012: Trusting and Agile: Chocolate Soup and Assembly – Making Sure that Employee Recognition Comes First

Culture Crush Business Podcast

This episode of Culture Crush focused on the conversation of employee recognition. We were able to highlight two great individuals leading two employee recognition companies. Dan Silivestru with Chocolate Soup and Jonathan Fields with Assembly provided insight into the need for company recognition to the employees as we way that can increase company culture, brand recognition, and increase engagement and retention of the staff.

Their two companies compliment each other with the support they give to employee recognition. Assembly allows the employees the opportunity to provide recognition to their peers while Chocolate Soup allows the leadership team to provide recognition to the employees on all of their special days.

85% OF HR LEADERS SAY EMPLOYEE RECOGNITION PROGRAMS ENHANCE THEIR ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE.

79% OF EMPLOYEES SAY THEY WOULD BE MORE LOYAL TO THEIR EMPLOYERS IF THEY RECEIVED MORE RECOGNITION.

This episode is great for all listeners. We can all connect with working for a company with a good culture or a bad culture, so we can all connect to the discussion of employee recognition as well. We encourage company leaders to listen to this episode to gain two new resources that are designed to help employee recognition and therefore the overall health of the company culture. These two resources can drastically help improve the engagement of the staff by showing them the recognition they need.

Chocolate Soup was born out of a sheer passion for building great company culture in support of happy, caring, and respectful teams. They’re here to help companies of all sizes discover the power of radical generosity, surprise and delight by recognizing important employee milestones with expertly curated, personal gifts.

Chocolate Soup offers a subscription-based employee recognition program that delivers beautifully curated gift boxes filled with treats and gifts. Companies can recognize their employees’ work anniversaries, birthdays, children and pet birthdays and more.

They also offer custom gift boxes for company events or for unique milestones including weddings and new home purchases.

Chocolate Soup lives and breathes employee happiness!

Dan Silivestru is the co-founder and CEO of Chocolate Soup. A life-long entrepreneur, Dan and his partner Pj Lowe have founded three previous startups, selling TinyHippos to RIM (BlackBerry) in 2011.

Their experience closing down their last startup, bitHound, gave them the idea for Chocolate Soup and its mission to help companies with employee recognition, engagement, and retention through beautifully curated, locally sourced gift boxes.

In addition to running Chocolate Soup, Dan also serves on the board of several startups and mentors early-stage founders with their startups.

Follow Chocolate Soup on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Assembly is an employee recognition and rewards solution that ensure employees feel appreciated and acknowledged for their hard work.

Jonathan Fields started his career in investment banking. After one short year he realized that his efforts were not truly valued and wanted to work in a more collaborative environment. Jonathan joined a small startup called ZipRecruiter as the 15th employee. The company went on to grow to over 1,000 employees and recently went public.

After 7 amazing years at ZipRecruiter Jonathan realized he wanted to better the employee experience and make work more efficient so he went on to build Assembly. In the past year Assembly has grown over 3,000% and continues to better work life culture in this changing environment.

Jonathan is an avid golfer, lives in Marina Del Rey with his fiance Eliana and has a mini golden doodle named Charlie. Jonathan also has a very immature sense of humor and is obsessed with Coldstone.

Follow Assembly on LinkedIn.