1. Aligning employee recognition with core values helps communicate and reinforce the organization’s expectations and desired behaviors, fostering a positive work culture.
2. Employee recognition clarifies core values by highlighting and rewarding behaviors embodying them, making it easier for employees to understand and emulate them.
3. It helps drive individual performance by providing personalized acknowledgment and motivating employees to align their actions with the organization’s core values.
4. Integrating core values with recognition programs ensures employees understand their importance, promoting commitment, integrity, and efficiency in achieving organizational goals.
Corporate values are crucial in fostering a positive work culture and ensuring long-term organizational success. One effective way to achieve this is to align the employee recognition system with the organization’s core values. Combining these two elements can prove highly beneficial for the organization.
An organization’s core values are the guiding principles for attaining its mission and vision.
Hence, they help employees navigate their work environment and achieve their goals. It is essentially the means to an end.
Core values help in setting the standards about various aspects of an organization including its brand, the type of talent it intends to attract and the rules of employee engagement in the workplace.
For most employees, corporate values also serve as a reference for behaviors that help ensure their professional success.
It is precisely why organizations need to define and articulate them clearly.
Lack of awareness of corporate values, improper understanding, or miscommunication can lead to workplace dysfunction.
Hence, without a proper definition of core values, it might be difficult to set boundaries for acceptable behaviors.
It is difficult for employees to avoid acting in ways that may harm the organization.
Also, employees find it challenging to find meaning in their jobs, affecting their satisfaction, engagement, and happiness.
Disambiguated core values often leave employees feeling disappointed and demotivated, significantly reducing productivity and efficiency.
Corporate values can help orient the employees towards the mission and vision of the organization and help them understand the best ways to fulfill the same.
Organizations need to realize that their employee recognition practices go a long way toward communicating and reinforcing their core values to their workforce.
Hence, they should take steps to integrate their core values with their employee reward and recognition systems.
Here are a few ways in which the recognition program can help in driving corporate values:
1. Sends out a Clear Message about Expected Behaviors
2. Creates a Clear Definition of Core Values
3. Helps Drive Individual Performance
Recognition sends a clear message to the employees about what behavior the organization expects of them.
When employees receive appreciation for their accomplishments, their co-workers get to understand which values that are noteworthy and preferred by the organization.
It motivates them to imbibe these values and align their actions and behaviors with them.
Employee recognition can effectively define an organization’s core values for employees.
Hence, employees can see the qualities and behaviors that align with the core values.
Hence, employees tend to repeat and emulate these values as the organization appreciates and recognizes them for demonstrating them.
So it makes HR and leadership’s work of communicating corporate values to employees much more straightforward.
Also, employee recognition provides personalized acknowledgment to recipients.
At the same time, it helps them to understand how the core values are integral to their roles and responsibilities.
Hence, it motivates them to perform their roles with more significant commitment, integrity, and efficiency.
It helps drive individual performance while generating greater awareness of corporate values.
Even though the concepts of corporate values and employee recognition have co-existed for a long time, it is only recently that organizations have realized their strong linkage. Hence, organizations need to redefine their employee recognition strategies to include their core values to derive maximum benefits.
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 held leadership roles at 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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