How to Create a Successful Employee Recognition Programme

Generally, organisations think they are doing a good job of engaging and recognising their employees. BI WORLDWIDE’s research tells us that only 52% of employees are recognised in their first year of employment and 35% of new hires are planning to leave in the next 12 months. Those who are recognised are 2.1x more likely to stay.

Once you've attracted the right people, an employee recognition programme will continually reflect and reinforce your brand values and behaviours – and what is recognised will be repeated. When you've inspired your employees through your brand and recognised those who live out your brand, your customers feel it and benefit from it, creating another important reciprocity model known as the Value Funnel.

Employee recognition programmes are an essential part of delivering quality experiences for your customers – whether it be peer-to-peer or manager discretionary recognition with points. We know that those who are frequently recognised are more committed, work more intensely and deliver better service.

An employee recognition programme should be specific to your overall engagement strategy. The technical solution or software should have a choice of flexible options to provide a variety of recognition capabilities from peer-to-peer, manager-to-employee, years of service awards, nominations, communications, and a robust reporting suite to ensure you are able to measure and understand the results and impacts.

In this article, we'll explain how you can implement an effective employee recognition programme that helps to retain staff and enhance productivity. We'll cover:

• What is an employee recognition programme?
• The employee recognition framework
• Recognition options
• Steps to creating an employee recognition programme
• Introduce the new employee recognition programme
• Measure performance
• Finding the right recognition solution
• The business case for employee recognition
• Best practices for employee recognition programmes
• Choosing the right employee recognition platform

What is an employee recognition programme?

An employee recognition programme is a system that acknowledges the hard work and accomplishments of employees within an organisation.

Typically, a platform is used to facilitate the giving and receiving of recognition, with points being awarded that are redeemable towards employee rewards. The purpose of an employee recognition programme is to increase employee engagement and productivity, drive a positive culture of recognition throughout an organisation – and boost its bottom line.

An employee recognition programme also helps to:

• Communicate and reinforce a company’s strategy, culture, and values by reinforcing, leveraging, and contributing to others’ success.
• Foster and encourage innovation and new ideas to transform the business.
• Combine and expand existing, disparate recognition initiatives to reinforce culture.

The employee recognition framework

According to Deloitte, over 80% of organisations have a formal recognition platform in place. However, some recognition programmes typically focus on recognising top performers with a large annual award, without taking into account what's most meaningful for each individual.

While it’s important to recognise top performers for their significant contributions, limiting recognition to a select few on an infrequent basis fails to align and engage the organisation as a whole. Your high performers will quickly see through anything less than excellence. Seeing awards for mediocre work will only signal to your stars that your organisation is not for them.

To increase engagement, drive organisational change, and shape culture, your recognition programme needs to reach as many employees as frequently as possible using different types of recognition.

The more types of recognition you use, the more employees you will reach and engage.

Recognition options

Your recognition platform should include public recognition, peer-to-peer recognition, and manager-to-employee recognition.

Public recognition

A public or social recognition platform enables employees to publicly share their thanks and appreciation for their colleagues' work and support, reinforcing the culture of your recognition programme across the organisation.

Studies have shown that organisations with engaged employees have decreased rates of turnover, 21% more profitability, and 17% higher productivity.

Social recognition platforms highlight special moments, kudos, and the achievement of milestones. They can contain personalised eCards, eCertificates, badges, and corporate values/behaviours. Individuals can also upload their own eCard or video as part of the recognition process. Individuals will receive an email when they are recognised as will their manager giving visibility to the recognition. Getting "points redeemable for rewards" on a corporate social recognition platform may not mean as much as having their manager copied on an email explaining what a difference they made.

In addition to manager and employee notification, these recognitions can be written to a Public Recognition Wall to highlight recognitions happening across the organisation.

Peer-to-peer recognition

Peer-to-peer recognition is a key component of a comprehensive social recognition strategy. Take a look at all of the “likes” on social media and you’ll see just how hungry we are for the approval of our peers … and how much we enjoy both receiving — and giving — compliments. Of course, a well-designed peer-to-peer recognition programme does more than create a collection of “You are so good at what you do” posts.

