It's time to start dating your employees again.

Organisational psychologist Adam Grant once went looking for a group of workers who badly needed motivating. He found them in a university fundraising call centre.

Their job was to ring alumni and ask for money to fund student scholarships. Most people said no. Plenty just hung up.

So Grant ran an experiment. He brought in a student whose scholarship had been funded by the money those callers raised, and let him spend five minutes with some of them talking about what it had meant for his life.

That's it. Five minutes.

A month later, the callers who met him were spending 142% more time on the phone each week and raising 171% more money. Same callers. Same script. Grant repeated the experiment with new groups of callers and different students, and the effect held.

The lesson is simple. When people can see the impact of their work, they care more and they give more.

And most organisations almost never show them.

Every relationship needs attention.

The relationship between an employer and an employee is like any other relationship. It starts with a lot of promises.

In the early days, everyone's on their best behaviour. There's a welcome pack, a team lunch, a manager who checks in, maybe a branded water bottle.

Then work gets busy. A couple of years in, the romance has become a calendar invite for the annual review and an automated email on your work anniversary.

Nobody planned it that way. It's the same way date night slips when life gets full.

That's why I say you need to start dating your employees again. Remind them why they chose you, and give them reasons to keep choosing you.

Show people that their work matters.

Two of the six pillars in our Integrated EVP Framework sit right at the heart of this: I'm Valued, and My Work Matters.

So the questions are practical ones. How do we make people feel valued? How do we show them the difference their work makes? How do we celebrate them more often?

What's usually missing is a story capture mechanism. Every week, somewhere in your business, a customer says thank you. A candidate writes in to say it was the best interview they've ever had. A family sends a card to the care team. A client emails to say the project team saved the day.

Most of those moments land in one inbox and stay there.

Capture them. Share them. Make a bigger deal of them than feels natural.

It works even when the story is second-hand. In a follow-up study with lifeguards, Grant found that simply reading stories about other lifeguards saving lives lifted the hours they worked by more than 40%.

Awards nights aren't enough.

Plenty of organisations do the big moments well. The annual awards, the conference, the end-of-year message from the CEO.

They're great. For the person who wins.

Everyone else didn't win.

The real power is in the day to day. Showing people the impact of their work often, in small ways, in whatever form suits your organisation. A thank you that names what someone actually did. A customer's feedback read out at a team meeting. A two-minute video of a client explaining what the project changed for them.

It's why the activation plan we built with Revlon runs for a full year, inside the business as well as outside it, and why our work with Richard Crookes Constructions included internal culture content alongside the recruitment work.

This isn't a nice-to-have.

It's tempting to file all this under "nice culture stuff". It's actually one of the clearest reasons an employee value proposition pays for itself.

Gallup's meta-analysis covered 2.7 million employees across more than 112,000 work units. It found teams with low engagement typically have turnover 18% to 43% higher than highly engaged teams, and it ties engagement to productivity, profitability and customer loyalty too.

It even shows up in the share price. London Business School's Alex Edmans found that America's 100 Best Companies to Work For beat their peers' stock returns by 2.3% to 3.8% a year over 28 years.

Dating your employees, it turns out, is good for shareholders.

Your best stories are already inside the building.

Here's the bonus. The stories you capture to celebrate your people internally are exactly the content that works externally. Candidates trust your people more than your careers page, after all.

That's the infinity loop in action. Celebrate your people, and they feel more valued and more connected to why their work matters. Capture those stories and put them in front of the people you'd love to hire, and you attract more of the right people. Keep the loop turning and you become what we call a Magnet.

Start with your next team meeting.

Here's one small thing to try. Ask every manager to bring one piece of customer or client feedback to their next team meeting and read it out, with the name of the person who earned it.

It takes two minutes and costs nothing. And I'd bet someone in that room remembers it longer than their last performance review.

If you'd like to see how your organisation scores on I'm Valued and My Work Matters, the EVP Strength Finder scores you across all six pillars and shows you where the opportunities are.