Moderator: Alright. I think we will go ahead and get started. I know everybody is busy, and we want to be respectful of your time. But just want to welcome everyone to today's O.C. Tanner webinar. This webinar will be recorded and available to watch on demand later.
Today we're delighted to welcome two team members from AAA, the Auto Club Group. We have Toi Johnson, employee programs and experience specialist, and she's joined by Lisa Medved, recognition and reward specialist.
Today, Toi and Lisa will be sharing the amazing history of employee recognition at the Auto Club Group, a history that has spanned over forty years, and that includes a recent program rebrand and refresh.
They're also gonna be talking about how they built their internal champion network to support program adoption across their company and ongoing success.
There will be time at the end for Q&A. If you have any questions, you can drop them in the Q&A feature of your Zoom meeting or in the chat. We'll keep our eye on that.
And Toi and Lisa, just thank you so much for being here and sharing all of these insights with us today. I'll pass the time over to you.
Toi: Alright. Can everybody hear me? Can you hear me, Raven?
Alright. Good afternoon or morning depending on where you are. Thank you all for joining today. I'm really excited to take you on a journey today through the Auto Club Group's, also known as ACG's, culture shift and recognition program transformation.
I'm gonna take you through this journey through the personal lens of my ACG journey and shift as an employee.
I'm sure that many of you had a chance to read O.C. Tanner's 2024 Global Culture Report and all the data that supports making the people-centric shifts in the workplace. And as we travel on this journey today, you will notice that we have evolved over the past forty years meeting the needs of our employees and the business.
And I thought it would be more interesting to talk about this culture shift by sharing some of my personal stories and how it's impacted my employee experience.
So I'm gonna start with how I got to AAA. I was literally a year from graduating from the University of Michigan, and on the rebound from the housing bubble of 2002, leaving the real estate market in the banking market, just trying to find work close to the Metro Detroit area.
I literally stumbled into the AAA world.
Unintentionally, as I knew very little about AAA.
So I'm pretty sure almost everybody on the webinar today has heard of AAA.
And so I'm gonna ask you a question. If your car didn't start, who would you call?
So I can hear out in the virtual world. Everybody says triple A, right, triple A, triple A. Well, I'm ashamed to say I would not have called AAA. I had never heard of AAA. I grew up in the south, so I wasn't very familiar with it.
So with that said, I came to AAA and soon learned that AAA was a leader in emergency road service, in the number one insurer in Michigan.
I later learned that AAA was formed back in 1902 to protect the rights of motorists, been an advocate for better roads and highways. And at that time, the Auto Club Group of Michigan was responsible for creating the first stop sign and would later unite with other regional auto clubs to become the Auto Club Group, representing fourteen states, and two US territories.
Today, the Auto Club Group offers many products and services to its members. This includes insurance, financial services, car care, travel, and retailer discounts.
We have various member engagement channels such as our service networks, our call centers and local branches, which represents our diverse workforce that includes tow truck drivers, service technicians, and insurance agents. The mission is to be the go to resource for all of our members as they travel through life. And today, the AAA National Federation represents forty-five motor clubs and sixty-four million members.
So my journey with AAA started way back in 2003. I've been here over twenty years. It's hard to believe it. And I started as a property and casualty agent.
I've had the opportunity to work in many different capacities in the organization, and my passion is people. So I've served as a new hire onboarding coach, a supervisor, a project leader, and now my current role as an HR employee specialist managing our recognition program and other employee experience initiatives. And on a personal note, I've been married for eighteen years, and I'm a foster and adoptive parent. I have twin ten-year-olds and a three-year-old daughter.
When I applied online that day, I never thought I would be at AAA for twenty years, and I never thought it would be the place that I would literally grow up, get married, raise children and discover my purpose.
Alright. So let's talk about this forty-year journey. Let's start from the beginning and how the forty-year relationship with O.C. Tanner began.
And as we've grown, we will look into the need to shift and rebrand based on our company goals and employee needs. And lastly, we will look into adaptation and engagement: How have we adapted and changed over these forty years. And where is the recognition program today?
Where we started - Okay. Move too fast.
One thing that really amazed me when I came to AAA was the long tenure.
I would meet employees who have been with the company for thirty or forty years. They had been at the company longer than I had been alive. I would sometimes walk into work to see these huge balloon displays, friends, and family members, little kids running around, employees just celebrating their anniversaries. And, of course, the best part was the elaborate food spread. The celebration really just permeated the building.