Studies have shown that 41% of companies that use peer-to-peer recognition have seen marked positive increases in customer satisfaction (BI WORLDWIDE, Aon, Gallup, Crain’s).

When an employee is recognised by a peer, they are likely to repeat the behaviour that earned the recognition. Why? Because it produces a double-dopamine rush: doing the behaviour feels great – and being recognised for it does too.

Those who anticipate recognition for their future successes feel a greater obligation to work hard, give a higher proportion of their full effort, look for ways to improve the way they do their work and deliver more of their best ideas to the company.

A company-wide peer-to-peer recognition programme can increase your employees' anticipations of appreciation because recognition occurs frequently. In Rodd Wagners' book, 'Widgets: The 12 New Rules for Managing Your Employees As If They're Real People' he describes how research shows, the anticipation of being recognised paired with being recognised often drives behaviour change, satisfaction, and engagement.

Manager-to-employee recognition

Managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores (Gallup 2015). 81% of employees say they’d be willing to work harder for an appreciative manager (Glassdoor 2023). Since recognition makes a significant impact on engagement, a manager-to-employee recognition programme makes it easier for managers to participate.

Managers are time-poor. While most like the idea of recognition and see the benefits of it, the process of gaining approval, finding the right rewards, giving the rewards, and submitting expense reports is too time-consuming. With a recognition programme, managers can give a quick thank you note, send a personalised eCard, and issue a reward in less than 30 seconds. Even if they aren’t on a computer, recognition is just as accessible on a smartphone via a website or mobile app.

As easy as it is to give recognition, it’s just as easy to look at the recognition levels of the team. Managers have access to reports for their teams, providing them with real-time data on who is being recognised, by whom, for what, and when. These reports also offer individualised manager insights for more equitable and inclusive recognition.

Managers also have access to several do-it-yourself tools on the recognition technology platform. These tools empower them to communicate, motivate, and engage their teams to drive local or short-term objectives. Empowering managers increases their engagement levels, but it also drives employees.

How an employee recognition strategy augments compensation to drive results

Your recognition strategy should be separate, but incremental to your compensation strategy. Think of it as inspiration vs. compensation. When we use a recognition programme, we are influencing, culture, behaviour change and incremental effort – often featured on the Public Recognition wall of the solution.

As recommended by WorldatWork, compensation and recognition are both key parts of the total rewards strategy. Understanding how they differ is essential to creating a recognition strategy that has the greatest impact.

Compensation is what we’re paid for doing a job. It’s what we expect to receive for our efforts. We work for a given salary, wage, bonus opportunity, etc.

To be effective, recognition must be meaningful and distinct from compensation. Cash and cash equivalents, when given as recognition, are simply lumped together, or “lost,” with other compensation. Non-cash awards reinforce the employee-company link whenever the award is used or viewed. Offering a broad selection of non-cash awards ensures there’s something appealing to everyone – which is especially critical if you have a diverse, global workforce.

Recognition supports your employee value proposition

To maximise results, companies need the right people working together, doing the right things to the best of everyone’s abilities. Ultimately, a company’s employee value proposition (EVP) is what attracts and retains these “right” people. The EVP is defined as the complete offering a company makes to its prospective and current employees in return for their best efforts. It encompasses culture, pay and benefits, all of the non-financial aspects — including recognition — that attract, retain, and motivate employees, and the reasons former employees would speak well of the company.

In addition to the day-to-day work experience, or how much an employee feels they belong with their role and team, we often use things like paid time off, health benefits, career advancement opportunities, commission or bonuses and recognition to make employees feel valued and appreciated for the work they do.

Many of these come at a cost to the organisation so it’s important to understand which are most effective in impacting employee performance and commitment. In other words, what do you offer that is most valuable to your employees?

One way of measuring this is employee net promoter score (eNPS). Pioneered by Bain & Company and Fred Reichheld to measure customer experience, NPS has been used primarily to determine how likely a customer is to stay and offer referrals. This same measure can be adapted to gauge employee sentiments around a specific programme, initiative, or work experience as a whole. While it won’t provide a complete picture of how your employees feel, it can be paired with other metrics to provide a holistic view of the value proposition you’re offering.

eNPS is a simple measure, based on one question:“How likely are you to recommend this company (or this programme, or initiative) to others?”

