An employee recognition program can do a lot for your company, including boosting morale, productivity, and employee engagement. But if you do employee recognition poorly, it could have the opposite effect, and actually make your employees less motivated to do their jobs well.
You need to know what you’re doing in order to put together an effective employee recognition program. You need to personalize your attempts at employee recognition, and try to nurture a culture of recognition and self-improvement via peer-to-peer recognition. Don’t feel like you’re limited to giving cash bonuses or other monetary rewards – people can be very happy with non-cash forms of recognition. Sometimes a personal note or a simple thanks can make all the difference to an employee’s performance.
Make It Personal
If there’s one thing that can sour even the most well-intentioned employee recognition program, it’s making the awards too generic. Don’t send a form letter acknowledging an employee’s achievement – take the time to write a short personal note, and sign it in ink. Pick up a thoughtful gift that matches an employee’s taste. Give them a gift card to their favorite restaurant as a congratulations on a job well done, or recognize that they’ve been working a lot of nights by letting them go home early on a Friday.
Of course, tailoring your recognition awards to what each employee might want or need requires getting to know your employees a little bit, so you can know what kinds of awards they’ll be most happy with. That way, you can avoid calling a shy, introverted person who hates attention to accept a plaque in front of everyone. It will mean so much more if you can show employees that you care about them as people.
Get Everyone Involved
Peer-to-peer recognition can help you create a company culture focused on giving praise where it is due and recognizing hard work and professional achievements. It can also bring your teams closer together by strengthening bonds of respect, trust, and gratitude between them. When you build your company’s employee recognition program, make sure you leave room for peers to recognize each other.
Create opportunities for your employees to praise and recognize one another. For example, you could put up a Recognition Wall where employees could post shout-outs to colleagues who have helped them. Just make sure that all employees are eligible for recognition rewards – if everyone’s participating, no one should be excluded from receiving rewards.
Be Creative, Authentic, and Grateful
You might think that the best way to award hard work and high performance is with cash bonuses or even pay raises. And, sure, everyone wants more money. But as long as you’re compensating your employees fairly – and they have enough to be comfortable – it’s the non-monetary awards that can sometimes mean the most.
Symbolic awards like thank-you notes, plaques and trophies, certificates, handwritten cards, and public recognition have been found to have a powerful effect on motivation, retention, and performance. Get creative about how you reward your employees for their hard work. Tangible awards, like trophies, plaques, or custom-made coins can take pride of place in an employee’s home or at their work space, and can inspire them to keep doing well in the future. Personal rewards, like a one-on-one lunch, movie tickets, or a gift card can make employees feel seen and appreciated.
The key to making non-cash rewards work is that you have to be authentic – you should be showing genuine gratitude to your hardest working employees. That’s why saying thanks can be one of the most powerful ways you can reward your employees. Take the time to recognize important milestones in employment or in your employees’ lives – not just work anniversaries, but birthdays, new babies, and even funerals. Your employees are human beings with lives outside of work, and it pays to acknowledge that.
Make Praise Immediate and Relevant
Holding back your praise until an employee’s annual review doesn’t help either of you. Give recognition when it’s earned instead of saving it up for some later date. You’ll keep your employees motivated and won’t have to worry about them becoming resentful, wondering if their hard work has been noticed. You can keep performance levels high, and keep employees from exploring other employment options by giving your recognition in a timely fashion, and making sure the employee knows what they’re being praised for and how their hard work helps the company.
Employee recognition programs have so many benefits for employers and employees alike. Implement your own recognition program, and build a workforce of loyal, hardworking staff.