So that leads me to the beginning of the O.C. Tanner, ACG Partnership.
Employee milestone career anniversaries were the formal recognition program for employees all the way up into 2004. And at that point, there became a need to align all the various ad hoc recognition programs and find a better way of tracking costs. So in 2005, we moved towards a more comprehensive recognition solution, which called "Powered by You," or professionally known for all of our long time ACG employees who may be on the call "PBY."
Powered by You offered leaders a way to recognize employees in monetary ways with the awards store and non-monetary ways with stickers and cards.
This really presented a culture shift for employees because leaders could recognize their teammates in visible ways and employees could benefit from that by being able to purchase gifts in the awards store. I remember when the program was first introduced, awards were far and few in between, but as time progressed, there were many more opportunities to get awards. And employees loved it. I can say personally all the TVs in my house were purchased with PBY points, loved it.
There was also a way for employees to recognize each other for special moments in non-monetary ways by sending you stickers and cards for birthdays and anniversaries and just special moments. This program gave our company a way to combine all the other informal and ad hoc recognition programs and help recognize desired behaviors.
And from a financial perspective, there was more visibility and more tracking of the recognition costs.
But as time goes on, we need to change. There's always change around the corner.
And so what we were noticing is that there was a gap between the behaviors that we wanted to see and the business impact. We needed to close that gap. And we needed a solution that would do that.
So we were just seeing inconsistent recognition just across business lines. There are areas with high recognition usage, and then some with none at all. There was a lack of understanding of the program levels and the values, and some of our excellent interview data showed a lack of recognition even in some of the high usage areas. We really needed to have a better way to track and to control the spending.
Based on this gap, we partnered with O.C. Tanner to perform an assessment to determine what changes can we make to close this gap.
And while the PBY program began to increase in popularity, so were the costs, it came to a point where there are millions of dollars in expenses and little oversight on where and how the expenses were being managed.
And it was discovered that there were several different departments who have responsibility for different aspects of the program, and there wasn't just one place to go to find out exactly what was happening.
So this led to the need to initiate a large scale project to understand more about exactly how the program was being used and to create a better way of managing the expenses. It prompted us to have our data team pull as much information as possible and look at every aspect of the program they could. And this led to a ton of insight that no one was really looking at before.
And we wanted to know who's using it? How are they using it? How often were people using it? How much money was being spent on the program? We know we wanted to know all of this at all times moving forward. We just didn't know what we didn't know.
So I'm gonna go into a little bit more detail on the current state analysis and what we found out in 2020.
Based on all the information received from our assessment analysis, focus group feedback, executive interviews, Best Practice Partner interviews, and our conversations with O.C. Tanner's research team, we identified four critical buckets to focus on.
Number one, limited personalization. We were getting a lot of feedback from employees that they knew that the comments were just copy and paste. They weren't really personal.
Some employees said that they would get awards and quarterly meetings and get notifications via email before the meeting. So it had a flattening effect. And some employees said that the anniversary celebrations weren't personal at all.
We needed a realignment of focus. There was so much emphasis on projects and metrics versus appreciation of effort and behavior. If you hit your mark, you could be recognized, but not for your daily work.
And it was mostly just for project completions. We really wanted to hear the stories of the how and not just the what. Stories about people and their impact.
We also noticed that there was inconsistent leader modeling.
You had to be above and beyond your job duties, there were limited nomination levels, and some of the descriptions were very confining.
Our work from home employees, they felt unnoticed.
And then lastly, we looked at the undefined recognition, the what and the why, it wasn't easily understood.
There was a focus again on the results and not the effort. And then there was also hesitation that there's not enough budget or we don't want to spend the budget too quickly.
So after gathering all of this feedback, we came back to the table to determine what could we do to improve? How can we create a tool to meet our employees' needs and support the organization's financial goals?
So I would like to share a very thought provoking quote that came from one of our executives in a focus group.
This says "we have the opportunity, especially with everything that is happening in the world today, to step up our game and value the wonderful people we have here at ACG. What we are seeing right now is that companies who truly value their people are going to not just survive, but thrive."
And you'll just have to remember that while we were going through all this assessment and discovery, we were just getting into the pandemic.
Alright. So let's look at some of the future state developments.
In our future state, we wanted to address many of the major pain points of the Powered by You program. I'm gonna spend just a little time highlighting some of them, but you can look at the slide on your screen just to look at everything, but I'm just gonna focus on a few of them.
