Rethinking Employee Rewards And Recognition

Who doesn’t love a pat on their back from their manager? Recognition is one of the very basic things that every employee craves.

Employees spend most of their days’ time at work and thanks to technology, they even work from home after hours if needed. While employees put in so much effort, it is only fair to recognize their work and reward them for it.

Though managers want to recognize the efforts of their employees, sometimes they just don’t do it because they don’t understand how to do it. Most organizations reward their employees with a bonus in their salary during their annual performance reviews, hoping to motivate them for the coming year. Does this approach actually work? It could motivate them for about a month or a quarter for maximum, but not beyond that.

If you really want to make an impact on your employees with rewards and recognition, it is important to rethink employee rewards and recognition. It is recommended to build an employee rewards and recognition program at your workplace or implement an employee rewards and recognition software.

As a manager, there are a few elements of employee recognition that you need to be clear about:

1. The Employee  – You have to know the employee that you are going to recognize and reward. You should know details about them like the team they are working in and the project that they are working on.
2. The Reason – You have to know why you are recognizing an employee. Employee recognition isn’t something that you do without understanding the seriousness of the issue handled or the effort put in by the employee into a particular project.
3. The Frequency – It is important to keep track of employees’ work from time to time and recognize their good work on a regular basis.
4. The Place – Some managers choose to do it in person and some managers tend to recognize their employees in front of the team involved or a group of employees.
5. The Methodology – There are various ways to recognize an employee. Some organizations take their teams out on a trip, some give them monetory bonuses, some provide them with their company’s official merchandise, some have ’employee of the week’ contests etc. Based on what’s ideal for you, decide beforehand what your top performers are going to be rewarded with.

Though there are many ways managers can use to recognize employees, it has now more than ever become vital to give employees frequent and instant recognition for their accomplishments and progress.

With the Gen Z entering the workforce, it has become crucial to rethink the employee recognition and reward culture. The new generation needs personalized, regular and meaningful feedback and recognition from their managers.

Here is a step by step guide for you to build an employee rewards and recognition program at your workplace:

Goals

Setting employee goals is the first step to understanding your employees’ roles in their organization and what their responsibilities are. So, make sure you set SMART goals for your employees and align these goals with department goals as well as organizational goals. Now you have a compass to measure success, when it comes to employee performance.

Also read: Why Engagedly Is The Ultimate Goal Setting Tool That You Need!

Monitor

Setting goals isn’t just enough, you have to also regularly monitor the performance of your employees. Organizations use a goal setting software in order to keep track of employee progress on the goals assigned to them without any hassle. At Engagedly, we use our OKR software to set objectives and key results. These key results help us understand the progress made by employees so that managers can accurately understand and track the progress of their employees on a particular goal.

Feedback Culture

It isn’t just enough to track the progress of your employees but to slowly build a culture of frequent feedback at your workplace. If you constantly set goals for your team and monitor their progress, this encourages them to give their best and stay productive. So, it is important for you to have a culture of honest and progressive employee feedback.

Also read: 10 Best Employee Feedback Tools To Track Performance

Rewards and Recognition

Having frequent feedback sessions with your employees makes it easier for you to recognize their efforts and reward their accomplishments. There are various ways to do it: gamification, personalized thank you notes, praising employees in-front of the whole team. At Engagedly, we use Engagedly app which allows to gamify every aspect of an employee’s work. We also use public praise and discretionary points to praise an employee publicly for their contribution.

Using a rewards and recognition software doesn’t only help you with the budget of rewards but also drives employee engagement in the organization.

If you want to know more about Engagedly’s employee rewards and recognition, request for a live demo and talk to our experts!

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