5 Straightforward Ways to Make Recognition More Meaningful

Employee recognition isn’t a new idea, but as a practice, it’s experiencing a renaissance worldwide.

Employee recognition is the rewarding of employees for excellent performance or exemplary behavior in the workplace.

Until recently, most employee recognition programs (87 percent, according to research from Bersin by Deloitte) focused primarily on tenure. A large number of those 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 celebrating tenure.

Is the goal truly to celebrate your colleague’s ability to stick around and hold down a chair, or is there more to it? If it’s just about how long someone’s been hanging around, you might as well throw a party for the old breakroom microwave that has been chugging along faithfully since the office opened.

Realistically, nobody celebrates the old microwave because the true aim of these tenure-based initiatives is to celebrate the contributions someone made during their tenure — and despite the cost and the effort involved, most of these programs fail to recognize those contributions in a meaningful way.

Recognition’s greatest power lies in its ability help 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. That’s why organizations are beginning to shift away from the tenure paradigm to a strategy that focuses on recognizing contributions in a more timely, specific, visible, and ultimately rewarding format.

With these principles in place, recognition becomes a more effective tool for improving engagement and retention, plus an avenue for timely, motivational feedback that annual performance reviews alone can’t really provide. So how do you apply those principles and make sure you and your team are getting the greatest possible benefit from recognition?

Inclusivity: Involve the Whole Organization

Implementing a formal employee recognition program is one (absolutely crucial) element of fostering a greater culture of recognition. In order to build that kind of culture in earnest, you need participation from all levels of the organization.

Senior leaders are also your organization’s culture leaders, and for better or worse, they’re driving the cultural conversation at work. If team leads are encouraging participation in a program, but mid and senior leaders are notably absent, it makes a statement that employee recognition isn’t truly 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 craze that nobody takes seriously or expects to last.

Research shows that employees find recognition coming from direct supervisors and senior leadership to be important, but recognition from peers is what motivates employees to go the extra mile. That’s why it’s so important to have participation and buy-in from stakeholders at all levels, from the CEO to last week’s new hire.

Rewards: Give Meaningful Employee Recognition

Rewards are the key to sustained, enthusiastic engagement in a recognition program. As meaningful as it is for employee recognition to happen, it’s more engaging and sustainable over time when there is a reward to associate with it. We’ve actually done some research that backs that up.

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 raised 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.

Timeliness/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. Neuroscientist, Paul Zack, studied the effects of recognition on the brain and stated “a way to harness the reinforcing effects of dopamine is to engage in recognition close in time to the goal being met or exceeded. It needs to occur consistently and promptly” to have maximum impact.

To be most effective and meaningful, employee recognition should be given in the moment.

Have you ever put a massive amount of work into something — really gave it your all — and received little or no recognition for it? That feeling you’re recalling is why timeliness is so crucial to recognize, 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 is not only 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.