So first of all, limited recognition. This was a huge opportunity. Only leaders could give awards. The PBY program only allowed leaders to give recognition. But in our future state, everyone will be able to give recognition.
Now this is a major mind shift change for our employees, but this brings inclusivity and a sense of empowerment that this is our culture and not just theirs.
We also wanted easy access for all of our employees. In the previous program, you had to have a separate password from all your other company passwords, you had to be at a physical computer. And since we have so many employee roles, and many that do not have access to a computer, we wanted to make sure that there was mobile capabilities in our future state.
And, obviously, we want to be able to measure our success. That's very important. The previous program didn't have metrics to understand the program success. The new program would have metrics to measure cultural impact and business objectives.
Alright. So transformation, we transformed. Let's take a look and see what this new program is looking like.
Alright. This is our program redesign. We are no longer Powered by You. We are Celebrating as One.
So finally, we've done all the land work to create this program we want, and here is the redesign. With our new platform, all of our territories--So we have our northern region, our Midwest, we have the South, everybody on the same platform.
So we no longer have all these ad hoc programs here and there. We're all together as one under this new name, Celebrate as One.
Okay. With Celebrate as One, there was four major components. First of all, appreciation. And this was a nice thing about the new program because the appreciation side was very similar to the Powered by You.
So we have the monetary and the non monetary recognition, but it's so much better because now it's not just the leaders that can be about awards. Everybody can do it. Every employee can recognize each other, not just for results, but for effort. And there's now a budget tool so no one can overspend. All the dollars are accounted for, and there's no question about the fiscal responsibility.
Next, we have initiatives. Initiatives are new.
We have a good way to differentiate behaviors based on incentive and those that are just purely appreciation, whereas we did not have that from the previous program.
Our initiatives program is perfect for leaders to create their own campaigns with total control of designing their award values, the criteria, the participation without all the extra layers of approval that were required in the previous program. And then lastly, we have our Yearbook and our milestone award celebrating career anniversaries.
So we now continue that long standing tradition of celebrating career anniversaries in a new way with a physical and a virtual Yearbook. And this is such a great enhancement, especially with so many employees now working remotely.
Teammates and leaders can send well wishes and even more than just words, they can add pictures and video. We also have a new acrylic numeral that shows the landscape of our different journeys versus the plain silver numeral that we had in the previous program.
Each part of this new program really provides appreciation to the peers, who are peers in the moments that matter, most throughout all stages of the employee life cycle, from our individual contributors to executives, this redesign will allow for more opportunities for everyone to be appreciated.
Alright. So we're gonna address some of the limited recognition. As I stated, all employees now can give monetary recognition with points allocated each quarter through an automated process. If they don't use the full budget by the end of the quarter, those points are lost, Our new hires receive their budget to be able to appreciate their peers a quarter after they start. So that avoids any double dipping for employees and we can really have a good way to control our spending.
Leaders can now also see their team's budget and help encourage appreciation for their team, which continues to promote that appreciation culture. Accessibility was huge. So access to the tool with the rebrand, we now have access to the program through multiple ways with our mobile app and the abilities with the plugins with Outlook and Teams.
We now have access to various employee roles as we have car wash employees, car care, tow truck drivers, as well as office staff, with a single sign on process. And now we're integrated with the various club regions, and we, once again, we have that mobile capability.
We also dedicated a specific space on our intranet so all the resources, the frequently asked questions, our guides, our virtual backgrounds, our job aids, everything is in one place.
We also develop training guides and e-learning courses to help our employees to learn about the new program, and this is accessible to everyone.
So we partner with O.C. Tanner's creative team to create eight short mini videos, one minute or less, that highlights the new program and how to use it. This was a great way to bring to life the program and communicate in a different way than just text on the page.
O.C. Tanner also created many informational employee and leader guides, PowerPoint templates, presentations that leaders can use to share a new program in meetings and huddles. And this is a great tool for us as we didn't time to spend figuring out the messaging and how to make it visually appealing, we'd let the experts handle that. These videos were used for internal training courses and on our internal ACG two page, which is like a in house YouTube site. So I'm gonna share with you one of those videos right now.
Alright. Where'd you guys think of that? Wasn't that exciting? Are you ready for a new program?
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. So, yeah, I love that video. O.C. Tanner did a great job with creating that.
So now let's talk about a little bit about measuring success. So one of the most exciting changes with this program was being able to measure our success.
