Did you know that only 13% of employees are actively engaged at work?
Failing to recognize your employees properly can cause big problems for your company. It can negatively impact engagement rates and voluntary turnover, which will hurt overall company performance and success.
A great way to make employees feel appreciated is through a custom employee recognition program. When executed properly, this strategy has been proven to increase overall employee retention and engagement, which is essential to the success of your business.
In this article, we’re covering the ins-and-outs of employee recognition, and how it can benefit your company.
Effective employee recognition might be more attainable than you think. There are many strategies you can quickly implement to make a huge immediate impact. Here are 6 surefire ways to make your employees feel appreciated.
1. Leverage Social Media As Part of Your Overall Recognition Strategy
Social media is “here to stay.” According to Statista, 79% of the US population has a social media profile. When it comes to designing employee recognition programs, it’s important to follow modern habitual communication patterns and reproduce this logic in the workplace.
How to do it?
One of the best options is to choose an employee recognition solution that follows social media patterns from the outset.
Tools like WorkProud combined with a comprehensive Employee Recognition strategy will set the standard for social recognition within your organization, while giving you management tools to measure the impact.
When using social recognition, it’s important to set recognition guidelines tied to your core values. This will guide employees toward being specific about what they are recognizing their colleagues for.
Also, encourage other employees to nominate who they believe deserves appreciation for specific achievements, quality of work, or being a good team player. Not only does this help you determine high-performers, but it helps employees see that their work does not go unnoticed.
You can find out more about the importance of social recognition in one of our recent articles.
2. Encourage Peer-to-Peer Recognition
As an employer, it’s not always easy to stay in the loop on what individuals are doing, especially at large companies. Peer-to-peer recognition is a great way to make employees feel supported and recognized in personal, accessible ways.
It can also help to reinforce your company’s culture while creating greater levels of engagement between employees. This has been proven to reduce voluntary turnover rates.
How to do it?
One of the most efficient models of peer-to-peer recognition is a combination of public praise and reward points. Managers can choose to assign points to peer recognitions that are deemed worthy of reenforcement. Employees can accumulate points use them on specific items in a custom rewards catalog.
Managers can aggregate in-depth data from peer recognition activity to help support important decisions like promotions or bonuses.
3. Try Team Recognition
A larger-scale way of recognizing employees is by praising teams or departments. These tactics encourage every individual on the team to contribute in a more meaningful way.
Source: The Elements of Great Managing, Rodd Wagner, James Harter
By encouraging employees to work together to solve problems, you can foster greater collaboration and team connectedness. This will help improve the performance of everyone on the team and make them feel more personally invested.
How to do it?
Rewards can vary depending on the department, levels of achievement, and available budget. Again, team rewards don’t necessarily require significant spendings to make an impact. By offering up prizes like free team lunch or movie tickets, you can give employees the opportunity to further bond outside of work.
4. Offer Recognition ‘In the Moment’
While long-term recognition initiatives are great, you should still aim to recognize people on a daily basis.
It’s very important to recognize good work in a timely manner, in order to reenforce positive behavior.
Try to find moments to earnestly recognize employees who are making meaningful contributions to work. Compliment them for making good points in a meeting or offer up words of encouragement for a project they’ve done.
How to do it?
Modern recognition solutions will allow managers to quickly recognize their employees in a public manner. Having an option that enables peer-to-peer recognition is also very important to maintain a high level of engagement across all departments.
Giving timely recognition is vital for making employees feel noticed.
5. Recognize Non-Work Accomplishments
Another great way to make employees feel appreciated is by recognizing their personhood outside of work. The personal approach is highly appreciated among the latest generations and can do a lot for a good working atmosphere.
How to do it?
If someone’s running a marathon or participating in a charity event, support them and praise them for their personal accomplishments. This shows them that you value them as an individual and not just another body in the office.
6. Use Online Rewards Catalogs
With today’s tech advancements, there are many ways to acknowledge employees outside of the standard employee of the month initiative. Nothing is more dangerous for employee engagement than “one size fits all” approach to rewarding and recognition.
How to do it?
Online Rewards allows you to gift your employees with a wide range of merchandise, from gift cards to electronic gadgets. Check out our customizable catalog to see all the unique ways you can recognize and reward your employees.
Ready to Recognize Your Employees?
Employee recognition can have a huge impact on your employees’ performance and office morale. By trying multiple combinations of these 6 employee recognition tactics, you can make your employees feel valued, and keep them engaged and happy at work.
Do you need help with your employee recognition efforts? Check out how our employee recognition programs can help you engage and motivate your employees in meaningful ways!
