and execution, but if you don’t have the right mindset, successful digital transformation projects will only be a pipe dream.  

So, what are the qualities of a great mindset? It all starts with team members who:

• Understand their own strengths and weaknesses that they bring to the project
• Are grounded in reality, goal oriented and are great team players
• View change positively, viewing challenges as opportunities to overcome

These qualities are just the tip of the iceberg, so let’s take a deeper dive into some four key aspects of having a great mindset:

1. Honesty and Candor

Creating a mindset of honesty and candor is essential to have successful teams. Honesty should never be devalued within your team.

Candor involves talking about things in a real way, without negativity, towards other team members. It’s discussing the things that can be done better or how individuals can interact more effectively, without pointing fingers.

This also includes Care, which means having an attitude that you are all in this together. It’s involves determining how to best look after team members and being aware of how individual members are doing.

Care comes down to active concern for the total person. Case in point—everybody's got a life outside of work. Having an empathetic understanding of what things employees are balancing, to the point that they feel free to share about them, is the goal.

Here’s an example. Bob has been working late every night and seems stressed, which is uncommon for him. As a leader, it would be helpful to ask Bob how he's really doing—to show true care to him, making sure he is doing alright. It may also involve “taking one for the team”—giving Bob permission to leave a couple hours earlier the next day, if that seems appropriate.

And here’s a further illustration of how having the right collective mindset throughout your team might look like. Bob’s manager could ask someone to pick up the slack for him and a team member would most likely be glad to jump in and help.

On the other hand, having negative team mindsets could result in many more problems on a project. Imagine this—team members with a fearful mindset aren’t going to be as forthcoming when something's a mess. And with that type of environment, you’re most likely not going to find individuals wanting to jump into to help when someone’s needs a break. They’ll perhaps be more concerned about not meeting their own work goals while caring less about the overall team goals.

Bottom line—it comes down to working with your team to build the right mindset, which in turn, helps create a healthier team culture.

2. Endurance

Endurance is one of the most important factors of continued success and is a large part of having a great mindset. This is true for anything, whether you are building a business, a team or your life.

Successful teams complete projects over and over again. It has to do with their ability to endure. Every day they come to work and complete tasks, completing one more piece of the puzzle at a time. It involves team members keeping their mindsets positive and making a decision to endure.

Of course, great leaders will use the “Care” approach to check on them, as well, to help them in the process if they’re getting stuck.

In the end, endurance is the ability do what it takes over and over again with measurable, incremental and positive results, which move you towards a successful conclusion of a project. It’s also about making sure you do what you said you would do.

3. Visibility and Transparency

This involves open communication with your stakeholders, whether external or internal. Essentially, it’s all about letting them know that you will have a mindset of honesty, candor and care with them and that you will escalate issues when required. By doing that, you show leadership how much you care about the project, which will pay dividends for you throughout the course of your work.

For example, if you happen to miss a deadline, it may look less erratic when you're raising the issue with management. It really is going to make a difference in the way that they view you and how they view the project.

But that’s not the only good outcome. Having visibility and transparency amongst all team members can positively affect the end users of the process, and eventually the business as a whole.   

4. Change Management

How you approach communication of planned changes has a powerful effect on mindset. That’s why a good change management approach is important—employees in an organization really need to understand what's changing. That way, they can prepare themselves for the changes, so that they can achieve the right mindset. This involves communicating the amount of effort required for a project to transition from where they’re at to where they have to be for the business to succeed. Then, it’s asking for their feedback along the way.

This removes the outward perception of changing for change sake and casts a vision of the future to help ensure success for the organization. And it really becomes an organizational change/movement mindset.

This is vital, because this can change the whole organization’s attitude and help create an environment that is more accepting of digital transformation.

When you can do that, you’re well on your way to a  more successful digital transformation journey for your organization!

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This newsletter is an example of the content Michael Cantu and I have included in our best-selling book on Amazon, No-Nonsense Digital Transformation. This book talks extensively about creating proper mindsets, building exceptional teams, and creating great cultures, so it isn't just for digital transformation fans.

Are you interested in learning more? Then click the button below to get started!  ​

As a business leader, ensuring newly launched projects succeed is always challenging. Unfortunately, projects can still fail despite best efforts.

One different way to view these failures is to hone in on what didn’t work in those situations. Flipping the switch on these scenarios can provide valuable insight into what could’ve worked.

Along those lines, what are some common mistakes that project managers can avoid to help ensure success?

1. Failing to Think Outside the Box to Avoid Potential Problems

Unfortunately, many Project Management (PMs) are so focused on putting out fires instead of thinking outside the box to help prevent the occurrence of possible challenges. Great PMs are tuned into what could potentially go wrong. They are forward-looking, ask questions, and are on the lookout for problems before they ever occur.

2. Prioritizing the Unimportant over the Important

Too often, PMs will focus on minutia instead of the most important things: ensuring the client is happy, tracking to budget, and keeping the project on time, to name a few.

For instance, it doesn’t matter nearly as much if someone hasn’t updated a chart or properly marked a task as 40% instead of 50% complete. A good PM constantly weighs what’s most important and tackles those items first.

3. Under-utilizing the Best Aspects of the Team

When PMs don’t take the time to understand their individual team members’ strengths and weaknesses, this can sabotage the team functioning at more optimum levels.

For example, Bob may excel at performing a particular task, but instead, the PM assigns the task to Suzy who isn’t as skilled at that particular job. Also, some team members may require more oversight than others. Finding out these abilities and assigning team members to perform tasks that match those skills can tremendously boost team productivity.

4. Neglecting to Regularly Test Early-On Assumptions

At the beginning of projects, PMs often have to make assumptions based on a scarcity of available information. When more data becomes available, it’s important to test and revise assumptions against this information. Failure to do so can result in serious errors that can affect project success.


These are a few examples of steps PMs can take to avoid issues that can lead to project failure.

Speaking of avoiding failure, Scrum is a wonderful project management approach that helps identify problems before they ever become issues.

As a certified Professional Scrum Master, I’ve experienced this reality repeatedly in my line of work. I’ve also seen how the use of Scrum typically decreases the amount of time to finish projects, and it doesn’t matter what type of project it is.

If you have any projects that you would like to undertake but have limited internal resources to complete them, or you are stuck in the middle of a project with little hope of moving forward, I’d love to have a conversation with you!

If that sounds good, click the button below to schedule a chat.