Awards Ideas for Employees
Performance is driven by organisational behaviour. For people who are on a team, their achievements, commitment, and motivation shape the foundation of your business, which means that you have to keep the standards high.
So what’s the key performance booster? Money? Friday beers? In reality, you can use any channel to foster positive organisational behavior. The golden rule is to always focus on engagement. According to the Engagement Institute, employees that feel disengaged in a workplace may cost a company anywhere from $450 to $500 billion a year.
Recognition events are the perfect tools for shining a spotlight on employees’ achievements, encouraging individual work, and getting the creative juices flowing.
Why you should run employee recognition programs
In her TED Talk on employee recognition, Claire McCarthy discusses team engagement in the context of the popular square wheels illustration:
Unfortunately, for many organisations, this style of workplace cooperation is a harsh reality. People who are poorly motivated to grow usually just choose to stay in their comfort zone and do whatever feels safe, even if it doesn’t benefit the whole organisation.
Through awards events, you can optimise a huge number of workplace processes by making all the moving parts work well together. A simple example would be launching a creative idea contest: Ask your marketing team members to come up with a product launch idea that can be realised on a specific budget and within a specific timeline. The winner gets the honour of becoming a product owner and actually launching the idea.
Types of employee awards
The results of recognition initiatives largely depend on how you choose the awards as well as how you incorporate these awards into the schedule.
The two major formats are peer-to-peer and top-down recognition. The system of peer-to-peer recognition is based on the analysis of employee performance by other team members. In this category, we can specify the following awards types:
- Bonuses: Small monetary rewards given by one employee to another
- Verbal praise: Helping people understand their value to the organisation through words
- Symbolic gifts: From paper stars to chocolates, there are many options for small mementos people can share in a workplace to recognise each other’s contributions.
Top-down recognition is the mechanism of rewarding individual or group achievement through supervisors. Depending on the occasion and goals, you can choose the following types of top-down awards:
- Annual bonuses: A specific amount of money that is added to an employee’s base pay at the end of the year to reward individual performance and their organisational contribution
- Spot bonuses: Financial rewards given to employees during the year for reaching specific milestones
- Public recognition: Praising individual or team achievement in front of a crowd (employee of the year, years of service awards, etc.)
Creating criteria for employee awards
Rewarding employee achievement is beneficial to the company as well. Not only does it motivate people to move in a specific direction but through awards initiatives, you also build role models that your other employees will follow in future.
To help you set the awards event criteria that complement the mission of your organisation, we’ve developed this simple five-step guide:
- Gather an internal committee that will work on the development of an awards program. Ideally, these should be people who work within the company and understand its values, weaknesses, and goals.
- Conduct a survey to tap into employees’ expectations. How do they want their work to be evaluated? What’s the best award for them? Ask the questions that will help you create a truly inspiring incentive for your staff.
- Align expectations with organisational goals. The wants and needs of your organisation don’t always match. While catering to the objectives of your team, you should also ensure that these objectives resonate with the company’s mission. In the end, employee motivation matters only so long as your organisation functions and grows.
- Apply criteria to employees and teams based on their KPIs and goals.
- Ensure there’s a perfect understanding of awards criteria across all teams. You can create a memo that explains the criteria in detail as a centralised source of information to which employees can refer.
Creative employee awards ideas
We’ve developed three unique employee awards and recognition ideas that you’re welcome to steal or adapt for your business:
Social media shout-outs
Especially if your staff is largely represented by millennials, social media buzz can be the perfect platform for recognising achievements. The inspiring example of a social media rewards program is #CastCompliment by Disney: Using the hashtag and the name of the person, people from all over the world can recognise the work of Disney cast members they meet. The beauty of this initiative is that it’s open to everyone, which takes employee recognition to a global level.
To create an impact through social media, you can either follow Disney’s global approach or use an internal online community where your staff can exchange shout-outs.
Hobby day
Employee recognition isn’t always about bonuses and promotions. Work is an important part of your employees’ daily life, but there are also many other things they love doing. Develop an appreciation event based on hobbies that your team members have. For instance, you can pick five people who demonstrated great commitment in the last month and create a company event catered to their interests. From a kayaking trip to dance master classes, you definitely have a huge list of ideas to work with. The point here is to demonstrate that KPIs are important, but personality always comes first.
Picking your dream prize
The best idea is letting employees choose what they want to receive for the good work they do. To simplify the process, you can partner with popular product or service providers like Amazon, which offers employee recognition gift cards that your award winners can use to choose their perfect reward.
Conclusion
Unique recognition awards ideas for employees help companies keep retention high and increase engagement in the workplace. Whether it’s through a financial bonus or a thank you note, do your best to demonstrate that your employees’ work is highly valued.