Performance
7
min read
Employee recognition has been one of the top tools that most organizations are leveraging to create an empowering and positive work culture to attract and retain top talent. You must have come across at least one discussion over the past couple of years on how your organization needs to develop and implement a robust employee recognition program.
However, we understand that with several priorities in your mind and limited resources, there might be multiple questions that you would have on employee recognition and the best way to maximize its effectiveness and ROI.
After working with several fast growing organizations, we have been able to identify some of the tried and tested ways to get started with employee recognition, in a way that is efficient, cost effective and bears incremental results.
Here is a detailed guide to help accelerate your rewards and recognition journey.
Create a culture of recognition and appreciation
The first major question or thought that is likely to strike you is how to create a culture of recognition and appreciation. It goes without saying that if you simply recognize the work of your employees on an ad-hoc basis, there will be no sustained efforts or results.
It will be a one-off event, leading to no impact on performance, retention or motivation. Therefore, it is important to create a culture of recognition and here are a few steps to achieve the same:
1. Recognize early and regularly
First, your employee recognition efforts need to be in real time and regular in nature. There are two aspects at play here. On one hand, you need to ensure that you recognize and appreciate the performance or efforts of your employees when it is due and not months after, when the cause of appreciation is out of mind. Therefore, you need to ensure early employee recognition.
On the other hand, you need to be regular in your recognition efforts. Appreciating your employees once every six month is not enough to create a culture of recognition. You need to make recognition a habit, across all levels of the organization.
Pro-tip: Having regular 1:1 check-ins with team members is a quick, easy and cost-effective way to induce a culture of regular recognition. Check out our short guide on how to take your next 1:1 check-in to the next level
2. Be specific
A culture of recognition and appreciation thrives when you are specific. Simply telling your employees that they did a good job is not enough. Be specific and clear on what they are receiving appreciation and recognition for.
Whether it is for closing a deal or for improving customer satisfaction, you need to be clear when recognizing efforts and performance. This will help them understand what they are being recognized for, and will further enable them to work towards the same with greater motivation.
Being specific will also give cue to others on how recognition works best, and, thereby, encourage them to emulate the same.
3. Celebrate effort and intention
If you wish to truly create a culture of recognition and appreciation, you need to recognize every aspect of an employee's work and not focus merely on the results. This includes appreciating the efforts and intention, even if they were unable to achieve the desired results. Creating a culture is all about encouraging others to follow the same, and when you appreciate efforts and intentions, others will too.
Top 5 Best Practices for Employee Recognition
An idea closely linked to creating a culture of recognition revolves around the best practices. These best practices can help you ensure that your recognition culture grows and thrives effectively.
1. Have a clear recognition program
As one of the best practices for employee recognition, it is important to have a very clear recognition program. There are several aspects to this.
First, you need to align on what the objectives of your recognition program are or what you seek to achieve by focusing on employee recognition. It could be a combination of results like increased sense of belongingness, better performance, greater satisfaction, higher engagement etc.
Second, you need to be clear on what kind of behaviors will be rewarded and recognized. You can define these behaviors based on the culture or practices that you seek to establish in the organization. For instance, if you feel that your employees are not as responsible as you would like them to be, recognize accountability.
Other factors that you need to decide on include the frequency of recognition as well as who should recognize, leaders vs peers. Having these bases covered will ensure that you have a robust employee recognition program.
2. Experiment with different types of rewards
Next, you must ensure that your employee recognition efforts are actually bearing fruits, you need to experiment with different types of rewards and ways of appreciation. While in some situations a pat on the back can go a long way, others might require public appreciation or a combination of incentives and rewards along with recognition.
However, don’t be afraid of using recognition and reward ideas like a day off, or a gift voucher. They can be as effective as any other form of recognition. It is important to play along with a bit of variety to make the experience of being recognized fun and exciting.
3. Make it personal
One of the best practices that has had a high success rate for almost all organizations has been the ability to make recognition personal. You need to understand that you are recognizing a human being for their efforts and that requires personalization.
