Hi, I'm Deidra Langstaff with Langstaff Marketing and I want to talk to you today about something that I considered to be most important for your business, and that is employee recognition. What is key nowadays is finding great people and retaining those people. Companies ask me all the time, "How do you get great people and how do you keep them in your business?

Number one, we all know that when you do find good people and I think most of those come from referrals, the key is that you make sure you put them in the position that best fits them.

The second thing that's most important is that you're constantly educating and providing those employees with new information and helping them grow in their career path. And I might want to point out at this time that their career path might not be exactly what you thought it was going to be for them, but if you want to keep great people, then it is truly a partnership. It's not a boss‑employee relationship. It's truly a partnership between two people that work in the same company.

But the third thing that is extremely important is employee recognition programs. I don't mean the old employee of the month type thing. What I'm talking about is a way of making sure that you let employees know that they're being recognized for work that's being done that is over and above the call of duty. That it's more than just saying thank you. It is being very quiet in how you communicate with them.

Sometimes you're leaving a handwritten note that says, "Hey, by the way, I just wanted you to know that I did notice what you did yesterday afternoon and thanks for doing that for us." It's random times giving employees small gifts. They don't have to be anything large. Let me tell you, five dollar ice cream gift cards go a long way as do really nice fleece jackets. You can run the gamut on how much you want to spend, but anything from five dollars to 20 dollars.

But if you do that over the year and you maybe take four or five times throughout the year to recognize your employees as individuals, and then of course as a group in terms of their appreciation, it's amazing how much morale you will have in your company.

Think about it like this. Just because it's a relationship between the employee and the boss doesn't mean that it's really any different between two people who are dating, courting or two people that are married. You still have to constantly make sure that you're letting them know how important they are to you.

So remember that marketing is everything and everything is marketing.