2021 seemed to fly by, at least here at The Great Game of Business. We were planning our year just yesterday, and then, BAM, the year was over. At least, that is how it felt. Looking back on 2021 made us take stock of the most read Great GameTM blogs. In case you missed them, here they are in order: #8 - 10 Easy Ways Leaders Can Express Appreciation in the Workplace Individuals in the workplace need to feel appreciated in order to enjoy their job, do their best work, have positive work relationships, and stay with their organization long-term. The key ingredient in meaningful, significant, and effective appreciation is individualization—expressing appreciation in the recipient’s preferred “language.” Varying the ways company leadership communicates appreciation will improve chances of hitting the mark, so we’ve compiled 10 ways leaders can express appreciation in the workplace and foster positive work relationships in order to establish a recognition culture. <>

By definition, a MiniGame™ is a short-term activity designed to correct a weakness or pursue an opportunity in your company. MiniGames motivate employees to make day-to-day improvements that will add up to year-long success, and when implemented correctly, MiniGames are proven to: Affect a financial or operational change: Drive results through improved performance. Increase business literacy: Reinforce key components of business success such as goal setting, mutual responsibility and performance management. Build teamwork: Rally employees (players) around a common goal in order to achieve a shared reward. Develop a winning attitude: Create an environment where winners are recognized and rewarded for generating results.

For nearly four decades, SRC Holdings have been evangelizing the importance of tapping into the universal human need to win. The Great Game of Business® educates your people in the rules of business, rallies them around a common goal, empowers them to see and improve the score, and engages them by allowing them to share in the rewards— What we call a Stake in the Outcome®—presenting them with the opportunity to win as a team. If you want to see success the way SRC has for almost four decades, you must start with communication. You need a system to ensure that you get the most out of your meetings. That doesn’t mean you need one identical to SRC’s meetings, or Huddles as we call them. On the contrary, your system will inevitably look, sound, and feel very different, as well it should. Companies are as diverse as people, and nothing is more distinctive than how you communicate. You have to develop a language and style with which you and your people feel comfortable, which fits your business personality. You will also have to adapt other companies’ techniques to your circumstances, and you may well have to invent new methods of your own.

“Engagement” has become such a huge buzzword in our society that some CEOs and managers no longer even want to talk about it! But don’t be fooled—this topic isn’t going anywhere. With research organization Gallup reporting that a staggering 87% of employees worldwide are not engaged in the workplace… we have our work cut out for us.

Winning is not just a matter of pride, of course. It is also a habit. Unfortunately, losing can get to be a habit as well. When people are in the habit of losing, you won’t see fire in their eyes, only sand. If you want to light the fire, you have to begin by creating wins and celebrating wins— by making a big deal out of little victories and then building on the little victories to achieve bigger victories. It’s a way of putting fun in the workplace— literally. We throw parties and hold celebrations at the drop of a hat. What we’re really doing is creating a team.

While the percentage of engaged employees in the US is higher than it has ever been, according to Gallup more than 50% of employees are unengaged: “they may be generally satisfied but are not cognitively and emotionally connected to their work and workplace; they will usually show up to work and do the minimum required but will quickly leave their company for a slightly better offer.” What’s worse—13% are actively disengaged employees who, in addition to being poor performers who exerted minimal effort, are four times more likely to leave their organization than the average employee.

I Quit The numbers speak for themselves. In October, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the quit rates hit 2.9% in August 2021 - an all-time high since data was first collected in December 2000. Leisure and hospitality have been hit the hardest at 6.4%, followed by business and professional services at 3.7%.

The best, most successful companies feature highly participatory cultures in which employees routinely identify problems and share and implement ideas. High engagement cultures take a lot of work—the right information, the right team structure, management commitment, training time, and more. But a key factor that is often overlooked is the need to create a safe environment in which people feel comfortable dealing with conflict, taking risks, and trying new ideas. This blog talks about why this matters and how to get there.

Huddles are daily or weekly meetings that drive employee engagement and serve as a self-correcting measure to keep your company on the path toward achieving its goals. Huddles are the linchpin of any successful open-book implementation, but if you find engagement and understanding are low in your organization, you’ve learned an important lesson: Huddles can’t do it alone. In order to foster cultural adoption and high involvement in the planning and execution of your organization’s goals, you’ve got to make the process accessible to your team. Here are three keys for reaching your team and driving their participation:

Deciding what your company wants to be when it grows up should be a team effort. We continue to live in unprecedented times. Nothing seems predictable, and it's just about impossible to get anyone to agree to a consensus. Take inflation as an example. While plenty of economists continue to forecast that inflationary pressure is a temporary product of strong demand and snarled supply chains, others point to skyrocketing prices as evidence that an inflationary wrecking ball is already at work wreaking permanent economic damage. Tracking issues like these regularly makes it easy to get lost in the day-to-day weeds.