Creating a culture of gratitude at work has an impact far beyond the perimeter of your office. As employees become comfortable expressing feelings of gratitude toward one another, you will notice how even the smallest gestures can produce big results for your brand. In effect, you are creating a team of brand ambassadors who exude your company’s ideals, both inside the office and out.  

In my book The Currency of Gratitude, I share my observation that, in order to build this kind of welcoming internal culture, you need to set realistic expectations for your team around the notion of “work-life” balance.  Personally, I believe it’s an outdated concept that imposes an artificial separation between “work-life” and the rest of life. The fact of the matter is, regardless of who we are, we all bring our personal selves to work each day and our work selves back home with us.

Let’s face it. When something is going well or poorly in either space, it tends to seep into our attitudes and behavior in the other. As a team, we’ve learned that emphasizing gratitude inside and outside the office helps unite the group around common goals and practices. And what we hold in common is that we bring gratitude into the office each day and take it back outside the office when we leave.

By nurturing a business culture that refuses to divide an employee’s “personal life” from their “professional life,” you are acknowledging all aspects of their life and showing a genuine interest in, and concern about, their personal goals and dreams.

Creating an authentic culture of gratitude fosters emotional connections between employees and leadership and between co-workers. Even more interesting, a grateful culture helps connect employees to the company’s overall purpose by helping to build a link from employee personal goals to the brand vision of the company.

In my companies, we encourage employees to reflect on their own personal brand and define their individual goals. Through our proprietary program, My Big Idea®, we’ve refined the process and now share it with our clients. My Big Idea® guides individuals and teams as they take it one step further by seeking out and finding clear points of alignment between their own goals and those of the business.

If you’re not convinced that fostering a coherent and welcoming internal culture will help your business thrive, just look at my company’s employee retention rate. Although marketing agencies are well known for high turnover rates, at Blazing we don’t have that problem.

That’s because we have built a business culture based on gratitude that acknowledges our employees have hopes and dreams bigger than what any job could ever satisfy. By this simple gesture, we’re able to retain a loyal and productive group of people who care about and value one another, which in turn helps the business succeed.

Grateful and confident employees are the best team of brand ambassadors for your business out there, and they are an important voice in articulat­ing your company’s brand. That voice is evident in the way employees answer the phones, how visitors are greeted when they enter the office, and even the way the office looks. Don’t discount the value of actual lived experiences at every level of the company and in every interaction as a powerful means of promoting your brand message. They matter.

While there are plenty of ways to show gratitude, one of the simplest ways is encouraging employees to thank the people who impact their daily lives at work, those people who make their days better, make their jobs easier, and help them enjoy their job. That means thanking one another not just for major contributions or projects completed well, but for noticing and being grateful for the little things. You may like to write personal notes as I do. Or you may prefer to express your thanks in the form of an email to your whole team to recognize someone. However you choose to say thank you, just do it. In whatever form it takes, expressing gratitude is vitally important to employee culture, engagement, and retention.

Check out chapter two of my book to find more examples of simple yet impactful ways to express gratitude that make a world of difference when building a team of brand ambassadors fully aligned to your company’s brand promise.