READERS' CHOICE AWARDS 2021
SPECIAL REPORT
20 www.hrreporter.com
"If you don't have a kick-ass culture and
if you're not focusing on how to engage
your people, you're at greater risk of
losing your best people because they can
literally go anywhere now and work."
Tom Short, Kudos
'rooms' for them to talk about a subject
or a topic or an issue or a challenge and
use the skill that we're providing that
month [to find] solutions to it."
Need for recognition grows
With so many people working from
home due to COVID-19 restrictions,
"connecting remote team members and
keeping people more resilient, through
trying to maintain culture when you're
not in the same vicinity or building,
has been incredibly difficult," says Tom
Short, founder and chief customer
officer at Kudos in Calgary.
"At the beginning, there was a little
bit of people waiting and seeing what
was going to happen. But [employers]
quickly realized that they needed to
not cut back on certain technology
solutions and communication, [and]
they needed to invest more heavily in
it, given the new normal of the remote
workforce and a workforce under
incredible stress."
As a result, there's been greater interest
in social recognition platforms such as
Kudos, he says, "as people search for
ways to connect, communicate and cele-
brate the good things that are going on
in their company in very difficult times."
And as economies reopen, the need
for recognition and a focus on employee
engagement will be that much stronger.
"Expectations have changed; the
mobility of people has increased,
because it doesn't matter where you are
in the world — you can work for anyone.
So, if you don't have a kick-ass culture
and if you're not focusing on how to
engage your people, you're at greater
risk of losing your best people because
they can literally go anywhere now and
work," says Short.
"People are, every day, waking up to
this new reality that you've got to take
care of your people and you've got to
take care of your culture. And if you
commingle everything together or give
it less emphasis, your culture can suffer.
And if your culture suffers, your busi-
ness will suffer."
TOP BUSINESS-LEVEL PRIORITIES FOR HR IN 2021
Improving operational excellence
Growing the business
Executing business transformations
Optimizing costs
65%
64%
54%
50%
find out how to develop more positive
relationships, collaboration, networking,
conflict resolution, that sort of thing.
And then how do you add together all of
that to a multi-generational workforce?"
he says.
"And then things like integrity character
and what we call the shadow of a leader
became much more important in organ-
izations today, because they want their
leader to be somebody they want to
emulate, somebody they want to look at
and feel that they can have confidence in
going forward."
While many participants miss the
in-person experience of training, they
have become more comfortable with the
virtual environment, says Gibson.
"Thankfully, with Zoom, we're able to
still create breakout sessions where we
put participants during a module into
Source: Gartner