Working with O.C. Tanner, we identified a best in class measuring approach across three critical areas, program activity, cultural impact, and business impact. We worked to pull together our current state before the program was launched and agreed with this timeline.
We will concentrate on program activity in year one. So award usage, the number of awards given, budget span, the average budget per quarter, and what was left over. In year two, we will see if the program had impact on our culture scores, results from our engagement survey as it relates to our "feels valued" and rewards and recognition dimensions.
And with the business impact, we have seen significant improvements in some of those areas but we haven't quite added that to our story yet. We look forward to making that part of our next steps, and we expect to see positive impact in turnover, customer service, net promoter score, and exit survey data.
Alright. So once again, let's look at some of our success.
So with this, the previous program, we had limited participation as far as the number of employees who received awards. In 2021 with the old program, we had 81% of our staff who received awards. In 2023, 97% of our staff received awards. Yes. Yes. Yes. That's so awesome.
Okay. And so moving to this new program, this represents an increase of 2,200 people being appreciated.
For our ecards, in 2021, with the old program, we had almost five thousand ecards that were sent from that old program. With the new one, we had 33,839 cards sent. This represents an increase of over 28,000 cards. That is amazing.
So with this new program, also, our award nominations are aligned to our ACG values. Previously, they were not aligned at all.
So in 2021, in the previous program, we have 54,282 moments that matter. In 2023, they increased to over 89,000. That's an increase of over 3,500.
In our previous program, we had no idea about what awards were for initiatives, what awards were for appreciation. With the new program, we had over 558 initiatives, geared towards incentives, so incentive-based activities with over 88 million points deposited. That is amazing.
And subsequently due to this activity, it led to our finance and compensation department creating an effectiveness assessment after each initiative that qualifies at a certain dollar amount, which has impacted the organizational effectiveness measures.
This work also has contributed to ACG being recognized externally as a top place to work for the last two years for the first time in the company's history, along with being recognized as a top workplace for our industry, we're also recognized for our DEI practices in a number of regional awards such as the Detroit Free Press and the Tampa Bay Times.
Our people have really felt this impact. From the first voice of employee survey with the program to now, our engagement scores have increased in a few key appreciation areas, and the program has had a positive impact in critical areas.
Alright. So let's talk a little bit about some of the lessons that we learned. So number one, engagement is so critical. So we learned that launching our champions team would have really helped us with our engagement. It would have helped us increase adoption, helped us educate the employee and even address any errors more quickly.
We also found out that having the right resources is so important. So you want to think about maybe possibly starting with a small appreciation team and then scale up or you may want to think about with the education component. Do you need the additional support? So for us, we needed some additional help from our learning and development team to assist with creating new courses.
You also want to consider timing. Are there any organizational factors that will impact your recognition program and when you launch?
For us, we probably would have delayed our Yearbook launch because we pretty much changed everything all at once. I think maybe waiting for that would have helped the employees feel a little bit less overwhelmed than being able to get used to the various parts of the program slowly.
Alright. So engaged employees adopt, adopted employees engaged. Let's now take a look at what actions we took to increase engagement and adoption of the new program. This is the fun part. I think that the launch of our champions team, and I can hear the champions out there, was so pivotal in our engagement in adoption process. Our champions are employee volunteers who model the behaviors we want to see and help promote the appreciation culture in the course of their work day.
And I thought this quote did a good job of explaining the best way to bring out engagement and adoption. And it says "if you want to bring fundamental change in people's beliefs and behaviors, you need to create a community around them where those new beliefs can be practiced and expressed and nurtured." Yes. Yes. Yes. I love community.
Alright. So let's talk about our champions team. How do we plan for them? So first of all, we want to look at the best practice. We wanted to start out our champions team strong. So we met with several O.C. Tanner clients to discuss best practices and we came up with three key roles and responsibilities for our champions, which are trainers, coaches, and influencers.
We also partner with O.C. Tanner to create a unique identifiable logo, which you guys can see in my background and on my shirt right here, to promote unity and represent the team's values and achievements.
Next, the selection criteria. We wanted to make sure that our champions have good performance, that they were with the company at least for six months, and, of course, they have to have a passion for recognizing others. We created a fun and exciting hub announcement to draw interest.
So we went and we recruited our champions. We promoted the announcement on our news feed, which is similar to an in house Facebook page and sent emails to all of our initiative administrators and just talked word-of-mouth. We wanted to get as many people as we could to join this team.
