Chad Silverstein says employees need praise roughly every seven days. He shares how he operationalized it: public recognition, monthly bonuses up to $1,000, PTO rewards, and handwritten letters praising employees to their families. Praise costs little, builds trust, and reinforces the behaviors you want.
Questions this video answers
About once every seven days.
$1,000.
April.
Chapters
I think the Gallup poll came out with some study. I remember seeing it. I don't know the exact numbers, but they said that everybody in an office, they need to be praised within once every seven days, which is crazy, but it's the way people feel. They're not praised, they feel undervalued, they feel like they're not appreciated. And what's so incredible about praise? And I used to have a discipline and one of our even core values was like, catch people doing good things and then recognize them for it. So as an EOS client, we would practice and model the way for how we celebrate not only our wins, but how we try to, you know, really keep the core values front and center by rewarding people, recognizing and rewarding for the core values that we are talking about instead of just stamping them up on the wall. We lived them, we hired for them, we fired for them, and we recognized and rewarded for them. And it was how I gave out bonuses at the end of the month, and I had other teammates standing up in front of the entire company sharing, you know, an example of someone who, who exhibited the core value that we wanted more of. And it was just month in and month out, it was just repeated over and over and over. And I'd give away thousand bucks, thousand bucks, PTO day. And I did it really. It helped perpetuate that in our culture to the point where, you know, it became habit. It just became a habit catching people doing good things, getting your ratios right so that people didn't only hear from us when we had a problem with you. And it really built an amazing abundance, amount of trust. And the cool thing about giving praise and catching people doing good things, it's free, doesn't cost you anything. You don't even have to spend a lot of time doing it. You can even do it with a not not recommended, but a text message, an email, a pop in real quick to tell you. And if you go out of your way to do it in a special way, well, then you're rare and you're going to make a big, big impression. You know, one of my favorite ones that I ever did was I did it in the month of April. I. I asked my leaders. Actually, I asked more than that. I asked a lot of people who the most important and special person in their life is, and they were. They wrote it down and I asked them, and they didn't tell them anything about what I was doing with it. And I wrote a letter for each person praising the person to their loved one and telling their loved one how much this person meant to me. And I was very specific and concrete about what I, what I gave over and what I shared. And I remember I, I, I, I mailed them. And when people started finding out that I had done that, I mean, you would have thought I moved mountains for them. It was unbelievable. All I did was sit down and write some letters and just tell the truth about people that I cared about and were working so hard for me and doing so much for me. And I just wrote a letter praising them to their loved ones. Man, oh man, it made an impact. You don't have to do anything crazy. You just have to care enough to tell people nice things. You got to have a big heart, catch people doing good things, go out of your way to make people feel good about working with you, for you, next to you. And don't underestimate the power of your words. Praise is a big deal and people need it. They crave it, and you should give it, give more of it.
