Today’s companies need employee social recognition. It isn’t just for morale; it’s
Employee recognition, in layman’s terms, just means giving thanks, expressing gratitude, rewarding, and supplying appreciation to your employees. It could be for a milestone, an anniversary, completing a project, going above and beyond, or just because. There’s really no limitation to giving employee recognition. It should be done frequently, promptly, and be specific. Recognition can happen anytime of the day, week, month, year for any reason at all.
So, why do companies need recognition? Because it unites teams, boosts morale, and increases engagement. But even if we remove the buzzwords from the equation, there’s something to be said about the positive power of recognition at any organization. Employee recognition programs are a big thing at modern businesses, especially in the wake of The Great Resignation and post pandemic downturns. But how can businesses use them effectively? What makes a recognition program great?
Building A Strong Company Culture Through Recognition Programs
A strong company culture is integral to any business, but it isn’t always easy to set up at your business. With a little hard work, planning, and dedication creating a great company culture—and a place where people love to work—is pretty easy. Start by recognizing their efforts with an employee recognition program. Other ways to build a strong culture of recognition might be to give certain team members more responsibility and conduct regular check-ins. You can also ask about progress in goals without doing a formal check-in. It’s important to trust your employees and give them tasks they can readily accomplish. Goal set in, monitoring, and feedback all play into this and ultimately build a strong culture. By recognizing these accomplishments, you’re showing your employees that you care about them and value what they do at your organization.
Making Recognition Meaningful For Individual Employees
For recognition to be truly effective and useful for an organization, that means you need to take care of employees on an individual basis instead of trying to do mass recognition on a larger scale. Using comprehensive, tech-based employee recognition programs at your business can be beneficial when it comes to providing meaning to individual employees. For recognition to be effective, it does need to be specific to an employee. If you’re just recognizing the entire team, it won’t work nearly as well. But the best part about it is that you can get quite a bit of great feedback from your team by simply recognizing them in a social capacity for their hard work. In addition to that, it’ll motivate them to be more productive, be more engaged, and have positive vibes toward the company. Many companies like to tout that they’re teams are family, but the truth is most people desire work life balance and money from work. That’s why they’re there. But giving them the ability to feel like they’re a valued member of the team is much more valuable to the company as a whole than not recognizing them at all.
Using Formal and Informal Recognition
Recognition also works well if you mix it up between informal and formal styles. There’s a pretty distinct difference between the two. Formal recognition consists of official rewards. These might be certificates, award notices, specialized emails, and so on. Informal recognition is your typical “thank you” or acknowledgment from a supervisor or colleague. While both types of recognition are important, sometimes informal recognition can show more care (and be more personal). It helps build relationships and morale within the workplace, too, making it one of your most valuable tools for recognition at work.
Recognizing Important Milestones
Throughout our careers, many of us work toward a common goal for the company. Whether it’s a mission, product launch, improving the reputation, or other endeavor, hitting and achieving goals is integral to success. That’s why recognizing milestones and anniversaries is so crucial in the modern working world. Recognizing an anniversary, especially, can be particularly valuable for an organization. Within the first year or so of working at a company, an employee is going to probably have a good idea on whether they’re going to stay or not. If they like the company culture, find satisfaction working there, and are engaged, they’re going to stay. If not, they might go somewhere else. Employee recognition software makes recognizing milestones and anniversaries easy because it provides a quick, intuitive interface employees can use to recognize those things. It also has a database where you can pull information about employee accomplishments and automatically send notifications that it’s time to recognize those employees. Recognizing such things becomes a big part of running a business because it brings people closer, creates positive memories, and provides motivation for future accomplishments. Who wouldn’t want that at their organization?
Offering Quality Rewards
It goes without saying that rewarding employees for their hard work is just as important as recognizing it. Unfortunately, this is the area where many recognition programs and businesses get things completely wrong. Rewards need to be something worthwhile and interesting that will keep employees engaged, rather than whatever thrown together nonsense and employer wants to save money by providing. For rewards programs to work effectively, employers need to take them seriously. Offer rewards the employee can use. These can be monetary such as paid time off, vacation, bonuses, or a pay increase. They can also be non-monetary. Non-monetary rewards can create a lot of positive emotion and morale around the office. Sometimes it’s nice to receive a gift card, specialized anniversary letter, invitation to dinner, or points that can be used toward other prizes from the company. Apparel is also a great reward idea. Then there are other intrinsically valuable rewards such as continuing education classes or the ability to take a few remote work days if the office allows it. All of these are ideas for rewards that can really make a difference in your recognition program. By implementing them effectively and using them to provide value to your staff, you can get the most from your team and your recognition program with ease.
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