Employees need to stay encouraged and motivated to give their best performance at work. In recent studies, it has been found that around 50% of the employees tend to stay committed to their work, especially when they are recognized for their efforts.
So, as a team leader or manager, it’s your responsibility to ensure that your employees stay motivated and also committed to the company or organization.
In this blog post, you’ll know about some of the fun employee recognition ideas that can help your employees build a strong connection with the company or organization and even stay at the top of their game.
1. Celebrate Their Birthdays
A birthday celebration can be one of the best ways to make your employees build a strong relationship with the company.
So, if your employee agrees (some may prefer to celebrate their birthdays with family), celebrate their birthdays in the office or anywhere else where all your employees can participate and make the day a memorable one for the employee.
Provide catering or purchase a cake to ensure that every staff in the office participates. Employees can also present small gifts or even wish cards to cheer up the employee.
You can also give the employees an entire day off so that they can celebrate their special day.
2. Encourage Colleagues to Come up With Interesting and Fun Ideas
Make it simple for your employees to express their gratitude to one another. Coworkers usually know the characteristics of the employees and they also know what can make their colleagues feel motivated for their achievement.
Therefore, as a team leader or manager, you can ask the colleagues to come up with some interesting and fun recognition ways that can make the employee feel more special for their achievements.
3. Ask the Employees What They Like
Conduct a staff survey if possible. Directly ask them what they would like to have from you as a token of recognizing them for their performance or work. In this way, at least you can be assured that you’re rewarding your employees with something they’ll appreciate.
4. Reward Your Employees Based on Their Unique Interests.
Presenting your gratitude or recognition in a unique way for each of your employees can be pretty interesting and different. Giving them awards that they appreciate or they want like a wristwatch, a branded perfume, or anything else that they would love to have, can be an effective and interesting way to recognize your employees.
5. Tracking Team Wins and Building a Healthy Competition.
Consider how NGOs employ a thermometer to demonstrate the gradual increase in donations as they approach a goal. Whether you take a more graphic approach or keep everyone informed through meetings, you can accomplish the same thing.
A little competition among teams and colleagues is always healthy, and as your staff climbs toward a certain objective, you may not only congratulate them on their efforts but also motivate them with the promise of a prize for whichever team reaches the mark first.
This will encourage all the teams to give their best and through this, they will develop more skills and can be a future asset for the company or organization.
6. Make the Recognitions Public.
Show your appreciation for your employees in front of everyone. Notify your customers using signage or social media. Take a photo and express your gratitude for what your staff accomplished and how they got this award.
This will encourage your employees to give their best to generate more business for your company. Moreover, this also makes the employees feel more valued and they tend to become the future assets of your company.
So, recognizing your employees publicly, makes them feel more motivated and encouraged to deliver the best results.
7. Provide Employees With Genuine Choice and Voice.
Appreciation is not a game or a system of rewards. It should be an ingrained part of your culture. One approach to accomplish this is to provide your employees with genuine choices and a voice.
Genuine gratitude is necessary. You can present a gift card to a member on their birthdays, however, if they’ve regularly approached you with problems and have always been sincere with their work, but you’ve made no genuine move to address them, then these gift cards can be meaningless.
So, make sure that you recognize their efforts and dedications as this will make them feel valued for what they are doing.
8. Incentives and Commissions that are unique.
Time off, food, a bonus, or even promotion are acceptable as a form of recognition and are also standard rewards.
However, you also need to consider how you may differentiate these rewards sufficiently to make it truly stand out as a part of your office culture. Some companies, organizations, and businesses recognize their employees with commissions which is also a way to recognize the employees for their hard work and dedication.
9. Trophies Can be a Great Method to Recognition
Grand champion trophies are passed down from year to year in professional sports. You can also create a trophy (either an actual trophy or something more comical) that can also be recognized as a symbol of your employee appreciation and distribute it throughout the company to employees who have done something excellent.
This can be one of the most effective ways to encourage your employees to perform better and motivate them to be the top performer again.
Bottom Line
Recognizing your employees is essential to bring out the best from them. However, fun recognition ideas can be more effective than those traditional ways of recognizing your employees. No matter what methods you use to recognize your employees, always make sure that your employees appreciate them.