How to make your employee recognition program a success

The same way that company culture is a journey and not a destination, employee recognition programs evolve with the personalities and ups and downs of your organisation. To give you a realistic picture of the work associated with building a lively and thriving recognition program, we dug into our most engaged customers to see how they do it.

East Coast Kerbing

A construction business with employees in the office and on construction sites, HR Manager Sam Smart loves using polls to “give the power of recognition to the employees”. Each week they set up a poll that can apply to both office employees and on-site employees, “Polls aren't specifically about performance when it comes to laying kerbs, they could be teamwork, communication, or attention to detail”.

Read more: The East Coast Kerbing case study

Hey You

Hosting a collection of recognition, and coming back to it every now and then to remind yourself and your team of how much has actually happened is a great way to keep the ball rolling. Jennie Rogerson from Hey You says it’s important that “It’s not just recognition in a team meeting that is then lost, it’s something they can look back on the previous winners and see exactly what’s being recognised.”

One way to do this is to include recognitions from the past week or month into your company newsletter, or save a section of your team meetings for reading recognitions out and acknowledging both the sender and the recipient.

Clinic to Cloud

An office based technology business, COO Patryk Kania believes the transparency of peer-to-peer recognition is what fuels employees wanting to be involved. “It’'s not the C-suite deciding who gets what, it's the company deciding. It works quite well, people are engaged,” so make sure your employee recognition program has a variety of ways to send and receive recognition, including manager-to-employee and peer-to-peer.

Read more: The Clinic to Cloud case study

Calanna Whole Health Pharmacy

Group Team Leader Kelly Williams says holding managers accountable for leading by example and sending recognition has helped their uptake. At the start of each week managers review employee performance and recognise high performance. As they’re a retail business, they focus on things like loyalty sign ups as well as teamwork and customer service. They also share positive customer feedback with employees through Recognition.

Read more: The Calanna Whole Health Pharmacy case study

Delta Laboratories

Commercial Manager Jacqueline Leach makes use of rewards to reinforce stellar recognitions. The business is split between a lab environment and a warehouse environment, and Jacqueline acknowledges that when the push for recognition from leaders goes down, so does the amount of peer-to-peer recognitions, so it’s important to keep it constant and top of mind. Adding rewards to recognitions is one way they keep that engagement up, and also ensuring everyone has a chance to be recognised for the contributions and performance with poll themes such as “quiet achiever”.

Read more: The Delta Laboratories case study

Real Therapy Solutions

CEO Amanda Wood says her team consists of a variety of ages, genders, and interests and so takes the time to ensure recognitions and rewards and personalised. “Perkbox has definitely helped us build our company culture. It's a great opportunity for people to recognise each other, for us to recognise them, and to feel like they get a bit more when they work here.”

Read more: The Real Therapy Solutions case study

The takeaway

All of our most successful customers understand that a recognition program is something they have to constantly promote, and approach from both the top-down (leading by example) and bottom-up (encouraging peer-to-peer).

Finding ways to re-visit older recognitions makes the positive effect of both sending and receiving recognition last longer, so round-up style communications are a great idea. 

Finally, personalising your message, reward, and poll themes to your employees as individuals and as a business!