Instead of sending out the same gratitude message to all, make each message personal and highlight how you appreciate their individual contribution and performance alongside team effort.
Having a standard template for recognition looks more of a tick in the box and does not express any genuine or authentic effort for employee recognition. Invariably, you will be unable to achieve your desired result. Therefore, make each instance of recognition personal and customized to employee performance.
4. Recognize everyday
When you seek to learn about the best practices for employee recognition, you need to understand that confining recognition to celebrate only the big wins is not enough. You need to recognize the everyday small wins for your employees and make them feel motivated at all times.
The idea is to celebrate small wins like checking all points in a task list. All great leaders know that recognizing efforts everyday will act as a motivator for employees to outperform themselves everyday and give in their best, because they know their efforts and contribution are always appreciated.
5. Recognize even when times are slow
Finally, don’t save recognition only for the good and happy days. To make the most of your employee recognition program, it is crucial to appreciate efforts even when times are slow. For instance, if your team has been putting 12 hour long days for a deal and the deal doesn’t come through, you still need to appreciate the effort that went into the preparation.
The idea here is not to completely dismiss what happened and celebrate despite being in a backstep when it comes to organizational success. But, it is important to motivate the team to perform better when the next opportunity comes along and avoid the fear of failure as well as prevent self doubt.
Role of qualitative vs. quantitative recognition
A key component for employee recognition is to gauge performance review and evaluation effectively. That is what forms the basis for quantitative vs qualitative evaluation and consequently recognition.
- Quantitative evaluation refers to gauging the level of performance numerically in terms of deals closed or targets achieved. They have a clear goal, achievement of which turns to recognition.
- Whereas, qualitative evaluation is ideal for roles which have a more abstract outlook, especially the ones which come from a creative side. Qualitative employee evaluation is also useful to gauge employee behaviors.
Based on the type of evaluation, you can leverage different ways of recognizing your employees. These can include bonuses, praises, written notes, etc. You can leverage quantitative recognition when you wish to appreciate their achievements from a quantity or volume of work lens. However, leverage qualitative recognition when you are truly impressed by the quality of work your employees have been able to turn around or the kind of energy and enthusiasm they bring to the team.
What is the difference between recognition and rewards?
Many hyper growth organizations face a lot of confusion when it comes to understanding the relationship between rewards and recognition. There is often a question if there is a connection between the two and if one should take precedence over the other.
For a simple understanding, you must look at recognition and rewards and intrinsically linked. If you look closely, recognition is relational in nature, while rewards are transactional. While rewards are tangible and constitute gifts, bonuses, vouchers etc., recognition is an intangible form where the work of an employee is appreciated by calling out their accomplishments and the like.
If you are wondering if you can replace one for the other, you need to think again. Both of them play a different and equally important role in advancing the cause of employee retention and satisfaction.
While rewards are materially driven and become an important incentive and source of motivation for employees, recognition helps in employees believing that their efforts and contribution are being valued, even if it doesn’t translate to tangible rewards every time.
For a more comprehensive understanding, you may want to see rewards as a way of recognizing employee performance which is less frequent and comes with an attached cost of realization.
Whereas, recognition can be more frequent and does not necessarily require resources and investments. All that is needed are words of gratitude and a genuine willingness to appreciate efforts.
Top 7 career milestones for employee recognition
As a fast growing organization, you will have many employees who will be celebrating key milestones in their professional life for the first time when working with you. It is extremely important to celebrate such career milestones from an employee recognition lens to create a greater sense of belongingness.
We believe that the top 7 milestones can be divided into two major segments. The first ones include those which are more common and are generally considered to be more important, like:
1. Work anniversary
Celebrating the day when employees complete a tenure or a year and more with your organization to recognize their efforts and contribution.
2. Landing first big deal
Recognizing the hard work and commitment of your team members when they accomplish a major target in their functional area which has large scale positive impact for the organization.
