The season is upon us for giving thanks and recognizing another year of exceptional work with your employees. While I believe we should show gratitude, thanks and recognize our talent each and every day, this time of year often welcomes extra gratitude from people.
That being said, when you’re recognizing your employees and workforce for their exceptional work, it’s important to remember to focus on personalized recognition for it to be effective. Remember, what motivates people is what motivates people and when it comes to recognition there shouldn’t be a one size fits all solution.
Why You Should Personalize Your Employee Recognition
With a personalized recognition program and strategy, you are more likely to get a return on your investment and those participating in the program will more likely be motivated by the inventive. Many organizations providing recognition programs to their employees aren’t getting a return on their investment, because they lack personalization and choice.
If you want to acknowledge your employees’ uniqueness, it’s important to get to know them personally, and get to know what motivates and drives them. Find out how to they like to be recognized, whether it be monetarily, verbally, from their peers, privately, publicly, etc.
Providing the same recognition and rewards for everyone guarantees your program will be ineffective and disappointing. Read more about why a Personalization Strategy is important for your organization.
Why You Should Recognizing Your Talent
Most people must go to work to earn a paycheck. But gone are the days where people stay in a job just to make a living. Our culture has shifted and people want to be motivated, engaged and inspired by what they do. They figure, they’ve got to work anyways, so why not be great rather than ordinary.
When you provide your employees with personalized recognition and rewards for their exceptional performance achievements, you:
- reinforce positive behavior,
- set expectations for them and their colleagues,
- increase their energy and engagement,
- and motivate them to continuously achieve great things in their work.
Read more about why Employee Recognition is the #1 Driver of Employee Engagement.
What Do Personalized Recognition and Rewards Look Like?
As I mentioned above, you want to get to know your people personally, and find out how they like to be recognized and rewarded. Some employees might be shy and prefer private personal acknowledgement from their direct supervisors, whereas others might enjoy being recognized in front of their peers at a weekly meeting. Some employees might really like to be acknowledged with financial compensation such as a bonus, or total recognition points, while others might prefer more vacation time, flexible work hours or something similar.
A total recognition solution is a great way to implement a formal recognition program into your organization to help continue to drive employee engagement with recognition. A good recognition solution should include many ways to personally recognize your talent including the forms mentioned above.
And remember, every employee is different when it comes to rewards — some may want to use their recognition points to redeem for smaller items right away, while others will save for big-ticket items. By providing your workforce with virtually unlimited reward options with a Total Recognition solution, your talent can redeem for what they want, when they want. For example, Global Engagement Solutions employee recognition programs feature an extensive award collection, monetary and non-monetary awards, peer to peer recognition, and an always changing and evolving catalog of reward options such as music downloads, restaurant, retail and movie gift cards, home and lifestyle products travel, vacation and event options.
To find out more about starting a total recognition program in your organization for 2018 get in touch with me at [email protected] or view my calendar here to book a 15 minute discovery call.