A Good Lesson in Bad Business: When a Company Botches an Employee Thank You

REWARDING EMPLOYEES can be a tricky business. 

It’s also hard for many organizations to get right no matter how good their intentions are.

The key to it — and this is critically important — is that whatever you give employees to say thank you for their hard work must make them feel like you sincerely appreciate their efforts.

But as we learned recently, just giving them a cookie isn’t going to cut it.

HR Brew detailed it all in Sephora rewarded employees with cookies. They explained it like this:

“Sephora North America … sent out cookies to employees after hitting $10 billion in revenue, Business Insider reported. The cookies arrived with a note that read, in part, ‘We thank you for making it our greatest year ever. Cheers.’

Sephora employees … were less than enthused about the gift.

‘They are always coaching us to meet our goals and expectations, and of course, everyone goes above and beyond for the company and all they give us is a stale cookie and a letter thanking us,” one departing employee told the publication anonymously.

On a Reddit thread for Sephora workers, one user shared a meme with a photo of the cookie that read, ‘When your employer makes $10 billion…and all you get is a damn cookie.’ “

A gift to employees that blew up

WHEN ASKED ABOUT employee reaction to the thank you “gift,” a Sephora PR representative responded as PR people sometimes do — with a blast of PR gobbledygook that detailed all the other things that the beauty chain is doing for its workers, including offering “substantial product discounts to our employees.”

As you probably guessed, the statement also made a point of completely avoiding the specific complaints about the cookies.

That’s how companies sometimes respond when something they do to reward employees completely misses the mark and actually has the opposite effect on their workforce.

It also seems that the people at Sephora behind the cookie “reward” had a feeling that giving employees a gift like this could blow up on them.

And if they did, wow, were they were ever right.

HOW DO WE KNOW THIS? It’s because in the original reporting in the Business Insider story — the republished version that appeared in Entrepreneur — it mentions the card that Sephora employees got along with their “gift.” Business Insider adds these details:

“Sephora’s card — which BI has seen — said the company set records for Black Friday in stores, as well as new bests for its online traffic and warehouse fulfillment.

‘Inside this box, you will find a sweet treat to enjoy with your team,” the card continued. “We thank you for making it our greatest year ever. Cheers.’

At the bottom of the card was a warning: ‘The content of this card is confidential and should not be shared externally as it is a violation of our company policies.’ “

Someone with a lot of business experience can make the case that the warning on the card was NOT really about disclosing the information concerning the records the company set for Black Friday sales. That’s because the information the company mentioned was so broad as to be the kind of company information that PR people live for.

It’s wonderfully vague and positive without offering up any specifics that pesky journalists might try to double check. That’s why it’s more likely (at least to me) that the warning was really a thinly-veiled threat that was meant to discourage employees from talking about any of this.

Especially the cookies.

When good intentions go bad

HERE’S MY TAKE: Rewarding employees is a good thing, but it can go bad when expectations are high, or in this case, the actual reward seems insultingly bad.

I’ve touched on this very issue before, most recently last December with a classic Skeptical Guy Christmas post titled The Christmas Bonus Problem: Sometimes You End Up With a Lambskin Fanny Pack.

I pointed to a survey from a few years back that was commissioned by Spherion Staffing Services. One of the findings was that “46 percent of respondents said their company does not give holiday bonuses or any other monetary gifts during the holidays.”

In other words, close to half of those surveyed said their organization didn’t give ANY holiday bonus or gift.

As Grinch-like as that sounds, it may just be a practical decision to avoid any possibility of having their gift-giving blow up like Sephora’s famous cookie reward did.

Or to paraphrase what I wrote about a bad Christmas Bonus, a bad thank-you gift is worse than no thank-you gift at all.

In the end, just a badly botched bonus

IT’S SAD TO SEE a company spend time and money on a bonus that is so badly botched that it irritates employees and has the absolute opposite effect of what was intended. In fact, it’s the kind of thing that makes executives decide to never, ever give out employee gifts again.

That is a very human reaction, but it’s also a very wrong reaction.

What Sephora leadership should do is ask themselves this: “How did we manage to get something we thought was so right so very wrong?”  They would probably do this about any other business problem, and that’s what this was — a business problem to be managed so it doesn’t happen again.

At it’s core, it’s something that could really damage Sephora’s reputation in both the short term and long term. Failing to handle it right will make things worse, and what they need to do is simple — make a sincere apology, some kind of a gesture to employees to make up for the bad decision, and let everyone know of the company’s determination to never let it happen again.

When companies don’t manage a very public business problem right, it continues to haunt the company long after it happened. Sephora executives should take note, because that’s what Anheuser-Busch InBev found out with their Bud Light fiasco.

It’s why they’re still dealing with the Bud Light fallout nearly a year later.

Giving employees a gift for a job well done is management at its best. Fouling it up so that it has the opposite effect is management at its very worst.

You can’t make the gaffe go away, but managing the problem the right way can help get it behind you pretty quickly.

As they say, it allows you to live to fight another day.

Other trends and insights … 

And if you need your weekly fix of AI news … 

• Meta Calls for Industry Effort to Label A.I.-Generated Content (From NY Times.com)
• Generative AI may have a “high human cost,” SHRM report says (From HRDive.com)
• More than 80% of VC pitches now involve AI (From TechCrunch.com)
• AI is moving too fast to keep pace for 4 in 5 workers (From Fortune.com)
• What Leaders Should Know About Measuring AI Project Value (From MITSloan Review)
• States are not ‘waiting on Congress’ to regulate AI (From HRExecutive.com)

 

Readers: I’ve been writing a version of this wrap-up for 20 years — from Workforce.com to TLNT.com to Fuel50 and now here. Let me know what you think at johnhollon@yahoo.com.