Though simplistic in nature, it is the first step in understanding if you’re providing the right employee experience, one they value and find motivating.

Case Study

One global technology company is using eNPS to measure employee attitudes about its corporate employee recognition programme. Knowing employee recognition outperformed other areas of their EVP, they used eNPS to identify strengths of their existing programme and gaps they needed to address. Understanding employee perceptions about the programme has helped the company make changes that have led to a 100% increase in eNPS over 4 years.

Steps to creating an employee recognition programme

Here’s how to design and create an employee recognition programme with your people in mind.

1. Set objectives

Set your objectives, expectations, and the intended result from the employee rewards and recognition programme:

• What is the purpose of implementing the programme?
• What are you trying to achieve?
• How will you measure their impact and effectiveness?
• What are the behaviours and outcomes that you want to recognise and reward?
• How will you differentiate between different levels and types of performance?

Once you set your objectives, it will become a lot easier to build a programme that'll work to fulfil your objectives. Consider involving your employees in setting these objectives. It will help you align them with your corporate mission, vision, and values.

2. Align with the company culture

To see positive results from your recognition programme, you should align it with the company culture. By doing so, not only can you improve your retention rates, but it can also help you to attract the top performers.

A company’s culture is critical to its success. As Harvard Professor Emeritus Dr. James L. Heskett wrote in his book Culture Cycle, effective culture can account for 20-30% of the differential in corporate performance when compared with “culturally unremarkable” competitors. Why? One of the primary reasons is that there’s a strong link between a company’s culture and the engagement of its employees. Culture influences people’s behaviour on a daily basis and drives innovation and the customer experience. When aligned with business strategy, culture attracts people who are comfortable in the culture – producing higher levels of engagement. Employee recognition programmes boost employee engagement by acknowledging contributions.

3. Allocate budget

Depending on the size of your organisation, you can expect to spend an average of $125 to $175 per employee per year on award costs and another $50 to $75 per employee per year on administrative costs.

4. Determine scale of the recognition programme

Many organisations around the world have a global audience. It is critical to ensure you select a partner with global expertise and the local support you need to most effectively run your global recognition programme. This strategy provides many benefits to your programme stakeholders and programme participants as well as cost-savings to you.

A truly global footprint allows for support to your local recognition programme teams around the world. And is the best fit to meet and exceed your global needs.

Ensure support through a proven account management structure in which a global account manager is responsible for the entire programme.

Underneath this global leader are regional account managers who support your local operations around the world allowing for in-region and in-time zone support for your stakeholders in each region. This approach allows for a global programme consistent around the world while also addressing region-specific needs.

Your programme stakeholders around the world are one of your biggest assets and are your programme ambassadors during programme design, implementation, and ongoing management.

By providing these integral team members with local support, you are helping to engage them and facilitate a deeper commitment to your global recognition programme.

Regional and local promotions

In-country local offices around the world should offer account management, technical development and support, creative services, event services, programme design, training, programme analysis and customer service. These offices should work directly with your regional team members to tailor local promotions to the specific needs of your participants in each region. We call this a ‘Glocal’ approach where we combine our global presence with local expertise.

Local expertise and know-how will help guide your team members through local promotion design and implementation. Teams should work as an extension of your regional teams to help you meet your business objectives around the world.

Participant benefits

Your programme should have Customer Service Support in-time-zone for all programme participants around the world. This ensures that your employees receive prompt, relevant support to address their enquiries or concerns. By offering a flexible, in-language platform, you are better able to engage your participants through a programme that feels relevant and suited to them.

Culturally relevant and aspirational awards

Award fulfilment for participants should be tailored to each country to ensure that the awards offered align with the cultural preferences of each region. This can be achieved through a continual evaluation and review of the items that are being redeemed. This evaluation of redemption patterns provides insight into the items that are most desirable and helps to identify opportunities to expand the reward offering.

