Effective Employee Recognition

The best employee recognition programs

Effective recognition and reward programs celebrate the behaviours that exemplify the values that make your business unique and successful.

RedBalloon for Business recommends employee-led recognition programs that make it easy for people to recognise each other spontaneously, anywhere, any time.

Saying thank you, is easy and free, and instantly boosts morale. When it’s done frequently, and from a mix of both leaders and peers, it keeps people engaged and provides continuous feedback and reinforces the progress people have made.

Recognising values lived

If you haven’t got company values, or you’re finding they aren’t resonating with your people, now’s the time to (re)visit this topic.

Your company’s core values are your guiding principles; they are what help people determine what’s right and wrong. With them, your people will know if they’re on the right path and fulfilling their goals.

But, it’s important to help people define what these values look like in action, and to build a recognition program based on specific behaviours and not just assumptions.

For example, the value “leadership” could manifest itself in different ways. Some might think that means leading a successful project. Others might think it means taking a risk and trying a new approach to solving a recurring problem.

Other people might think it means not being afraid to say “yes” to new things. It could be all or none of the above – the important thing is to understand what each of your values means for your people.

Recognise accomplishments as they happen

The key to designing an effective recognition program is to recognise and reward success in ways that reinforce the values and “ways of doing things” that make your company thrive.

TIP: You don’t need lots of different ways to recognise people. 2 or 3 recognition types are enough to begin with and, as your program matures and you see the need, you can introduce other recognition types and rewards that go with them.

For example, a tech company created a tiered recognition program that recognised and rewarded their development team based on the quality and cleanliness of their code. Both team leads and peers could recognise each other, so they got regular feedback and small, spontaneous rewards throughout the year.

The result? Junior developers worked harder to write code with less errors, and the speed by which the development team pushed code to production increased. On the other hand, had they only recognised or rewarded the speed that code was written, quantity may have increased but quality would have suffered.

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To find out more about how the RedBalloon for Business team can help you reward and recognise your people, contact us today.