3. Promotion and appraisal
Celebrating promotion and appraisal for your team members. Here employee recognition comes in the form of appreciating their performance and congratulating them as they move up in the professional ladder of success.
4. Retirement
Finally, the last of the most common career milestones for employee recognition is retirement. Here you can express gratitude and appreciate your employees for all they have done for the organization throughout their journey.
While these are some of the common career milestones that you take into consideration as a part of your employee recognition framework, there are a few others too which may not be as prominent, but are equally important. These milestones deserve equal recognition and celebration to boost employee morale and encourage efforts and perseverance.
5. Meeting goals
Celebrate and practice employee recognition when your team members are able to meet their weekly or daily goals. A simple email or words of appreciation can go a long way to help employees strive harder for their goals.
6. Sharing insights and knowledge
You must focus on employee recognition when your team members go out of their way to share insights and knowledge with others in the team. This will help expand the overall capabilities and competencies of the team and encourage others to contribute towards collective growth.
7. Mentoring peers
This is an important career milestone that you must recognize. Your employees deserve due credit if they make a genuine effort to mentor their peers and those who are new to the organization. If they are trying hard to help others navigate through the challenges they faced, they definitely deserve recognition and celebration of an important milestone.
How to implement an effective employee recognition program?
Many growth stage organizations today struggle with getting started with the whole employee recognition journey. While we have talked at length about how to create a culture of recognition and the best practices you can follow, we have also captured here a few tips to commence your journey in a way that is destined for success.
1. Get leadership buy-in
You need to start your employee recognition journey by ensuring leadership buy-in. This involves creating a business case for employee recognition and convincing those on top about how it has the potential to make a business impact.
Back your pitch with evidence and data points and make a clear pitch around the return on investment. Leverage metrics like greater retention, increased productivity, etc. and how each one impacts the bottom line.
2. Have a clear criteria
Once your leadership is aligned on the entire employee recognition agenda, you need to be clear on what recognition means to you. Furthermore, other factors like on what basis and how will recognize employee efforts need to be brainstormed and documented for effective implementation.
3. Explore different ways of recognition that fall in your budget
There may be several ways to facilitate employee recognition including some of the most extravagant ones like a foreign trip. However, you need to identify ways of recognition that best suit your budget. Dig deep and you will be able to find many ways to recognize employee efforts which come with no attached cost and have the potential to create large scale impact.
4. Include employee voices
As a fast growing organization, while setting up the employee recognition program, you have the golden opportunity to include the voices of your employees. You can ask your employees what ideal recognition looks to them and incorporate those ideas when devising your program. This will ensure that your employee recognition efforts are accepted and appreciated by the employees and they will actually be able to drive performance and results.
PRO-TIP — Conduct a quick survey to get insights into how your employees want to be recognized. Click here
5. Collaborate with external partners
Finally, as you may have multiple priorities to take care of and limited expertise in the area, it might be a good idea to collaborate with partners like SuperBeings.
- SuperBeings can help you in gauging employee pulse to understand what recognition means to them.
- At the same time, you can easily track employee performance to recognize efforts in real time with performance snapshots.
- Finally, with SuperBeings, your managers will have access to AI driven guided templates to help navigate through recognition conversations in the most effective manner.
What features to look for in an employee recognition platform?
Taking cue from the point above, to accelerate your employee recognition efforts, you can collaborate with external platforms, especially if you have limited time and resources at hand.
Most high-performing organizations believe that leveraging the services of employee recognition platforms has enabled them to create a culture of recognition effectively. However, if you plan to go with a platform, you need to check for the following features:
- Does it offer real time employee insights for recognition?
- Does it align OKRs with recognition based on performance?
- Does it enable your managers to have 1:1 recognition conversations effectively?
- Does it provide you with industry insights and best practices for recognition?
- Does it help you gauge employee pulse to refine your recognition efforts?
If you are looking for an employee recognition platform that takes care of all these and much more, you need to collaborate with SuperBeings. It can help you ensure a consistent and regular approach to employee recognition coupled with OKR alignment and guided templates for your managers for effective 1:1 conversations. Click here to book a free demo.
