This is a YouTube video titled "GiftCard Partners - Deborah Merkin - Panel Session Excerpts - From Day One Event, Boston in Sep 2023" containing an English panel discussion recorded in October 2023. The excerpt features Deb Merkin, CEO and founder of Gift Card Partners, participating in a multi-speaker expert panel discussing workplace culture, management communication, and employee recognition.
Good afternoon. How is everyone doing? I am so, so grateful to be here with this expert panel. So I'm first just going to ask each of our panelists to go down the line and introduce themselves and tell us in that introduction how you would describe your workplace culture. I'll start with you, Deborah.
Hi, I'm Deb Mirkin. I am CEO and founder of Gift Card Partners. What we do is we sell and market a engage to reward platform that businesses come into and can order gift cards, we can customize them, et cetera. And workplace culture is one of the most important things to our company. It has been since the beginning. Making sure that everybody is, I would say, happy is important. We have worked very hard in the last year to build the management team. But what I learned most is everybody has their part and their contribution and they should be recognized for that and a place to grow, basically.
What about managers? And when they're giving that feedback, how can you be honest while still bringing a certain level of care and empathy?
We've trained the managers in a couple of different things. I'm a member of a CEO group, and I actually brought the head of that who runs the CEO group in to train my managers. And one of the things we did was how we communicate, which is oftener. So we ask questions and we say, this is how you're making me feel. What is going on? I think it's just really urgently important to teach your people how to communicate, the senior management team, so that we can have everybody have an open dialogue. Thank you.
