Have you found that engagement with your Employee Recognition and Reward Programme is low? Take these steps to generate much stronger buy-in.
An Employee Recognition and Rewards Programme is a great way to boost morale and further teamwork and cross-collaboration. The instant sense of reward, building more positive teams and fostering a sense of growth are all fundamental to a fantastic work environment.
However, a common pitfall with Employee Recognition Programmes is a failure to launch. Employers can implement a system, but fail to gain traction at any level of the business. So how can you ensure your next recognition programme gets the traction it needs?
1) Explain the why
Even with positive ideas, employees will only properly engage if they understand why something is happening. Explaining why gives your plans a sense of purpose, and provides employees with a clearer understanding of how it benefits them.
With a deeper understanding of why, your employees may be more likely to engage.
For example - with an Employee Recognition and Rewards Programme, you want to give everyone in the company a say in who gets recognised, shining a light on employees who may have been overlooked. It's impossible for any single manager to understand everything that every member of the business is doing, so employee recognition is a way to reward everyone's hard work.
With a deeper understanding of why, your employees are more likely to engage.
2) Identify your key stakeholders
In most cases, one person will not have the sway to engage everyone in a business with an Employee Recognition and Rewards Programme. Beyond time and resources, it takes building strong relationships and winning over people you may not have worked with before to run a successful recognition programme. That's why identifying and approaching key stakeholders is so important.
Who are your frontline managers and employees that others will listen to? What do they need from an Employee Recognition Programme? Approach these key stakeholders first, and they can become vital individuals for fostering widespread engagement.
3) Build from the needs up
As with most Employee Rewards Programmes, a recognition scheme must address the key needs of your existing employee base. A prominent method of establishing those needs is Power2Motivate's Survey tool, which employers can use to gauge current engagement, where employees feel they should be recognised, and where they feel they currently are or are not.
With this information, you can build a recognition programme around specific types of feedback, or targeting specific levels and teams within the business. It's an excellent way of uncovering both engagement levels and ways to increase them.
4) Provide criteria for recognition
Make an Employee Recognition and Rewards Programme too open-ended, and teams may not know whether behaviours and actions merit submission to the system.
This is not to say that your definitions of recognisable behaviour should be narrow and rigid - however, providing examples of a broad spectrum of appropriate actions can be an excellent prompt for individuals in your business.
Examples could include:
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Working extra hours to complete an important project.
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Going out of their way to help another.
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Exceeding customer or client expectations.
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A strong performance against KPIs, either relative or subjective.
The specific actions your communicate will vary depending on your organisation - but prompt your employees, and they may be more likely to buy in.
Boost engagement with an Employee Recognition and Rewards Programme
Aon Hewitt's 2018 Global Trends in Employee Engagement report shows that once again, recognising and rewarding employees is the single biggest driver of employee engagement. By getting everyone in your organisation involved in your next programme from the ground up, you can build a system that gets widespread buy-in and delivers massive benefits at every level.
To kickstart your next Employee Recognition and Rewards Programme, contact the team at Power2Motivate.