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How HR Heroes Are Powering Team to Team Support

Give InKind is here to help you support your teammates when they need it most.

As an HR professional, you’ve had team members over the years experience everything. From new babies to illness, surgery, recovery, house fire. Lots of reasons that we come together and support our teammates during these big moments.

My Give InKind of origin story actually started with team to team support.

This is a photo of my living room when my family and I went through a big loss. These flowers are beautiful and I can tell you that no less than six of them came from my company or our vendors. Between my direct team sending us flowers, the company sending us flowers, other teams sending us flowers.

That is sort of the one way that they had to respond.

So I’m curious, now, to have you think about how you respond in those big moments.

And is it a default to send flowers–which may be one of six that person is receiving?

Do you send a gift card?
Do you leave it up to the teams?
How do you respond in these big moments and allow team members to come together and offer support?

As I sat there in my living room looking at these flowers and knowing my coworkers were wanting to help, my family was wanting to help, everyone was spread around the country.

We decided that there could be a better way to have team members come together, extending into friends and family and communities, and make it easy for everyone to give support during those challenging moments.

That’s why we’re here today.

The fact that this is important isn’t just something that I thought on that day.

It is validated by a number of studies that talk about how important it is for your employees to feel supported during those big moments. Not just that we want to help when someone on our team is going through a challenge, but that it’s really important for your team members, employees to feel supported.

15% of our workforce in the United States goes out on FMLA leave every year, which is a number that amazed me.

But if you think about it, FMLA is everything from caring for a new baby to caring for a sick child, to caring for an aging parent.

Lots of reasons that people might be going out on leave. And all ones that I happen to think are pretty deserving of a Give InKind support page.

You may already know this stat, but when an employee goes through a big loss, if they didn’t feel supported by their company as they were going through that bereavement period, 50% of them may come back and look for a new role. Employees who are engaged and feel supported are 87% less likely to resign.

66% will stay at their job because of that support that they felt.

A couple of studies have touched on just how important it is that when your employees are going through these big moments you make them feel supported.

We think that we have made that pretty easy to do.

Here’s how it works.

Step one:

You get the news, learn that someone on your team is navigating a disruption.

Let’s just pause there.

What do we do today?

We’d send flowers or a gift or circulate a card.

It used to be, we’d walk around the office and collect a little money from everyone for their donation.

What Give InKind makes it easy to do is set up a support page. It takes five minutes. You can list all the ways that the team can offer support. Whether that is through signing up to take a meal, offering a ride somewhere, or most often, what we find is, it’s digital gift cards that really are empowering companies to send their support from anywhere. Especially for our remote first co-located teams today.

Step three is their needs are met.

It sounds like I’m oversimplifying it, but it is just that simple.

map of the united states depicting a house fire in colorado and 17 other states from which support was sent. a great example for hr heroes to follow

This map shows a real life example of one employee’s house burning down in Colorado. And the 17 states that people participated from in support over the first 24 hours. Getting their coworker gift cards for Airbnb and Home Depot and the things they needed to meet their needs in that exact moment.

It’s pretty powerful.

Visit our Teams page to learn how to harness the power of Give InKind to support your entire organization today.


Give InKind does not provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. We have an affiliate relationship with many of the advertisers on our site, and may receive a commission from any products purchased from links in this article. See Terms & Conditions.

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