And then lastly, we confirmed and prepared. So we selected our champions. We had kickoff premeeting communications, links to those program and action videos that I showed you earlier. And then we hosted the kickoff meeting, which we had O.C. Tanner help us with. And we talked about the team's purpose, the benefits, and the importance of recognition.
Alright. So meet the champions. Once again, our champions are employee volunteers who promote the appreciation culture in our recognition platform.
Some of the benefits of our champions team, champions could potentially reach all our employee groups. They provide real time support and resources for employees to ask questions to learn best practices on how to appreciate.
It really changes the culture from "this is a corporate program" to "this is our program. This is our culture. This is our recognition platform."
Our champions are empowered to make changes. It gives them opportunities to solve problems, to create answers.
Our champions do such a great job with cascading messages promoting campaigns and giving feedback.
So today, our champions are 181 people strong in the three roles. So our trainers focus on preparing and presenting C1 (Celebrate as One) educational content. Our coaches focus on engaging employees at C1 events or individual sessions. And our influencers, they focus on inspiring teammates using the Celebrate as One tool, building awareness through videos, pictures, and infographics about Celebrate as One. We have quarterly all hands meetings, and we are heavily involved with promoting campaigns and recognition activities.
Alright. So here are some examples of some of the products created from our champion campaigns.
So at the top of the screen where you see the champion shirt, like the one I have on today, that picture is our first in person event that we had last year. We have the honor of hosting O.C. Tanner for the Detroit Culture Tour where the O.C. Tanner Institute came in and shared some highlights from the 2024 global report. Our champions were involved in every aspect of organizing that event.
We also had our champion's team create a customized training for leaders, and you'll see that at the bottom left corner, where it says celebrating anniversaries.
This champion really went above and beyond with creating an automated course for leaders to help them celebrate anniversaries. He worked with graphic designers. He got voice-over actors, just really went above and beyond.
We actually have that training now in our corporate training program.
Our champions also create customized ecards. You see that at the top in the right corner where a champion created a customized ecard for our travel agents. And the champions just participated in a campaign on travel agent appreciation day just sending out cards to as many travel agents as we know, just to show them that we appreciate them.
At the bottom where you see, would you sign my yearbook? That champion team created that infographic just to have a more visual way to help people understand the yearbook process. And then lastly, I just like to talk about the community that the champions have created. Their community goes outside of just the work that they do as champions. You'll see, pictures of the groups on the left side and on the right side in the middle.
Our champions did organize a volunteer activity to volunteer at the food bank. So we had some champions come out and volunteer, and we were just able to have fun and just show appreciation and thankfulness for how we've been blessed with helping those who are in need. So the champions create community that extends the work environment and they just do an outstanding job. I'm so proud to be a part of the team.
So I'd like to show a video that one of champions created to promote our mobile app campaign last year. And then next, you're gonna actually hear from a champion, Lisa Medved, share her experience on being on the appreciation champions team.
Moderator: Hey, Toi. Just really quick. Your last video, we weren't able to hear the sound. Is there any way to adjust those permissions in Zoom?
If not, don't stress about it.
Toi: Is there an audio? Somebody helped me share some. Okay.
Let's try that.
Okay. Here we go. Let's go. Let's go. Okay. Let's see if the videos go play now.
Video: If you own a smartphone, I got news for you. I got an app that you can download and it's free for you. It's called the great work app, and you can show appreciation.
Celebrate as One to go for good navigation. When you're ready, all you gotta do is hit this button and you can search for a peer and then say something. All times of the day or night, send an ecard to say what makes them great. Right. You can even pull up your information and take a peek to see your next future vacation.
One app. Many opportunities, the QR code is here. So download it for me. This is great for fleet providers or for those that are on the road driving for hours.
Take a moment to show love, keep that recognition in motion called the GreatWork app. Let's keep this going. Getting started is easy, just pair it.
We have job aides to make it all apparent. When you're done, get on and give a shout out. Let's celebrate each other because that's what it's all about.
Great Work app, baby. Download it now.
Toi: Yeah.
Wasn't that great? That was a great video.
Alright. So now I'm going to pass the baton to Lisa Medved as she shares her experience on the appreciation champions team.
Lisa: Alright. Well, thank you, Toi.
And, wow, what an act to follow.
Awesome. That was a great video. Well, hello everyone. Again, my name is Lisa Medved, and I'm excited to be here today and share with you the fun stuff. So I've been with the Auto Club Group, coming up on just about 23 years.
