Why We Do, What We Do, the Way We Do
Successful companies and organizations have certain core values and commitments that run throughout their corporate cultures and are often visible in the services they offer and products they produce.
When you think about Hilton, Chick-Fil-A, Southwest Airlines and Mercedes Benz, you know what you will be getting as a customer. This is because they have worked hard to make certain priorities and behaviors a part of their DNA. (If you don’t like or have the same values they do, you choose an alternative provider.) Hilton and Mercedes Benz provide quality and luxury at a higher cost to the consumer. Southwest Airlines provides a predictable, reliable experience at a lower cost, but does so by not offering certain choices and options.
Conversely, some corporations and organizations try to look like or report that they hold certain values (like customer service or quality) but they fail to actually incorporate them into their work culture (sometimes miserably so) and customers can tell. Uber. Spirit Airlines. Denny’s restaurants. One reason these types of organizations have poor reputations is that they often misread what their customer base wants. But more often, what they say is important to them is not reflected in the policies and procedures they build into the services they provide.
Why Appreciation at Work Provides the Resources and Services We Do
From the beginning, we worked to build the resources and services that we provide to reflect what is important to us in life. Our organization’s mission is to provide practical resources to help people across the world build healthy work relationships.
Our mission statement reaffirms this commitment to working with people as unique individuals.
We affirm the intrinsic value of every individual (regardless of their position in their organization) and we are committed to train leaders and colleagues how to relate to each employee as a person, not just as a “worker.”
Our desire is to:
Encourage positive, healthy communication between colleagues,
Empower individual employees to create healthy work relationships, and to
Educate organizational leaders about the benefits of positive workplace cultures.
What We Do & The Way We Do it
As a result of our mission, over the past 12 years we have strived to develop practical resources that are understandable, low-cost, and easy to apply to daily work life. Our books, while based upon relevant research and real-life experiences, are not difficult to read and digest. Our online assessment, the Motivating By Appreciation Inventory, is easy to use with a wide range of team members (from front-line service providers to the C-suite). And we have developed a variety of versions customized to vastly differing work settings – K-12 schools, government agencies, medical settings, the military, remote employees, senior care centers, and (soon) professional trades.
We chose to develop turn-key training resources (for example, the Appreciation at Work Training Kit) that could be used easily by beginning leaders, seasoned HR professionals and professional trainers – and could be used over and over with multiple groups. This is in contrast to a model where companies have to pay a high-cost consultant to provide the training.
We are committed to empowering employees to create healthy work relationships. We want to help each individual be able to take a part in changing their workplace culture, rather than expecting change to come top-down in the organization. Individual people are the foundational component of organizations and interactions between people is what creates a workplace culture.
What This Looks Like
The value of the individual person permeates all of our policies and procedures. We are committed to being available and responsive to our customers and potential customers. So we have set standards to ensure we get back to customers quickly and resolve situations to their satisfaction.
We strive to be positive in our interactions with others (customers, vendors, suppliers, strategic partners). To do so, we need to be able to take care of ourselves and not feel overly stressed.
Rather than try to do everything ourselves, we seek out quality partners to provide our services and resources. To do so, we have created a network of over 1,000 Certified Facilitators, Affiliated Facilitators, and Premiere Partners – across the country and around the globe. Our resources have been utilized in over 60 countries and are in 25 languages.
Why Are We Telling You This?
Our desire is to be a company of integrity – that our actions match what we say is important to us. So clearly communicating our values and priorities is one way of saying “this is why we’ve chosen the pathway we have” and “these are the principles that have helped direct our decisions.” Our values and ways of doing business are not the only good way to do business and we have much yet to learn and figure out as we grow. But letting you know that people are important to us is a message we want you to hear loud and clear (and, hopefully, experience in our interactions with you).
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Categories 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace, Appreciation, Managing By Appreciation, MBA Inventory, Workplace Culture