We have a physical presence in each region, meaning that we are able to locally source our awards and provide awards that are culturally appropriate, desirable, and relevant. This ensures that your employees will be offered a targeted and meaningful array of reward choices.

Company benefits

Local fulfilment

As you know, the award redemption experience is a reflection of your programme for your participants. Implementation of a strategic, experience-centric local fulfilment process helps ensure your participants have a quality, swift and cost-effective award redemption experience. This results in cost and time savings for your participants and a world-class redemption experience.

In-country fulfilment is essential as it maximises the participant reward experience by minimising shipping and customs expenses and delays.

In-country invoicing

Engaging a partner with a truly global presence means you will save money and build ownership at a local level. The ability to bill in-country through local offices not only provides support for your programme from that location, but it also provides the ability for in-country billing. The benefit of in-country billing will vary by country and vary based on where your budgets reside, and invoices are paid. In-country billing allows your local entities to claim taxes back, which can result in significant savings.

Introduce the new employee recognition programme

When introducing the new employee recognition programme it is important to set goals around the programme launch and allocate sufficient resources to ensure good communications, training, onboarding, flexibility measurement and ongoing improvement.

1. Engage employees with a call-to-action to log on, send a recognition, and read the communications.
2. Keep a simple and consistent experience across locations.
3. Maximise the recognition budget to create an engaging experience that’s scalable but memorable.
4. Make it an experience – consider merchandise, trip giveaways and branded items. Show them recognition is rewarding right from the start.
5. Make it informational – Resource Guides, Fact Sheets, Ensure Expert Ambassadors are on hand to show them the way.
6. Complete manager training well in advance of the launch and provide them with support material. Their ongoing active involvement is essential to the programme launch and ongoing success. Create goals and feedback mechanisms.
7. Utilise Programme Analytics to measure and adapt your recognition strategy.
8. Programme goals should include metrics around launch day and the weeks and months that follow to ensure that recognition becomes ingrained in the company culture.
9. Communicate relevant milestones to a broad audience and celebrate often.

Measure performance

A well-performing employee recognition programme can have tangible impacts on your organisation. As a starting point, you can use your employee participation rate to gain a high-level understanding of its success.

Your participation rate is the percentage of team members who are using the system to either send gifts or nominations. Generally speaking, a participation rate of 80% means you have a strong, recognition-rich culture.

However, you shouldn’t necessarily expect that level of adoption straight off the bat. Within the first 90 days of implementing your programme, a 40% participation rate should be enough to indicate that you’re on the right track.

Additional key metrics include engagement, intent to stay, commitment, and intensity of work. We know through our research that those who receive multiple types of recognition are happier, more engaged, committed and intensely performing all can have a direct impact on your bottom line by reducing costs or increasing revenues.

Finding the right recognition solution

Flexibility is key. Look for a recognition solution that provides an engaging, fun, and effortless way to engage, retain and recognise employee accomplishments. This should include features such as an extensive library of built-in recognition modules, along with robust segmentation capabilities.

Best-in-class solutions incorporate social science principles and are designed for visual impact, ease of use, and to bring your EVP to life. The solution should have the capacity to run multiple promotions with different audiences at the same time and post-programme rules to targeted audiences.

A recognition solution should provide many personalisation options that will make the site as unique as your organisation. This should include corporate and programme branding logos, colours, font, site layout configuration, inclusion of your values/behaviours, custom eCards, badges, and more. Plus a good recognition platform should offer a robust reporting suite and an account team who manage and support your employee engagement strategy by:

• Understanding the objectives: Gain insights to identify key business or performance issues and drivers of success. Insights can also be used to develop best practices in engagement.
• Develop a strategy: Define the key drivers and develop a project plan, roadmap, and key metrics. Also establish the programme theme, logo, creative and develop the creative and communication strategy.
• Integrating programme design: Use insights from behavioural economics to implement engagement, motivation, and reward strategies.
• Executing tactics: Manage the details, and update progress, ongoing programme operations, and project timeline management.
• Measurement: Continuously track programme performance by evaluating analytics and generating reports. Review the programme and evaluate its return on investment (ROI).

