Making sure your employees are recognized for a job exceptionally well done is important in any organization. Recognizing employees keeps them happy and more likely to stick around longer. Here are 4 ways to recognize your employees in a meaningful way to ensure your organization reaps the benefits of a recognition program.
Make It Specific: Recognize employees for specific actions, like exceptional work on a specific project or event. Giving specific praise helps employees set goals and understand desired behavior more clearly. Specific recognition also allows peers to make note of exactly what it takes to get publicly applauded for good work.
Make It Peer-to-Peer: Not all recognition has to come from a boss to their subordinate. While this is the most traditional type of employee recognition, peer-to-peer recognition can be equally meaningful. If one employee did another one a favor, or someone helped somebody else out on a component of a big project, peer-to-peer rewards are a great way for an organization to allows employees to say thank you to each other.
Make It Simple: Recognizing an employee, whether the recognition is coming from management or a peer should be ridiculously simple. There should be no hoops to jump through and (virtually) no forms to fill out. An easy way to enable employee recognition across all levels is to give each employee a "points" budget, that they can then give to other employees through an internal system (like your intranet). This allows employees to take full ownership of their recognition and giving, and receiving employees the ability to cash in the points for what they would like. Some employees can take an extra day off, while others can select a small denomination gift card to retailers like
Boston Market,
The Cheesecake Factory or
AutoZone.
Make It Part Of Your Culture: Build employee recognition into your employee handbook, your mission statement and/or your organizational values. This will engrain the practice of recognizing each other into every brain in your office, making it a part of everyone's routine.
For more information on employee recognition at your office check out this article from Forbes.
