5 Simple Ways to Make Employee Recognition More Meaningful

Employee recognition is all about helping employees see and appreciate the value, meaning, and purpose of the contributions they make, and to know that their colleagues see and appreciate it too. However, according to a Gallup survey, only 26% of employees feel that they receive similar levels of recognition as their peers.

Failure to recognize your employees appropriately can have a host of negative consequences for your business. In fact, lack of recognition in the workplace is a critical reason employees leave their jobs.

So how do you ensure that employees feel valued and appreciated for their contributions and efforts at work? Read on to uncover five simple ways to make employee recognition more meaningful with BambooHR.

What Is Employee Recognition?

Employee recognition refers to the process of rewarding employees for excellent performance or exemplary behavior in the workplace. Employee recognition isn’t a new idea, but as a practice, it’s experiencing a renaissance worldwide.

Until recently, most employee recognition programs focused primarily on tenure. Many programs still do. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with recognizing someone for the years of service they’ve contributed to your organization, it’s worth stepping back and considering the fundamental intent behind employee recognition.

Employee recognition is all about recognizing and acknowledging your staff for their hard work. There are various types of employee recognition strategies and creative employee recognition ideas to help you celebrate success, from verbal praise to bonuses and public shout-outs.

Importance of Employee Recognition

Ultimately, the purpose of employee recognition is to help employees feel valued and motivate them to keep producing great work.

Employee recognition also plays a key role in strengthening workplace culture and employee loyalty. But it isn’t just about ticking off a box. It’s also about how well you do it. According to Gallup, employees who receive high-quality recognition at work are 65% less likely to look for another role compared with those who receive lower-quality praise.

Benefits of Employee Recognition

Employee recognition can have multiple benefits for your organization. For example, recognizing employee contributions can help:

• Boost employee motivation. When employees feel recognized at work, they’re more likely to take pride in their work and feel motivated to go above and beyond.
• Boost employee morale. Recognizing employees for their hard work can help to boost morale and keep them feeling happy at work.
• Enhance retention. Employees who feel valued at work are less likely to look for new opportunities elsewhere.
• Improve employee productivity. Recognizing hard-working employees for their talent and efforts can help them feel more engaged and productive at work.
• Foster a positive work culture. Creating a workplace culture centered around recognition helps to foster a positive work environment.

How to Make Employee Recognition More Meaningful

Looking to improve your workplace culture with meaningful recognition? Here are 5 simple tips to make employee recognition more meaningful:

1. Inclusivity: Involve the Whole Organization

Implementing a formal employee recognition program is a crucial element of fostering a greater culture of recognition. To build that kind of culture in earnest, you need participation from all levels of the organization.

Senior leaders are your organization’s culture leaders, and for better or worse, they’re driving the culture conversation at work. So if team leads are encouraging participation in employee recognition programs, but mid and senior leaders are notably absent, thye’re sending the message that employee recognition isn’t actually important at the highest levels of your organization.

The same goes for a program that senior leadership promotes, but line managers, team leads, and individual contributors snub. That paints a picture of an out-of-touch leadership team.

As well as recognition from direct supervisors and senior leadership, peer-to-peer recognition is also important. It’s not enough for managers and leaders to appreciate employees. For a culture of recognition to thrive, they need to appreciate each other, too.

2. Rewards: Give Meaningful Employee Recognition

Recognition is key to employee engagement. Rewards can help make that recognition more impactful.

If you’re worried about that driving up costs, don’t. It turns out the rewards don’t have to be large to be effective—in fact, it’s often best if rewards aren’t large enough to significantly raise the stakes or alter the compensation landscape on your team. The best rewards find a balance between “large enough to be meaningful” and “small enough to be plentiful.”

If the stakes are too high, recognition can become a competition. While some good-spirited competition can be fun and motivating, competing for a large prize can shift the focus away from the work. That focal shift is why winner-takes-all frameworks don’t often inspire teams as intended.

When implementing or updating an employee recognition system, consider the positive impact rewards have on participation and find the balance between meaningful and plentiful. This balance can look different from company to company, so it’s best to consider rewards that fit your team and organizational culture, rather than attempting to apply a one-size-fits-all dollar amount.

3. Timeliness and Frequency: Make Employee Recognition a Habit

The more time that passes between an employee’s contribution and the recognition they receive for it, the less potential that recognition has for positive impact. In order for it to be most effective and meaningful, recognition should be given in the moment, or as close to the moment as possible.

Have you ever put a great deal of work into something—really gave it your all—and received little or no recognition for it? That feeling you’re remembering is why timeliness is so crucial to recognition, and why an Employee of the Year scheme may reward but will never truly inspire greatness.

The absence of recognition in the interim doesn’t just weaken the effect of recognition given later; it can have a strong and lasting negative impact. Each day, week, or month that goes by without that contribution being recognized isn’t just a missed opportunity to inspire similar contributions. It’s also a day, week, or month that employee lives with the sense that their work isn’t valued.

That kind of experience can leave employees feeling unseen and underappreciated, which is a great reason for them not to put forth a big effort in the future. It’s also a pretty understandable reason to start looking for a new place to work.

If you see someone put forth a significant effort or make a meaningful contribution, don’t wait until the next employee review or employee appreciation day to recognize it. Don’t worry if they’re not your direct report, or if their name sits above yours in the

organizational chart. Even if you’re not in a leadership position, your praise can have a meaningful impact on your colleagues’ experience at work.

4. Specificity: Give Recognition That Matters

Giving someone a pat on the back and telling them they’ve done a good job is better than nothing, but it won’t help them understand which of their contributions have the greatest impact on the organization, or why those contributions are important.

For example: Erica discovers a bug on her company’s app, and immediately implements a fix. Rather than “good job,” Erica’s team lead, Fatima, tells her, “Nice work on the bug fix, Erica. Your dedication to quality is really admirable. Thousands of people depend on our product, and they’re able to because of the effort you’re investing here.”

Specificity helps to zero in on exactly what made a contribution valuable, and it’s a great reference point for future contributions. Specificity also helps employees recognize their talents and skills, and promotes accountability.

5. Visibility: Set the Right Example

Visibility amplifies the impact of praise and recognition, and not just for the receiver.
Many employees spend a great deal of time pondering what success looks like in their organization. They want to make valuable contributions, but sometimes it’s not clear what those contributions look like.

When employee recognition is visible, it’s no longer a mystery which initiatives and contributions are appreciated most. As employees see someone being recognized for a contribution, they gain a salient example of the types of contributions their peers and colleagues truly value. The more frequently and visibly contributions are recognized, the clearer and more detailed a picture of organizational values everyone gains.

Keeping recognition front-of-mind on your team also helps boost participation and engagement. The more people see recognition out in the open, the more it cements the idea that your organization values employee contributions, and that recognizing great work is a normal part of daily activities.

There are many ways to make employee recognition more visible, from posting it across company-wide communications to featuring it on a big screen. However you choose to boost its visibility, remember that recognition’s influence doesn’t have to end with the giver and the recipient. It can positively impact the entire team.

Reward and Recognize Employees the Right Way

Fostering a recognition-centered workplace culture is as impactful as it is rewarding. Make sure your approach to rewards and recognition is meaningful by ensuring it’s inclusive, rewarding, timely, specific, and visible. Get rewards and recognition right with BambooHR.