Importance Of Employee Recognition And How You Can Show Appreciation

Employee recognition is defined as being an official acknowledgment of an individual’s or team’s performance towards accomplishing a business’s goals. In order for your company to maintain a good pool of excellent workers, you need to understand the importance of employee recognition.

In fact, experts estimate that it costs a company more money to replace an effective worker than it is to get a new one. As such, if you want to ensure that your employee retention rate remains high, you need to acknowledge and reward employees that surpass the expectations of your company. Here are some of the benefits of acknowledging those who go above and beyond as well as some ideas on how you can reward them. And best of all, recognition programs are tax deductible.

Here are some easily deployable yet effective employee recognition systems that you can deploy to reward your employees.

1) Crystal Rewards

One of the most beautiful rewards that anyone can receive is crystal awards. This basically operates like a trophy, but they’re significantly more professional, rewarding, and visually appealing. Crystal awards are generally a bit more expensive than a fake trophy or certificate, so these will be highly desirable in your employee’s mind. This is due to the fact that people value items based on their monetary value. It will be something that they will value and show to their friends who in turn could one day become a potential client and or employee.

2) Establish a Point System

One of the simplest and easily deployable programs you can integrate to reward your employees is to establish a points rewards program. Software such as Bonusly was specifically designed to provide bonuses to employees who have accumulated a certain amount of points based on their work performance. However, the system can be set up to offer prizes, gadgets and gift cards as well.

3) Birthday Celebrations

You don’t always have to reward top-performing employees alone. In some instances, you can design a program that recognizes them just because. In fact, only acknowledging top-performing workers can lead to internal conflicts amongst workers who barely make the cut. By introducing a general rewards program in addition to a performance-based reward program, it can prove to be especially useful when it comes to recognizing everyone, such as to allow employees to take the day off or get additional pay for working on their birthday for example.

4) General Recognition

As mentioned before, when you deploy a recognition system, not only do you want to acknowledge the top performers, you want to acknowledge all your employees if possible. By doing this it will help to foster emotional commitment, as well as healthy, non-aggressive competition. By bringing in some treats such as coffee during the winter months, or chilled drinks during the hot summer months, it can help to make all your employees feel appreciated.

1) Send A Powerful Message To All Employees That Hard Work Is Recognized

Recognizing your employees can help to strengthen your work relationship with them. By recognizing one employee’s excellent work ethic, it can send a powerful message to other employees that their hard work will be acknowledged and rewarded as well.

2) Emotionally Committed

Any single individual will tell you that when they have an emotional commitment to something, they will work harder towards that commitment than they would if their emotions weren’t tied to what they’re doing. Having an emotional commitment to something can lead to better performance and a higher level of productivity. By recognizing your employee, they will eventually become emotionally committed to your business. This in itself will lead to a pool of employees who are more engaged with the work that they are given, which in turn will lead to better customer service.

3) Attract More Candidates

By establishing an employee recognition system, it can help to increase your chances of getting competent candidates as opposed to offering a position with no recognition system. This is due to the fact that competent employees who have an invaluable amount of experience and work ethic tend to be more picky about the employers that they choose to work with.
In most cases, they will consider the perks a company offers more so than the amount of money that they offer because they can find similar rates everywhere. What they won’t find everywhere, however, is an effective and rewarding employee recognition system. So having one can help you stand out more as an employer to potential candidates who are on the hunt for a new job.

4) Build a Reputation

Once your employees finish their shift, they will at some point be asked about their work situation, especially by people looking to either work for or conduct business with your company. Whatever emotion they decide to show these two kinds of people will reflect on said individual’s perspective of your company. Simply said, do you want potential candidates/customers to view your business as a heartless sweatshop? Or, a successful company that cares and values their employees and any potential client that walks in?