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Excerpt
How do you reward your employees? Do you give bonuses?
Reward? We have perks. So we have what we call patches. We award them with patches, it’s like in the military. To name a few military patches, Private, Sergeant, Three Star General, Lieutenant, so we have those kinds of things that we stick to their jackets. Of course, we’re the ones who produced the jackets for them. This was way back when we were in the office. Now we don’t hold office anymore, we are working from home. So we’re still figuring out how we’re going to do that. And per patch, we have a perk. So we give them a perk, could be like, you have extra minutes for breaks, something like that. Right? So this is just an example, or you get one paid vacation leave, something like that.
So those are perks. Those are rewards. But you know, what’s important there? It’s not really the perks. It’s not really giving the jacket. It’s not even the patches. What’s important is you recognize them for their effort. We give them patches when they practice the core values. So we have six core values. We have grit, respect for work, and we have unity, challenger experimentation, and then clarity. If they keep on practicing any of these and we see that they practice it and the votes are in their favor because we do vote, the leadership team votes, who is deserving of the batch. Then we give them the patch. And they get recognized in front of the entire team. So that’s in front of 50 people.
There is a saying that the last time a person gets applauded is usually during their graduation day. I was quite sad when I heard that, because when you think about it, it’s quite true. The last time a person got applauded is during their graduation day, it’s quite sad. So we tried to figure out how we can fix that in SEO Hacker. We have our clap sessions. We really applaud people. We really recognize them. I’m sure other companies do it in some other way, like employee of the month or employee of the week. I don’t know if you have ‘employee of the day’, but I’m sure other companies do it in some other way.
But we’re very intentional in doing this. Because for us, yes you can give bonuses. Yes you can give monetary rewards. Yes you can compete in the salary market. But we don’t want to compete that way. Because the one thing that’s hollow in the hearts of a lot of people now, is a team that really cares about them and a team that really appreciates them. That is what’s lacking, it’s not just about the money, so we do it that way at SEO Hacker.