The business case for employee recognition

Regardless of the purpose behind your employee recognition programme, demonstrating its value is essential.

Recognition programmes are seen as an important tool used to drive employee engagement, increase retention, and improve productivity. Most Fortune 2000 companies have strong employee recognition programmes that are designed to align cultural values, behaviours, accomplishments, and results across the entire organisation. However, an emerging trend is to leverage the recognition programme as a tool to drive the strategic and financial goals of the business by involving everyone who can directly impact those goals.

Here are some key considerations to make when building a business case for employee recognition:

Demonstrate the potential ROI of employee recognition in six steps

This begs the question; can you measure ROI on recognition initiatives? YES, but you must define what’s important to measure. It’s a question that always comes up when companies are considering starting an employee recognition programme or questioning if they should continue implementing a programme: “What’s our ROI?”

1. Start with defining your recognition objectives.

Recognition can be viewed as simply a “warm fuzzy” that is impossible to measure if you don’t first assign specific objectives for the programme. To create a meaningful ROI, first, determine what the real business need for creating a programme is. Common needs include:

• Improving morale
• Increasing productivity
• Improving absenteeism
• Reducing turnover
• Reducing costs
• Reducing customer complaints

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to try to set too many objectives and not focus on what really matters.

• What are the one or two most compelling needs that you feel recognition can impact?
• What is leadership most concerned about?

Your recognition programme may also positively impact other objectives, but if you focus on one or two you will find it easier to create a defensible ROI.

When choosing your key objectives, keep in mind that some metrics are easier to measure and demonstrate ROI than others. If a key objective is to improve employee morale, for example, you should strongly consider using a credible control group to help demonstrate ROI (see step five).

As you evaluate what key objectives to select as the basis for your ROI, factor in how the financial benefit of improving a specific metric can be calculated. For example, the benefit of improving absenteeism could be calculated by offsetting any additional overtime wages incurred. Or the value of reducing turnover may be calculated by the cost saved in recruiting costs and new employee training costs.

Using existing data that the company already collects will have more credibility than new data you need to create. Plus, it will be easier and faster for you to access existing data versus creating a new data set.

2. Identify the existing key metrics within your organisation that align with your objectives:

• How do you currently measure morale? Employee surveys perhaps.
• How do you measure productivity or rework costs? Use measurements you already have in place. This not only gives you a baseline but it means that you don’t need to create a new measurement system, that can be costly to implement and delay the launch of your programme.

As previously stated, using generally accepted, credible and existing corporate metrics for your selected business objective will always provide more validity to your data. Senior leadership will understand your ROI logic when you can tie it to measures that they already rely on and trust. Introducing new metrics can invite sceptics to challenge your information – a position you don’t want to find yourself in.

3. Consider establishing a control group.

Analysts will tell you that without having a control group – those not participating in your programme – much of your data isn’t reliable. The ability to see the differences between those who use recognition and those who can’t (as opposed to those who won’t) is important. Having a credible control group is crucial to demonstrating a programme’s ROI.

The control group can either be a selected segment of employees who will not have the option to participate. Or the control group can be a baseline period to use for comparison. Either way, be sure to ask leadership and your analytics teams for help in selecting and developing the control group. This collaboration adds credibility to your final ROI calculations and results.

4. Clearly define and communicate what behaviours you want employees to recognise and reward.

Too often, recognition programmes offer vague advice on what to recognise and reward. It’s common to see things like “going above and beyond”, “demonstrating our values” or “leading the way”.

Employees need more specific direction. If you can’t specify actions for the entire company due to the variety of work being done, then ask your management teams to define the behaviours that can drive change within their departments. Localise the programme as finitely as you need to so you can measure its impact. If reducing employee turnover is your number one objective, ask each department to define why they believe turnover is too high in their group.

Of course, you’ll get responses about poor pay and bad benefits, but help lead the discussion beyond those reasons. Ask, “If we can’t give everyone a raise and free health benefits, what else can we do?” Those are the things you can recognise.

5. Set realistic expectations when defining a measurement schedule.

Employee recognition programmes can take a long time to get going in a company. Some departments will get on board right away and in others, you’ll be herding cats. It’s natural to want to have “great numbers” to share with management on a frequent basis. However, you should not expect to see any significant change for at least six months against your key metrics. In some cases, you may not see change until 36 months.