And if you look at the slide, you'll see I have the call center there, bold and in big font. Let me just tell you why.
So during my time in the call center, I was charged with creating contests and incentives to drive results for agents and overall ACG.
I was full of ideas and believed to my core that happy employees are more productive and loyal.
From there, I pitched ideas to senior leadership and ended up leading what we call the fun committee.
We created employee morale events that the call center staff thoroughly enjoyed and it was proven to boost results and retain our team members. Added to that, I was charged with the recognition of individuals and team successes.
I communicated those through bulletin boards, newsletters, and by email. Anytime a board was updated, staff would gather in excitement.
So why am I mentioning this? I believe it's a direct reflection of recognition.
While most employees are home based now, it's more of a challenge to engage with our team members.
That is why I truly believe the Celebrate as One program is so vital to the overall success of ACG.
It provides the opportunity to recognize team members through the portal.
As Toi had mentioned, you can send ecards or even points and the recognition is public on the wall within the program.
After leaving the call center, you'll see I spent some time working in the field, coordinating incentive trips, managing branch office openings, closures, and relocations, all to end up back in the call center environment where I'm currently working as a recognition and reward specialist, and I'm also on the engagement team, and serving as an appreciation champion.
Alright. So let's talk about being a champion, why I did it and what it means to me.
Through all of my years with ACG, my focus always been on fostering employing morale and engagement.
I volunteered to be an appreciation champion at ACG when the program started and was chosen to be an influencer.
As an influencer, I am determined to inspire colleagues, build awareness of the Celebrate as One program, and promote its usage.
My efforts have a powerful impact on the overall morale and well-being of team members at ACG as a whole.
Simply put, I find joy and I'm super passionate about making someone's day.
You smile and I smile and I believe it's super contagious.
Alright recognition for good work. I'm sure everyone agrees that everyone needs to be recognized for doing good work. Think about how it makes you feel. Happy, motivated, fulfilled.
Did you know that science suggests is something our brains are hardwired to need? It releases dopamine, which stimulates parts of the brain that create positive emotions like satisfaction and enjoyment.
In the workplace, these feelings of positivity are crucial for employee engagement, retention, and overall success.
One meaningful example of how I inspire and build awareness around our C1 program is through the creation of Thankful Thursday messages.
These are sent weekly to all team members, and include a link to the celebrate as one platform.
These messages encourage everyone to express gratitude and recognize each other's efforts to further promote a culture of appreciation.
Feedback from Thankful Thursday messages alone has been phenomenal.
Here are a few verbatim examples that show the powerful impact these messages have on our team members.
"I appreciate your hard work on engaging employees with your Thankful Thursday messages. I love how supportive you are for the people we serve and the motivational comments you send out to the teams."
Amen, thank you for this. I love these. These are great motivation, especially if the day is an "already not so joyous day."
I love this. I'm very new with AAA, and this is amazing. Thank you for sending such thoughtful messages to us.
It always puts a smile on my face. Thank you, Lisa, for your kind and encouraging words.
Here's an air hug for you, Lisa for sending this. Much needed today.
Happy Thursday. I love that you send these out. Thank you.
Hi, Lisa. Thank you so much for the words of encouragement. It made me smile today.
Well said, thank you so much, Lisa.
Love this. Thanks for sharing. Have an amazing day on purpose.
We appreciate all of your hard work and what you do.
So these are just a few of probably hundreds of positive feedback that we receive from sending these. And as I mentioned again, when we send these out, there's a link to the C1 program that encourages people to click and take a minute and recognize someone.
Anyways, I just want to thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about being an appreciation champion and what it means to me. I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes.
Gratitude is the healthiest of all human emotions. The more you express gratitude for what you have, the more likely you will have even more to express gratitude for. Zig Ziglar.
Thank you again. I appreciate you. Toi, back to you.
Toi: Thank you, Lisa, and thank you for being an appreciation champion. Thank you for Thankful Thursdays.
Alright. So we're winding down here. Talking about our culture transformation support. So O.C. Tanner has just done such a great job with supporting us on our culture transformation journey through the appreciation program, the yearbook, incentives, our initiatives, and the customer service support that we get.
Our education, so our guides and the O.C. Tanner Institute courses for our strategy. We have our weekly and monthly strategy sessions, Beth, and Hannah shout out to you guys for everything you do.
