If you are looking for ways to improve employee retention and motivation in your business, an employee recognition programme can have a huge impact on improving engagement and productivity.

Recognising your employees for their outstanding work will not only make your team feel valued, you will also benefit from a deeper sense of commitment, improved teamwork, morale and happier employees.

This article walks you through what you should consider when implementing an employee recognition programme so that it grows and evolves with your business.

Set achievable and challenging goals

The first step in creating a recognition programme is to set goals. Establish clear and measurable objectives for your team as a whole and as individuals that help support your overall business objectives.

Goals should be achievable and realistic but also challenging. Ask yourself:

• What does outstanding work look like for your organisation and what are the benchmarks?
• How does this goal fit in with their overall workload?
• Have others achieved similar milestones in the past?
• Is the goal measurable and timed?

Set up Peer Recognition

Not all managers or business owners get to see or hear about good work, so peer to peer recognition is just as important. It can also help to strengthen connection among team members and provide a sense of belonging.

Allow team members to acknowledge others within their team who have contributed to a specific goal or who have demonstrated outstanding performance.  These acknowledgements could be announced at monthly team meetings.

Team recognition

You may also want to consider team incentives when a team has collectively performed well for the month or quarter and reached or exceeded their targets. However, it is important to level the playing field as each team’s activities are often so distinctive from the other and you want to avoid unhealthy competition.

Communication

Decide how you are going to communicate your employee recognition programme and how everyone can play a part and get involved.

Create the right incentives

Consider what is going to really incentivise your employees to achieve and perform well, and also how frequently you intend to issue rewards.

Team activity days are a great way to reward recognition, as they bring everyone together outside of the workplace to celebrate their success.  Gift store cards are also a ‘safe bet’ to acknowledge individual top performers.

Annual bonus schemes are another popular incentive. These could be split percentage wise into individual bonuses for personal KPIs, team bonuses with defined goals and company-wide bonuses when the entire company reaches certain targets.

Display both public and private recognition

Some of your employees may enjoy public recognition and attention in the workplace, while others prefer a more low-key and more personal acknowledgment. Whatever approach you take, the key to success is being genuine and thoughtful when giving praise so that the individual feels incentivised to perform well in the future.

Share on social

You can use social media to publicly acknowledge good performance, using ‘Employee of the Month’ and this will also position you as an organisation who cares about their employees.

Too many people feel invisible at work, and this only causes them to feel unmotivated and start to look for other jobs where they’ll feel more valued.  Your employees deserve to be celebrated, recognised and rewarded when they go above and beyond, and a structured employee recognition programme is a great place to start.

If you would like help implementing an employee recognition programme, book a consultation with one of our friendly team today.