3 Reasons Your Employee Recognition & Awards Program Doesn’t Work

“Cool story bro. I could have made you a real desk. Do you even bank?”

I worked my tail off for five years at this particular corporation doing all kinds of last minute work, over the clock work and super critical work that would either make or break an entire program for multi-million dollar contracts.

Do you know what I got as my employee recognition and rewards for that effort? A $35 plastic desk for my kids. Granted, I picked the prize, but the fact that that was the best thing available to me for my choices is pretty sad, and it really put all of my accomplishments into light as far as the company’s value in my efforts were concerned.

But I want to change that for you. I want to help you help your company’s employee recognition and reward program to be aligned with the internal motivators of your employees and the company goals. It’s doable and here are three ways to help in the process:

1) Allow Them To Choose

Survey your employees. Survey each and every person and figure out what motivates them best and how they would like to be rewarded. A perfect time to do this is during the annual review or the interim performance appraisal meetings. Take a quick survey of the top three things that make them feel best and help them realize that they’re recognized and appreciated for their work.

Keep that in their records and every time you give out a reward after that you’ll have the secret to what does it for them.

2) Let Them Keep Track

Putting this in the permanent records or their performance appraisal records is great. If this isn’t available for them to check at any given time, it might not be as useful.

Make this information available either on an internal website or in some type of easily check-able electronic database (like Microsoft SharePoint or other alternatives) so they’ll know what they’ve told you and maybe how far along they are in the process, if you have a points accrual system.

It’s good to know where you stand and how much farther you have to go to the next level of rewards.

3) Keep Everyone Informed

“Oh I know! The donuts this morning were to DIE for!”

You also might consider sharing everyone’s motivational and recognition preferences. Obviously, you don’t want to get too detailed and share anything personal, but having this information available in a sanitized form for the rest of the company to look at can really help other people get ideas on what to do to make their coworkers feel appreciated.

A lot of times people won’t do anything just because they don’t know what will work best for other people. Fear of the unknown can be a big paralyzing factor.

Reward Like You Mean It

If you want your employees recognition and rewards program to succeed, you need to allow your employees to choose what works for them. Allow them to keep track of their progress and consider keeping everyone informed of the preferences that have been made. When you do these things you’ll be able to boost your company’s success and output to the next level.

If you’re looking for ideas to get your team to work better together today, get your team together and use the Bird personality test as a team exercise, and you’ll realize results that are amazing and you’ll do that quickly.