Employee Recognition Policy: Creative Employee Recognition Programs
Creative employee recognition programs begin with determining what activities should be rewarded. The goal for the employee recognition policy should be to reinforce activities that help achieve the overall goals of the company. Goals can include increased sales, but they should also focus on improving customer service and retaining customers, or on process improvement. Doing things more effectively can result in reduced expenses and greater profitability; all of which are important to achieve.
Some of the types of activities that can be rewarded include:
- Longevity - Creating an incentive to reduce turnover can result in a greater return on investment on the time and expense spent training and retaining the best employees.
- Days without sickness - Many companies have adopted use-it-or-lose it programs to save money on unused sick days. This becomes an incentive for employees to take a day off and call in sick. To counter this effect, consider offering an incentive for days without sickness. This will result in greater productivity and lowered absenteeism.
- Exemplary effort - Create a reason to reward the employee who works above and beyond expectations. That will help to encourage that type of activity and behavior in others. All organizations love to have employees who want to work harder.
- Customer service - It's difficult to attract new customers in a down economy, which makes it that much more important to retain existing customers. Offer an incentive to your associates who do a great job turning difficult situations around or helping to retain upset customers. This can happen at any level of the organization and rewarding good customer service can result in many happy customers which is good for the entire organization.
- Sales effort - Most companies will reward their sales associates with commission based upon performance. But, sales can happen at any level of the organization. One option is to create a program that recognizes sales leads or sales efforts throughout the organization. Creative employee recognition programs can have huge payoffs when sales come from unexpected sources.
- Recruiting activities - If you have great employees, they can be an excellent source of potential new hires. Creating a program to reward new hire suggestions can attract new employees that will become terrific contributors to the company.
- Process improvement - Employees who work with a system day in and day out will be an excellent source of ideas to improve the process. By creating an incentive program to reward employee suggestions, this in turn often leads to process improvements resulting in greater efficiency and ongoing savings.
- Mentoring - Instead of having associates not share information, create a program that rewards mentorship. This has the double effect of helping new hires get trained more effectively and also recognizes the senior employees for their knowledge and skills.
Recognition and reward programs are a great way to have employees step up to the plate and help the company achieve its goals more efficiently. Having an employee recognition policy that has multiple rewards for employees encourages the types of behaviors that are associated with a great place to work.
We would love to know what other types of creative employee recognition programs you have been involved with, and what has worked within your company.
