At Webhelp we are passionate about our people and their contribution to the company. Recognising our teams and ensuring they know just how valued they are is a core value of Webhelp. There are many companies that talk about employee recognition because it sounds great on their website, but I believe that in this organisation we really do walk the walk when it comes to all of our values!

I recently travelled to the Annual Star Awards gala dinner in each country in our region, that’s the UK, South Africa, and India. Our Star Awards offer a chance for us to recognise the individuals and teams – our most valuable assets – that are really making a difference. Without these great people, we simply wouldn’t be able to deliver the customer experiences that our clients expect. Ensuring that we both reward and recognise our team members is fundamental to delivering exceptional customer experience – i.e. our core business.

It meant a lot to me to be at each of the regional Star Awards gala dinners. But it also meant a lot of travel! I travelled to Liverpool, Cape Town, and Gurgaon as I really wanted to meet the winners in person and celebrate their individual and team successes. On my way home from the last gala dinner I calculated that I had actually travelled 16,296 miles to be at the events and was at home for five days during the month of October!

Webhelp has also enjoyed recognition as a company in 2018. Just take a look at some of the awards we have won as a business, and this is just a partial list of recent wins:

The list goes on and it’s amazing. Not only are teams ensuring that our clients can offer their customers fantastic experiences, we’re being recognised as an industry leader by some of the most important business and trade organisations in the world. It’s wonderful to see Webhelp receiving these awards, but it’s even more important to remember the importance of recognition – which is not just about feeling great because the trophy cabinet is full.

It is clear that recognition is particularly important to a company such as Webhelp because our team is often on the frontline of customer service, and we can only deliver a great customer experience if our employees feel valued and appreciated. We want our team to be enthused about helping customers and that means that our company needs to be enthused about our people.

Even companies that have less of a focus on the customer experience need to consider recognition seriously. Forbes magazine recently put the cost of replacing team members in the spotlight. Forbes suggested that each new employee can cost thousands of dollars and requires at least a month and a half to become reasonably productive – who can afford to lose great team members just because they are not recognised for what they are contributing?

Most of the people working in our team are millennials and this is a demographic that demands instant and continuous feedback. Any company hiring millennial age employees will struggle if recognition is not a core value of the organisation. The benefit of building recognition into your corporate values is both positive, through the increased happiness and engagement of your employees, and defensive too, because you can reduce unnecessary churn – team members leaving because they are tired of seeing their efforts unrecognised. Some analysts even offer tools to measure the value of employee recognition. You can directly calculate the Return On Investment (ROI) using these tools and see the value of investing in recognition.

There is a business case for all organisations to recognise the work their people do, but to my mind it’s simple. A company that recognises effort is a better place to work. Recognising our team members makes good business sense for Webhelp, but it also makes this company a lot more fun and that’s certainly a good thing!

If you’d like to find out more about Webhelp or ask Craig a question, email: craig.gibson@uk.webhelp.com

Craig Gibson

CHIEF COMMERCIAL OFFICER – WEBHELP UK, INDIA & SOUTH AFRICA