Is your employee recognition program beginning to lose its luster? It’s inevitable at some point, and the longer it’s been running, the more likely it is that it just don’t have the same impact that it once did. If that’s happening to your program, there are a number of things you can do to revitalize and revamp it. We’ll cover the biggest ones just below:
Survey Says!
Any time you’re considering an overhaul, the best place to start is with your employees themselves. Design a questionnaire and ask your employees what they’d like to see in a revamped recognition program.
Some of the ideas you get probably won’t be practical, but more than a few of them will be. Take the best of these and run with them.
Incentivize, Incentivize, Incentivize
Let’s face it, if the incentives and rewards you’re offering as a part of your recognition program just aren’t all that exciting, nobody’s really going to care. How long has it been since you really looked at what they are?
How long has it been since you updated the rewards? Is an update long overdue? If it’s been more than a year, then the answer to this question is almost certainly a resounding yes!
In a similar vein, it may be time to create additional incentives. Perhaps you’ve been running the program in a top-down companywide manner, when a department-by-department approach would serve your needs better. Yes, that means increasing the total number of incentives, but if it means a resurgence of interest in the program, then it’s almost certainly worth it.
Streamline
How long has it been since you stepped through using your recognition program? How easy is it for managers and employees to make use of? If the process of submitting employee names for consideration or selecting the winning employee is overly complex and convoluted, that could be a major part of the problem. Fix that, and people will suddenly be a lot more interested.
Rebranding
This is probably the simplest and most straightforward approach to take. Maybe your program has been going by the same name, and using the same theme for as long as anyone can remember. It’s just not new or interesting anymore.
You don’t have to make dramatic changes here, just switch up the colors, move things around, introduce a few new cosmetic elements, and perhaps jazz up the prizes a bit, and you’ll generate a surge of new interest in an old, tried and tested program.
Start Fresh
Sadly, all good things do ultimately come to an end. Perhaps, after some serious soul searching, you decide that the right answer is to simply scrap the old program and start fresh, building something new from the ground up.
That takes a bit more work than the other ideas we’ve talked about, but if the end result is a program your employees rush to embrace, then the extra work will have been worth it!
The bottom line is, you don’t have to just let your employee recognition program wither and die on the fine. Step in, step up, and make it shine again!