In recent years, spot awards or spot recognition has emerged as one of the most effective ways of boosting employee motivation and engagement. Here’s all you need to know about spot awards.
As the name suggests, organizations utilize spot awards to reward and recognize exemplary performance or commendable behavior of employees immediately, as and when it happens.
It is a well-acknowledged fact that rewards and recognition help in enhancing the performance and commitment levels of employees.
In this context, spot awards or on-the-spot recognition has emerged as an extremely powerful tool for reinforcing desirable behaviors and boosting the effectiveness of the workforce.
This is because this method of recognition assures the employees that their supervisors value their efforts and behaviors.
They can receive spot awards almost immediately or as soon as possible after the act of good performance.
This timeliness and specificity of spot awards makes them extremely effective in motivating employees.
Spot awards help employers to express their gratitude towards employees for a job done well and also to set an example for the entire workforce.
To make spot awards more impactful it is important to instantly recognize and appreciate performance/ behaviors that the organization wants to promote.
There should be a strong linkage with the overall business goals of the organization or the kind of culture it wants to create.
The primary objective of Spot Awards is to recognize employee efforts and behaviors on the fly and at the moment.
To get the best results from this method of recognition, organizations can adopt the following best practices:
1. Empower Line Managers
2. Establish Well-defined Criteria
3. Ensure Social Visibility
4. Leverage Digital Recognition Platforms
5. Include Monetary Benefits
Empowering line managers to offer spot recognition is one of the most important factors to make the program successful.
Providing supervisors with digital recognition tools, budgets, and minimal approvals would encourage them to reward and recognize employees as and when they demonstrate good performance or behavior.
This helps in building a strong culture of appreciation at the ground level. When their supervisors recognize them immediately, employees feel truly happy and proud.
It also assures them that they are on the right path in the execution of their business goals.
The organization should establish well-defined criteria for spot recognition, like any other employee recognition policy.
This is essential to create transparency, authenticity, and credibility of the award in the eyes of the employees and make it something that they would aspire for.
To make the policy more effective, each type of spot award should have well-defined criteria.
This would make it easier for line managers to choose the right level of award based on the impact of the performance/ behavior of the employee.
Spot recognition is generally offered at the moment, but to make it more effective it should be announced more publicly within the organization.
Spot award announcements should be shared either on social media or through a digital wall of fame, to create a high level of social visibility.
Using a digital employee rewards and recognition platform to give spot recognition can make it more effective.
A recognition platform helps managers and supervisors to reward and recognize instantly.
It also helps create social visibility by integrating them with other digital platforms in the organization like Slack and Teams or external social media like Facebook and LinkedIn.
Also Read: Manage Spot Awards Using Employee Recognition Software
One of the key success factors of spot rewards is to offer monetary benefits to the recipients.
The organization should tailor the monetary benefits based on the budgets and employee expectations.
Digital recognition platforms can help organizations provide monetary benefits for spot awards in the form of reward points.
These reward points can be accumulated over time by the recipients and then redeemed for e-gift cards of their choice.
Being able to choose their e-gift cards makes the recognition experience more personalized and memorable.
Employees might focus on short-term achievements for receiving spot awards.
These achievements might not be in sync with the longer term business goals
Hence, it is important for organizations to set clear criteria for spot awards, rather than leaving it completely at the discretion of the supervisors.
Other employees might perceive it as favoritism or unfairness on part of the manager or supervisor.
This might dent the credibility of the entire employee recognition program.
Apart from setting clear criteria, organizations might also introduce some sort of moderation by the HR or the management.
If not managed properly, too many spot awards may make employees overdependent on them for doing their work.
Instead of motivating employees to do better, it might create a culture of entitlement.
Defining clear criteria, moderation by the HR or the management and restricting the number of awards could ensure that the awards are given for the right reasons.
In recent times, powered by digital employee recognition programs, spot awards have emerged as one of the most effective tools for boosting employee motivation and engagement.
Lead author: Sagar Chaudhuri, the Co-Founder and CEO of HiFives. He is an HR Tech Evangelist with over 25 years of experience in the corporate world and entrepreneurship. In the past, Sagar has worked with companies such as Genpact, Infosys, and ICICI Bank, in leadership roles. He has an engineering degree from IIT Kharagpur and an MBA from IIM Lucknow. Connect on LinkedIn
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