The Epic You Awards are an absolute highlight on the annual Epic calendar. Team members from all around the country nominate the peers they believe have best embodied our core values throughout the year, and the leadership team has the incredibly difficult task of selecting a winner from each category.
This year our colleagues at Icon Cancer Care, Radiation Oncology Centres and our Core Services team are also joining us with their own Annual Awards, where they’ll be selecting those who’ve demonstrated their ability to ‘Be Iconic’, been ‘ROC Stars’ or shown their ‘Core Strength’ in 2015.
At Epic, we’ll be recognising those shining examples of our core values Energy, Purpose, Innovate and Connect with the help of our Epic You mascot Breadman, who acknowledges those who their peers think are truly ‘the best thing since sliced bread’.
When looking for our Energy winner, we’re seeking out someone who brings a positive energy to everything they do, and inspires and leads those around them.
(By the way no need for a spoiler alert, the lovely team members who are holding the letters are not this years winners – or not yet anyway, judging doesn’t start until nominations close at the end of October!)
Our Purpose winner embodies the most fundamental of our values, living and breathing our purpose of ensuring that everything we do comes back to our focus of delivering exceptional health care.
Innovate is always a hotly contested category, with so many people responsible for ideas that deliver on this key principle of striving to find new and better ways of doing what we do.
And lastly our Connect winner is a shining example of someone who truly believes in the need to build and maintain value adding relationships with our patients, corporate customers and suppliers.
In addition to the individual awards, we also celebrate the teams who best embody each of these categories.
The number of entries each year is extraordinary, and over the years we’ve moved from the early days where the nomination form was sent out as an email attachment which had to be printed, completed, faxed back and entered into a spreadsheet to increasingly sophisticated methods.
This year we’re excited to be using the Award nominations to launch our new partnership with Redii, the new reward and recognition platform recently launched by our friend Naomi Simson. Stuart and I first met Naomi 10 years ago when Stuart and Naomi were speaking at a Gallup conference on employee engagement. Red Balloon was launching its initial corporate employee recognition programs then, and we signed up as one of the first companies and that platform has powered our reward and recognition program for the past 10 years. We’ve now switched across to Redii, which has been specifically created for the purpose of reward and celebrating your people’s achievements.
There are a lot of similarities to our previous program, in that we can deliver on that key premise of peers recognising and thanking each other for a job well done, and managers recognising outstanding efforts by team members, but it allows us to get mobile and do this from any device anywhere, get more social, and opens up a whole new suite of reward options.
We’ve launched the new platform for the Epic You Awards, and will follow up soon after that with the introduction of the everyday recognition component. With the way Epic people love to celebrate and recognise each others achievements, and the ease of now doing this via mobile devices, I’m sure there’s going to be no shortage of activity here.
In the meantime, the leadership team are looking forward to reading the list of nominations and knuckling down to the difficult task of selecting our Epic winners for this year.