1. Spot awards are immediate recognition for exemplary performance.
2. These awards can be given for exceptional customer service, successful project completion, or Innovation.
3. They become a highly effective way to boost employee motivation and engagement.
4. Best practices for implementing spot awards include establishing clear criteria, ensuring social visibility, using digital platforms, and including monetary benefits.
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 or spot recognition to reward and recognize exemplary performance or commendable behavior of employees immediately, as and when it happens.
Spot awards are a great way to recognize employees’ immediate contributions and successes.
Here are the top 20 achievements that could merit a spot award:
Going above and beyond to satisfy or retain a customer.
Completing a project, especially under tight deadlines or challenging conditions.
Identifying and implementing a significant cost-saving initiative.
Developing a new or improved process, product, or idea can benefit the organization.
Leading a team to achieve or exceed their goals.
Effectively managing a critical issue or emergency.
Making significant improvements in a product or service quality.
Exceeding sales targets or securing a key client contract.
Providing exceptional guidance and support to colleagues.
Enhancing workplace safety through proactive measures.
Playing a vital role in a team project or collaborative effort.
Gaining new certifications or skills that benefit the team or organization.
Receiving outstanding feedback or accolades from external clients.
Positively impacting colleagues, evidenced by internal feedback.
Enhancing operational processes to improve efficiency.
Contributing significantly to promoting diversity and inclusion within the workplace.
Leading or contributing to environmental sustainability projects.
Representing the organization in community or charity events.
Troubleshooting or solving an unexpected problem or challenge creatively and effectively.
Utilizing data uniquely and effectively to make or influence critical decisions.
It is well-acknowledged that rewards and recognition help enhance employees’ performance and commitment levels.
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 recognition method 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 express gratitude to employees for a job well done and 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 solid link to the organization’s overall business goals or the culture it wants to create.
A large global manufacturing company with nearly 15,000 employees across a dozen countries utilizes the HiFives platform to power its global workforce’s spot award and other rewards and recognition programs.
Eligible managers and supervisors (based on their pay grades) can nominate employees for spot awards for their achievements through the platform. If another manager nominates an employee, the nomination request needs to be approved by the employee’s direct reporting manager.
The spot award is released immediately if the reporting manager nominates one of their direct reports. Otherwise, the system releases the award after approval.
The spot award is communicated instantly via email and copied to the nominator, direct reporting manager, and the HR business partner. The employees also receive a personalized e-certificate and reward points for the spot awards.
Employees can redeem their reward points for e-gift cards of their choice. They can select from a catalog of hundreds of brands.
The system publishes these notifications on a social wall, where their coworkers can congratulate the award winners by liking and commenting on their posts.
The platform is usable through desktop and mobile devices, enabling managers to nominate their team members anytime, anywhere.
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 critical factors in making 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.
It helps in building a strong culture of appreciation at the ground level. When supervisors recognize them immediately, employees feel truly happy and proud.
It also assures them they are on the right path in executing their business goals.
Like any other employee recognition policy, the organization should establish well-defined criteria for spot recognition.
It is essential to create transparency, authenticity, and credibility of the award in the eyes of the employees and make it something they aspire to.
To make the policy more effective, each type of spot award should have well-defined criteria.
It would make it easier for line managers to choose the right level of award based on the impact of the employee’s performance/behavior.
Organizations can offer spot recognition to employees anytime, but to be more effective, it should be announced 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 with other digital platforms, such as Slack and Teams, or external social media, like Facebook and LinkedIn.
Also Read: Manage Spot Awards Using Employee Recognition Software
One of the critical success factors of spot rewards is to offer monetary benefits to the recipients.
The organization should tailor the monetary benefits based on budget and employee expectations.
Digital recognition platforms can help organizations provide monetary benefits for spot awards in the form of reward points.
The recipients can accumulate reward points over time and then redeem them 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, organizations should set clear criteria for spot awards rather than leave it entirely at the supervisors’ discretion.
Other employees might perceive it as favoritism or unfairness on part of the manager or supervisor.
It might dent the credibility of the entire employee recognition program.
Apart from setting clear criteria, organizations might also introduce some 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.
Organizations can ensure the awards are given for the right reasons by defining clear criteria, allowing HR or management to moderate the nominations, and restricting the number of awards.
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 corporate and entrepreneurship experience. In the past, Sagar has worked in leadership roles with companies such as Genpact, Infosys, and ICICI Bank. He has an engineering degree from IIT Kharagpur and an MBA from IIM Lucknow. Connect on LinkedIn
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