For our creative creative design. So digital posters, we get presentations, videos, infographics, table tents, like, whatever we come up with, they'll to do it for us.
They've been amazing, our creative design team, Carrie, shout out to you if you're out there. And our champion support so they help us with kickoff meetings, our campaigns, just generating ideas to help keep our champions motivated. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for all the support in helping us with our culture transformation.
And we are continuing to transform. As we continue to grow and transform as a company, the O.C. Tanner, ACG partnership will embark on this next shift in July 2024 with our latest recognition solution through Culture Cloud, we are super excited about it.
And I'm gonna leave you all with a real quick quote, "A culture is not invented, a culture constantly evolves, which is why it must be nurtured." Culture is not something that is consciously invented or created from scratch, but rather it evolves over time through the collective actions, beliefs, and interactions of a group.
Thank you for joining the webinar today and taking this forty-year transformation journey with me. I hope you found something valuable and that you can take it back your organization.
Moderator: Toi, what a great presentation. I was not prepared for the wrap. It was amazing.
We do have a couple of questions.
Danielle was wondering what you are most proud of with this whole program refresh and rebrand.
Toi: Oh, gosh. Danielle, you would ask that question.
Most proud of?
That's hard.
Honestly, I think if anything, I would say just I mean, all the work that was put in before I even got here.
I was just talking yesterday. I was just like, man, I forgot, you know, going through this whole process, all the work that went into just building this program and how much better it was from the old program. So I definitely appreciate that, but I think for me, when I picked up the baton and started working with the program, I really think it's the champions team, honestly. I know.
I know. Because these people are amazing. Like this team, they inspire me. They motivate me.
Just the things that they do, their creativity, and their drive. You know, you don't really have to push them to do anything. They come up with these ideas, and they just get things done. And so I'm just so proud of just, you know, them and just the work that we've done and how we've changed the mindset of people.
I've been here twenty years, so I've seen, you know, a lot. And I am just loving where we are right now as a company.
Moderator: Awesome. And then Lorenzo is wondering and, you know, share only as much as you're comfortable here, but they say, curious to understand the cost aspect just a rough order of magnitude. So, you know, budget dollar per employee, and is it a one time cost or an annual cost? So I know, O.C. Tanner produces some research on, you know, how much budget you should plan on allocating per employee, and I think it usually runs around $250-$300 per year per employee. But, Toi, any thoughts on that?
Toi: Well, I'm not at liberty to be able to share that cost, but, we are continuing to monitor the cost, and we're hoping to be able to provide more investment in a program for our employees to be able to appreciate each other. But, you know, at this time, I'm not able to talk about the cost.
Moderator: Yes. That makes sense. And then one more question, which was, what would be your one biggest piece of advice for anyone who's looking to start a champion network from scratch?
Toi: From scratch. I would say start small and then scale.
Like start small and scale. So you definitely want a group of passionate people that are really into appreciating others and really want to make the environment a good place to work. And so I would just say start small and then just build from there and just continue to grow the team. If anything, I think that was really hard for me because we had a really large team to start out with, and it was just me.
So it was just a lot of work. And I have a lot of ideas, and I want to do everything, and I want to talk to everybody and it's just me. So I would just say definitely start small, start small, and talk to other clients who have teams. Like, that was so valuable.
You guys did such a great job. I know I just harassed you, bothered you about talking to other people, but that really was so helpful. So If you can do that and talk to other people and hear their experience, I think that was really helpful for us.
Moderator: And then we got one more question that slid in. So this goes back to your measuring success slide.
This person wonders how you really connected the dots to get more data, reporting, and analytics, more of that reporting view of your employee appreciation usage.
Toi: So we have an amazing, O.C.Tanner gives us a lot of information regarding that, but we have amazing in house data team. So they were able to they have tools that they use that they were able to get us metrics such as employee roles, generations, demographic information to help us really drill down on the data aspect of it. So we were just really blessed to have a team that does that. Actually is my employee experience department is a part of our, team that really works with data. So we were just really blessed to be able to have a team to get all that information for us.
Moderator: That's awesome.
Well, thank you so much. Huge thank you Toi and to Lisa for putting this presentation together, and for coming on with such enthusiasm and energy. I think it was so enjoyable, and I hope really informative everybody that was joining us today. Just a reminder that next month we'll have another O.C. Tanner webinar, and this one is all about elevating your employer brand with your recognition program.
We got to see some of that with the ACG program today. So thank you so much to everybody for joining, and we'll see you next time.