In the early stages of the programme, focus your measurement on tactical results such as:

• The percentage of managers who have participated in programme training.
• The number of recognitions employees have sent their co-workers.
• The percentage of employees who have recognised a co-worker.
• The number of recognitions, per manager, that have been given.
• The percentage of managers using their discretionary awards budget.

These metrics can help you input data to pass on to leadership to show that you are making progress.

Equally as important is the measurement of tactical components, as this helps you identify if there are areas of the programme that may require attention. You may discover that certain departments aren’t participating at all while others are very active. Use this data to see what you can learn from the active groups to develop communications and training initiatives to help get non- or low-participating groups more engaged.

6. Be transparent and conservative when calculating your programme costs.

In addition to awards costs and the administrative and communication fees you pay your recognition supplier, you likely have other labour and materials costs that you are absorbing within your budget. These may relate to training managers, running kick-off meetings, fielding questions, making presentations, travelling to other sites and so on. While including these costs will lower your ROI, it will increase your credibility when management understands that you are being completely transparent.

ROI can be calculated using the formula: ROI = (metric during measurement period – baseline) ÷ cost of the programme. Be conservative when reporting your ROI to senior leadership. Consider reducing your ROI by a percentage factor such as 30, 40 or 50%. Remember, other things going on in the company likely had some impact on the metric too. For example, if you can demonstrate a positive ROI by only claiming 50% of it is directly related to your programme, you are sure to have more credibility with leadership.

Quantifying the impact of recognition is possible by following this 6-step process you can quantify the impact of recognition with an ROI analysis.

Get executive buy-in

Executive buy-in plays a key role, especially in the success of a newly introduced programme. Show the impact of recognition, such as the link between regular recognition and employee engagement and satisfaction. For example:

• "Failure to recognise employee performance" is 3x more likely than compensation to contribute to employee turnover (MIT Sloan 2022)
• When recognition hits the mark, employees are 5x as likely to be connected to company culture and 4x as likely to be engaged (Gallup 2022)
• Further Gallup research suggests that the more talented the employee is, the faster they leave, compared with other disengaged employees. (Gallup 2017)
• Gallup also estimates that low engagement costs the global economy $8.8 trillion and accounts for 9% of global GDP. (Gallup 2023)

Bottom line: Recognition is an investment with quantifiable returns: increased engagement, productivity, and profitability and reduced employee turnover. Employers with the most engaged employees were 21% more profitable than those with the least engaged employees. In the end, it's in any company's best interest to invest in an employee recognition programme.

Best practices for employee recognition programmes

Before executing a recognition programme, follow these 10 best practices to ensure you get the most out of your recognition programme:

1. Make recognition fun, fast and easy.

Everyone in the company should understand how your recognition programme works and it should be clear that recognising some is quick and easy enough for peers and managers to do every day. Use an employee recognition app to make sending recognition to your coworkers fun, fast, and easy. With just a tap you can send recognition, add award points, include a video/photo, view Public Recognition, and contribute to service awards celebrations.

2. Align with company goals and values.

A recognition programme should be tied to specific corporate goals and core values to help convey a company’s strategic outlook to its stakeholders. It should be created with purpose and be aligned with a specific corporate mission, vision, goals, and values, and should reinforce certain behaviours.

3. Create a culture of recognition.

People talk about wanting to create a culture of recognition, however, launching a recognition programme is not enough to achieve that goal. To foster a culture of recognition and improve the programme’s success, managers must fully support and embrace the concept. This involves establishing clear targets, recognising good work, and reinforcing desirable behaviours that support the culture of your organisation.

4. Recognise early and often.

The impact recognition can have on people when done on a regular basis is huge. When receiving ongoing recognition for a job well done, people are happier, more productive, and more likely to repeat the behaviour they were recognised for.

5. Engage managers.

Manager engagement plays a huge role in any recognition programme. Their support and adoption of the programme will ultimately determine its success (or failure). Managers are the ones who give recognition to employees and they’re the ones who will make your programme engaging, memorable, passable… or forgettable.

