Your Business: Giving thanks - Pippa Lekner, The PR Shop

Sally Frewin (left) and Pippa Lekner (right), co-owners of The PR Shop.

Pippa Lekner is co-owner, with Sally Frewin, of PR agency The PR Shop.

What are some of the things you do as a business owner to say thanks to your staff?

Our birthday is on the fourth of July, and we tend to celebrate as a team because it's about us achieving as a business, so we always organise a dinner or drinks at that time with an emphasis on fun.

We also like to do lots of random stuff throughout the year, just when we feel everyone wants to have some social time together, or we feel in need of some fun. We'll take turns at giving one of the team members the opportunity to create a social event, which we'll always pitch in for.

And we'll shout coffees, or provide lunches with our brainstorms, or on a Friday we may bring in morning tea - just random things like that which show our appreciation. We always acknowledge birthdays with a morning tea and love a team flutter for the Melbourne Cup.

Do you also do anything special with staff at this particular time of year?

For the past nine years we've organised for everyone to get their hair and makeup done before our Christmas party. This year, we felt like a change of scene, though, and we've got a man in the office who doesn't fancy makeup - go figure! What we really try to do is create an experience and give everyone the chance to see each other in a different setting. For the last few years we've provided presents for a Salvation Army family, too, which is a nice way for us to give back as a team.

Then when we come back after the holidays, we have what we call 'jandal January', when we work reduced hours from 10am to 4pm. Again, that's driven largely by how we want to spend our January too. We shut the office for three weeks over Christmas, so you've got to phase yourself back into things slowly.

What kind of payback do you see from doing those kinds of things with your team?

Loyalty and happiness. Sally and I are mums and we've strived to achieve a work life balance because we want to spend time at home. Our working hours are nine to five, which is quite unusual in our industry, because we feel if our staff can relax in the morning and enjoy their evenings we get the best of them. It's about having a life outside of work to enable them to be productive and satisfied in their work lives, and to be fresh and creative.

How about clients? How do you say thanks to them as a business?

Every year at this time we aim do something different. This year we're giving everyone a voucher they can redeem for a box of cherries so they can get it delivered to their home address. We always keep the value under about $40 because in a lot of the big corporates we work for gifts over that amount have to be forfeited. So smaller is better, and we go for practical things rather than anything too flashy. We like to keep it real.

We've done things like said 'thanks for your support' and given them Bendon vouchers, or gifted umbrellas with a tagline about 'having them covered' - all sorts of things. And they're always given with a card containing handwritten messages from each of the team members, which we think is really important.

What's a key lesson you've learnt about giving thanks as a business owner?

Sal and I have always asked the people we work with about what's important to them; even when we do our Christmas card design, the team make the final selection. Their input is really important to us. Sometimes people forget to ask the people who are working on a face-to-face level with clients, yet it's such an easy thing to do and it makes everyone feel more a part of what's going on.

We also believe in the importance of acknowledgement - appreciating their hard work is so simple yet it is one of the biggest contributions we make towards a happy and healthy work environment.