Employee Rewards, Recognition, Engagement
Organizations need to clearly understand the importance of employee recognition for their business success. They need to develop effective programs that are aligned with their business objectives and the needs of their workforce.
Organizations need to invest time and effort to come up with innovative names for employee recognition programs as one of the first steps towards developing an effective employee recognition program. A unique, innovative, and relevant program name is likely to generate more interest and engagement in the program from the employees.
In 2020, the winner of the Best Employee Recognition Program Award by HiFives was Prodapt Solutions (www.prodapt.com), a multi-national telecom/ DSP software company. Prodapt runs a global employee rewards and recognition program for over 2,300 of its employees across 13 countries in 5 continents.
Hence it is our recommendation that awards especially those in the category of spot awards should be given based on the immediate achievements and not the past track record of the employees. Awards should be treated as awards – it absolutely okay to reward underperformers for their achievements if they meet the criteria!
Whether the winner takes all phenomenon is fair or not is the question to be asked. It seems only logical that the highest performing employees would end up getting the maximum recognition and rewards. The caveat to this is that it might demotivate other employees who are possibly average performers or borderline cases.
Organizations that have a deep understanding of how employee recognition impacts business can develop relevant programs that are aligned to their business objectives, organizational culture and workforce profile and get the desired results.
Traditionally, regarded as a ‘no-brainer’ form of reward, cash rewards are falling out of favor of employees, reducing their impact on employee motivation. It is time for organizations to move away from the tradition of cash rewards and consider adopting more diverse forms of non-monetary rewards that are likely to be more effective in driving employee motivation.
These creative and impactful ideas for startups to recognize their employees should help them energize and drive them to even higher levels of performance despite the challenging, unstructured and often chaotic work environments.
Organizations can need to take implement these measures to make employees feel valued and build a highly engaged, self-motivated, and completely dedicated workforce that can drive business growth and profitability.
Organizations faced with the dilemma of whether to reward employee performance or behaviour need to take a more balanced approach of rewarding the contributions of the employees towards achieving business goals as well as towards creating a more positive work environment.