Confessions of a Compulsive Organizer

Tips For Creating A Successful Employee Award Program

by Ricardo Hart

As a business owner, you need to understand the importance of recognizing top-performing employees. Recognizing achievements and proper performance helps to foster a strong sense of employee morale and encourages ambition amongst your staff. The best way to ensure this type of situation is to offer an employee award program for certain performance goals. Here are a few tips to help you implement an award program that will keep your staff striving to be at their best.

Make Achievements Relevant

In order for your staff to strive for achievements of any kind, you need to clearly articulate what those expectations, goals and achievement tiers actually are. If employees understand exactly what type of accomplishments are recognized and how those accomplishments are relevant to the big picture, they are more likely to strive for them.

By explaining how those accomplishments are relevant to the business operation and what purpose they serve for attaining operational goals for the company, you provide employees with an understanding of why you're rewarding these things. When they understand not only how but why, they are more likely to work toward those accomplishments.

Recognize Achievements in a Timely Fashion

As is the case in most any positive reinforcement process, one of the best things you can do to ensure that your employees connect the reward directly with the achievement is to recognize those accomplishments right away. Even if you don't issue the reward right away, taking the time to recognize the achievement, praise the employee and acknowledge that it is award-worthy will help to make the direct connection.

Make The Reward Matter

If you want your employees to have a reason to strive for these accomplishments, you need to make the reward matter to them. Consider what your employees perceive as valuable, and plan your reward structure accordingly. In many cases, business owners and managers default to cash-based awards, and while most employees will appreciate a small monetary award or raise, it doesn't offer something truly tangible to show the achievement.

Instead of, or in addition to, the financial incentive, consider investing in custom award trophies for each employee's accomplishment. This provides them with something they can place on a shelf or on display to show that they attained that goal or achieved that level of recognition. For more information, contact a company like Abilene Awards & Logos.

No matter what type of award system you choose to put in place, the goal is to make it worthwhile for your employees to participate. With the tips presented here, you'll be able to offer your employees a program that is easy to understand and relevant to them, which encourages participation.

Share