A well-tailored employee recognition framework is a lot like an online video of a baby – or cat – doing a surprisingly coordinated dance or something. Or a slice of particularly well-made Peppermint Crisp tart – there are so many things right with it that you cannot help but smile.
You see, a best-in-class, tailor-made recognition programme not only aligns people with strategy but allows you to achieve your goals while engaging and motivating employees, and it makes the recognition of high performance effortless.
Sound good? It gets better.
According to a talent management and rewards study by multinational risk management, insurance brokerage and advisory company, Willis Towers Watson, organisations with reward and talent management programmes that support their business goals are more than twice as likely to be high-performing companies (28% versus 12%).
What we know about employee recognition
Recognition has been shown to affect key business drivers like profitability, productivity, customer satisfaction. It also happens to be a basic human need. As such, recognition is a vital leadership practice that should be incorporated into the daily activities of leaders – in any organisation worth its salt. Leaders need to know the best way to gain employee cooperation and how to direct their performance toward achieving the goals and objectives of the organisation. Recognition is a key component of this exchange relationship.
By working within a tried and tested employee recognition framework, management can:
- Align their people and build a strategically focused, high-performance organisation
- Define goals, set targets, and engage interest throughout their enterprise, from grassroots level up
- Build the competencies required for success
- Clearly define goals and drive internal operational momentum by means of targeted communication
- Exploit the benefits of a wide range of reward solutions that have been tailored for maximum motivational appeal
In short, recognition is an act of appreciation or acknowledgement of actions, efforts, behaviour or performance that support the organisation’s goals and values. It can be expressed in many ways – emotional, intangible, symbolic or tangible – and it can be applied to people, their work, their level of dedication or the direct business results achieved.
READ MORE: Employee recognition will transform your company culture. Here’s how
Key objectives and outcomes of employee recognition programmes
- According to the Society of HR Management, 79% of employees leave as a result of lack of recognition.
- According to Gallup, businesses with high levels of engagement enjoy up to 22% increased productivity and a 27% increase in profits.
- Employees that make direct connections between their work and their company’s mission perform best when they feel that the opportunity exists for them to do what they do best on a daily basis.
- Recognition makes it clear that their opinions count and when they can sense fellow workers’ commitment to quality, they are motivated even further.
- An increase in performance is directly associated with improved revenue, profit, customer retention, quality, productivity, and safety.
In order to establish recognition as a leadership ‘best practice’ and to create a motivating environment where people can perform at their best, leaders have to be able to:
- Define recognition and key associated concepts
- Identify their own leadership strengths and areas to improve
- Identify and understand the requirements of recognition
- Apply the requirements of recognition in real-life situations
The requirements of effective recognition
In order to be effective, recognition has to be part of a broader process of affective leadership, which hinges on the ability to:
- Be self-aware. Leaders need to identify their own motivational levels and current strengths, and determine if their organisational values are in alignment with their own personal values.
- Be other-aware. Upper management needs to acknowledge and understand differences and diversity of others and how the personalisation of recognition can contribute to boosted motivation.
- Align hearts and minds. In order to align an organisation, goals and standards of practice need to be clearly linked to organisational values and objectives.
- Be on the lookout. A firm focus should be placed in identifying emerging positive and negative behaviours in the workplace and finding ways to encourage or discourage them.
- Give praise effectively. Effective praise differs from one situation to the next, and is based on action, effect, and the link to organisational values or goals. In order to work, it has to be timely, specific, sincere, prepared and frequent.
- Celebrate successes. Opportunities for celebration should be identified continuously and capitalised on accordingly.
- Address obstacles and issues of fairness. Obstacles to recognition should be identified and, when it comes to matters of reward, fairness should be front-and-centre at all times.
- Be open to new ways of doing things. Strategies should be formulated to ensure that the business continues to practice recognition in new, fresh, and relevant ways and is open to new ways of doing things.
Continuously reassess, maintain, and/ or realign recognition practices. Devise strategies to ensure that continuous assessments are done and that recognition becomes part of your daily leadership practice.
Alignment is inherent in a well-placed employee, but there are ways to nurture it to bring it to full bloom. A lot of HR tech used today is still rooted in the needs of a prior generation. Driving powerful alignment between your employees and your company goals calls for tech that engages the future workforce by providing frequent feedback and recognition – a solution that aligns seamlessly with existing HR processes to facilitate a happy, healthy, future-proof workplace.
The bountiXP employee engagement platform has been developed to combine recognition, rewards, social communication, learning and feedback into a single, personalised user experience, so that you can build a better workplace.