6. Train managers.

Make it a top priority to train managers upon the programme launch or when any programme updates are made so they understand the importance of recognition and how best to give it. Give them access to resources they can reference when they need them and make sure there are ongoing communications to keep the programme top of mind.

7. Make it rewarding and flexible.

Employers should give employees options and the flexibility to choose what rewards best meet their particular needs. Offer a collection of lifestyle awards culturally and demographically appropriate for employees in your organisation. A meaningful award is something they’ll be excited to receive but may not buy for themselves. A designer handbag or a golf club is a nice reminder of their recognition and gives them a greater affinity to your organisation each time they use it. Or offer hand-curated experiences or experiential rewards to your employees.

A study by Harris Group found that 72% of Millennials prefer to spend more money on experiences than on material things. According to Dr. Elizabeth Dunn, Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia (UBC), experiences—as fleeting as they may be—deliver more lasting happiness than material things. Dr. Dunn attributes the temporary happiness achieved by buying things to what she calls “puddles of pleasure”.

8. Communicate the launch of your recognition programme.

George Bernard Shaw famously once said, “The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

When introducing a new recognition programme, once you’ve designed the programme and determined the rewards, a strong communications campaign not only provides reinforcement but truly becomes essential to a successful programme.

A well-designed communications campaign grabs your employees’ attention and most importantly, keeps the key information top of mind–people remember what stands out. But beyond creating a buzz, you want your communications to drive activity and deliver business results.

9. Measure results.

To be successful, design your results-based recognition programme in a way that will correlate performance and contribution to recognition. The forensic view of the results should look for evidence that managers who had high levels of recognition activity also drove the highest results through their teams. Additionally, were employees who gave and received high levels of recognition also likely to perform better in the individual aspects of the promotion?

10. Think (and act) globally.

With employees all around the world, it’s essential that their recognition experience is memorable and meaningful, no matter where they are. Partnering with a supplier that has a global presence and offers comprehensive programmes will help you better reach and recognise your employees. Plus, it allows you to successfully address any cultural issues, while also avoiding expensive international shipping and duties.

Ask the right questions to make sure your programme supplier has brick-and-mortar locations outside of Canada. That way, your employees will have access to culturally appropriate award selections and local customer service. A Canada-based supplier can easily ship awards across borders, but one with a truly global footprint will save you shipping costs and provide locally relevant awards.

Choosing the right employee recognition platform

Our industry-leading employee recognition programme, DayMaker, can help you deliver your recognition programme and maximise the impact of your recognition strategy.

DayMaker allows employees to earn award points for a variety of positive behaviours. They can then redeem these points for a range of motivating and customisable award options from an online, mobile-friendly Merchandise Marketplace, Experiences Marketplace and Mastery Marketplace. Here they can select tangible rewards and experiences and learning opportunities found to be more impactful than monetary rewards or gift cards.

Using the principles of behavioural economics, DayMaker’s social recognition component brings your EVP to life in a fun, easy-to-use, employee-centric platform. Here’s what DayMaker’s social recognition features have to offer:

• Results-based Recognition: Use recognition to align employee efforts towards achieving strategic initiatives.
• Recognition Celebration Page: Celebrate employee years of service awards with a personalised URL filled with comments, photos, and videos from co-workers, family, and friends.
• My Dashboard: Get a clear picture of recognition participation metrics that measure active participation – not just who sent the most recognitions.
• Game Mechanics: Incorporate points and badges to reinforce giving or receiving recognition, celebrate milestones, and accomplish pre-defined performance objectives.
• Micro-Targeted Content: Create awareness and maintain engagement with connected and non-connected employees using emails, texts, programme reminders, and print collateral.
• Supersonic Search: Make it fast, fun, and cool to recognise accomplishments.
• Awards They’ll Love: Offer an inspirational, vivid, and culturally appropriate award collection featuring more than 3.7 million of the most desired redemption options worldwide.
• Project Management: Ensure a seamless onboarding experience, turn-key integration, and ongoing personal customer service in the areas where your employees live and work.