One of the ‘secrets’ to a successful small business is having employees who are engaged, aligned with what you’re doing and enjoy working with you and your team. We’ve all experienced interactions with businesses where the employees are clearly just showing up for the paycheck and don’t care at all about what they’re doing. That’s a business on life support. It’s equally easy to see when employees genuinely like and believe in what they’re doing…and that makes all the difference to a customer and ultimately the business.

It’s easy to make the observations in other businesses.  The real challenge is making the changes in your own business that will help drive that employee engagement.  Here’s an idea from a friend of mine – I’ll share the idea and then I’ll dig into why it works, which might help you come up with your own variation.

Gratitude Darts –

Ben has a successful, growing lawn and landscaping business.  It can be challenging to find and keep great employees in his industry. The work is hard and can lead to unhappy employees and high turnover in the competitive industry.

Ben has figured out a few things that are making a big difference with his employees and his clients. The best example is a weekly game that he plays with his staff that he calls Gratitude Darts.  Here’s how it works:

At the weekly team meeting, bright and early, Ben reads the comments and thank you notes from clients received during the past week. For every ‘Thank You’ or compliment from a client, the team member (s) responsible for the service gets a dart.  Team members also have a chance to call out their team mates to thank them for something they’ve done over the past week – which earns a dart for their team mate.

By the end of the meeting, most team members have at least one dart and a few might have several.  They take turns throwing their darts at a target. The player with the dart closest to the bulls-eye wins a gift card ($10 to a local store). The meeting winds up with a few final comments and everyone heading out to help the next round of clients.

The results?  The team enjoys their weekly meetings and although they’ve only been doing this for 3 or 4 months, Ben has already seen a change in employee morale and how well the team gets along.  There has also been a noticeable change in their focus on helping clients and being engaged. The company is headed in the right direction.

Why this works…

You may or may not be able to implement something like Gratitude Darts depending on your industry and the culture of your company.  You can certainly implement something that shares the important characteristics – here’s what you need to think about:

1 – What’s important…what do you stand for?

Ben and his wife identified early on in their business that doing great work and making their customers happy would be the keys to their long term success. They’ve incorporated these principles into everything they do – from sales to scheduling, to doing the work and following up. Gratitude Darts directly reinforce these ideas and is one more way to focus the team on what’s most important – client satisfaction.

2 – Make it fun

A big reason why this works in their environment is because the staff is naturally competitive with each other and they enjoy the good-natured opportunity to show each other up. Darts are an equal opportunity skill and they’re inherently fun to do as a group.  Because the prizes are small and frequent it doesn’t feel like there’s a lot on the line.  If it were a big dollar prize, it likely would have backfired because people would have started trying too hard to win.

3 – Don’t take it or yourself too seriously

In order for something like this to work it has to feel natural, it has to be simple and you have to not make too big a deal out of it. Owning and running a business is hard, but sometimes we make it more difficult than it needs to be. If you’re clear on what you’re doing, if you care and genuinely want to help your clients and your employees, that will show through and it’s okay to have fun.

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Do you have your own version of Gratitude Darts? If not, what would it take to implement something like this in your world? I’d love to hear your thoughts.  Call for an appointment and we’ll do some brainstorming for 2016!