Ideas To Help Supercharge Your Employee Recognition Program

Do you have an employee recognition program in place?  Have you been underwhelmed by its effectiveness to this point?  The problem could be rooted in your implementation of the system you have in place. 

Recognize Your Team With Employee Gifts

Employee gifts are a great way to recognize your team’s excellent work. Check out some of Successories most popular employee gifts. Below, we’ll outline a number of ideas you can begin implementing immediately that will help take your recognition program to the next level. 

Weave It Into The Fabric Of Your Organization

What we’re really talking about here is corporate culture.  Your recognition program can’t be just this thing you do at periodic intervals, like a slot machine for goodies that get spit out now and then in a mechanical nature.  It has to be more than that.  Recognition has to be an integral part of what it means to be in and work for your company.

Recognition should be a cause for the celebration of milestones and specific jobs well done.  It should be shared on social media and featured on your company’s home page.  This is what makes it meaningful.  In that respect, recognition isn’t about the gifts and awards you hand out, it’s about publicly acknowledging the accomplishments of your star performers.

Tailor Recognition To Specific Employees

This is huge.  Some employees don’t like the spotlight.  They don’t want to be called up on stage and recognized in a loud way that they’ll find obnoxious.  Recognizing an introvert is a very different thing from recognizing an extrovert, who will no doubt thrive on the type of attention we mentioned above.  Be mindful of that and take the needs and desires of your individual employees into account when recognizing them.

Be Playful And Allow For Playtime

Gamification is one of the most powerful, transformative forces you can employee to fundamentally change how people feel about your company and working for you.  Gamify your recognition program if you aren’t already doing so.  Make it fun.  Make it playful, and most importantly, make it memorable.  Again, the specific gifts and awards you’re handing out are secondary to this.  Presentation matters, and if the presentation isn’t fun and compelling, your recognition program won’t be as effective as it could be.

Know Your Employees

Depending on how many employees you have, this could feel like a daunting task.  It doesn’t have to be though.  Leverage existing technology to keep and maintain a tickler file that includes employee names, birthdays, anniversary dates, names of children and their birthdates, favorite colors, likes and dislikes, and so on.

Doing this helps to ensure that you never give an inappropriate gift to any employee.  It will keep you, for instance, from giving a box of coconut cookies to someone who is deathly allergic to coconuts, which, as you might imagine, will not be a well-received gift, no matter how heartfelt it may have been.

Hand Write Thank You Notes!

This is a small thing, but it’s incredibly important.  When you’re sending out holiday greeting cards or other nods of recognition, take the time to make it personal.  Too often, busy business owners send Christmas cards with either no message at all written inside, or a completely generic message that could be applicable to any and everyone.

Do more than that and be sure that when you include a message, you write it by hand.  It demonstrates that busy or not, you care enough to take time out of your schedule to do it right and that’s something that’s going to be remembered.

If you implement even one or two of these ideas, it will kick your recognition program into overdrive and you’ll be much happier with the results.  If you implement all of them, you’ll be absolutely amazed.