How to align your DEI initiatives with recognition for workplace success?
In recent times, organizations have seen a lot of focus being diverted towards fairness and inclusivity in the workplace, which takes into account recognition as well. Here are a few ways to ensure that all your recognition efforts promote inclusivity:
1. Have a diverse criteria
Don’t have a narrow or a single criteria for recognition. Be open to recognizing different efforts and achievements. Have unique criteria for each team to ensure that you are recognizing employees based on what they bring to the table and not on the basis of a standardized approach.
2. Emphasize on inclusive rewards
While your criteria needs to be diverse, your rewards and ways of recognition need to be inclusive. Ensure that the way your recognition messages are worded do not exclude anyone in the team. Similarly, your rewards should be such that can be utilized or enjoyed by everyone and not limited to a particular group.
3. Leverage technology for performance review
To promote inclusivity, you need to ensure that your review is fair and unbiased. Here, you can use performance management tools like SuperBeings to get a real time picture of performance which can help you eliminate recency bias or horns/halo effect and recognize and reward holistic performance based on continuous review and feedback.
PRO-TIP — Are you looking for the perfect performance review tool that suits your needs? This quick guide will help you to find one.
What role does technology play in effective and fair recognition?
As mentioned in the point above, technology can play an integral role in ensuring that employee recognition is effective and fair.
If we look closely, recognition is based on performance reviews and feedback. However, these reviews can be vulnerable to recency effects in which only the events closest to the review are taken into consideration. Similarly, reviews can be clouded by the halo or horns bias where one positive or negative feedback becomes the base on which the employee is reviewed. Invariably, these biases prevent fair recognition.
Fortunately, technology can play a major role in preventing the same. On one hand, technology is unbiased and can help provide a true picture of the employee’s performance. On the other hand, it can help you capture performance and effort in real time with a continuous lens to ensure that single instances or events don’t cloud recognition in the long run.
Efforts vs Results: The Best Approach for Recognition
If you feel confused whether you should be recognizing efforts or results, you are not alone. However, replacing one at the cost of the other can be detrimental. Undoubtedly, you need to recognize results, but recognizing and appreciating efforts is equally important because of the following reasons:
1. Motivates employees
It encourages them to keep trying and striving for excellence and enables them to believe that their contribution is being valued.
2. Promotes innovation and risk taking
Employee recognition of efforts encourages them to take risks and unlock innovation rather than follow the same path for results every time, which will eventually lead to growth stagnation.
3. Facilitates engagement and a positive experience
Finally, it will create a positive experience for employees where they see recognition of efforts as an empowering environment for growth and development, reducing voluntary attrition.
3 common problems with employee recognition programs
It would be an overstatement to say that the path to building a culture of employee recognition is one without challenges and struggles. Here are a few challenges that you might face along the way:
1. Inconsistency
Due to other pressing priorities, you might find yourself unable to maintain consistency in recognizing employee efforts. This will lead to an ad-hoc mechanism, which will not reap sustained and scalable impact.
To facilitate consistency, you can collaborate with a platform like SuperBeings which will help you recognize employee efforts on time and ensure that you don’t miss any accomplishment that deserves celebration.
2. Lack of authenticity
Sometimes, your managers or leaders might recognize employee efforts just for the sake of it, devoid of any authenticity. Employees are generally able to recognize the lack of authenticity and such recognition will backfire as a simple tick in the box. The best way to navigate through this challenge is to invest in the training of your managers on key leadership competencies to enable them to lead and recognize authentically.
3. Inability to communicate effectively
At times, you might have the right motivation, but the inability to communicate your recognition and appreciation effectively can impact the whole situation adversely. Here, you need the right guidance and templates to sail through the conversations in an effective manner.
If you want to avoid these challenges and effectively implement the best practices for employee recognition, book a free demo with SuperBeings today. As a one stop platform for all people management needs, we can help you take your recognition game to the next level.
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