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Support | 415-386-8600
Make employee recognition a year-round practice through planned programs, manager participation, peer appreciation, milestone celebrations, meaningful incentives, and informal thanks.
Pay, benefits, safe working conditions, manageable workloads, and flexibility remain essential. Recognition can make specific contributions visible when criteria and decisions are clear.
Options may include gift cards · prepaid cards · direct payments · merchandise · charity · swag
Budget for formal recognition, spot incentives, shared activities, and non-cash appreciation throughout the year. Publish eligibility and decision criteria, assign ownership, provide accessible alternatives, and review recognition patterns regularly.
Recognition can make specific contributions visible, but it does not replace fair pay, benefits, safe working conditions, manageable workload, development, or accountable management.
Use documented, role-relevant criteria and review who is recognized, by whom, and for what. Participation records can guide program improvements but do not independently establish engagement or performance.
Review recognition coverage, participation, timing, and employee feedback without treating those records as proof of productivity, morale, belonging, or retention.
Apply published criteria consistently across roles, locations, schedules, employment status, disability and access needs, caregiving responsibilities, and remote or onsite arrangements. Provide an accessible private alternative and a clear way to question or correct recognition decisions.
Use measures that employees can reasonably influence and understand. Apply the same verification process, avoid ranking unlike roles against one another, and do not use recognition as the sole proxy for performance, promotion, compensation, or discipline.
Short-lived campaigns can fade without an owner, budget, schedule, and review process. Treat recognition as an ongoing workflow rather than a seasonal message.
Define eligibility, decision criteria, approval steps, frequency, available choices, and a review cadence before launch. Document exceptions and correct patterns that exclude particular roles, locations, shifts, or work arrangements.
Recognition should support—not substitute for—safe work, fair pay, benefits, manageable workloads, leave, and access to support. If a program includes wellness activities, make participation voluntary, protect sensitive information, provide reasonable alternatives, and ask qualified benefits and legal advisers to review eligibility, privacy, and nondiscrimination requirements.
Before using any measure, publish eligibility and verification criteria and provide role-equivalent alternatives for employees whose work is not represented by the selected metric.
Frequent informal thanks can acknowledge a specific contribution without requiring a prize or public announcement.
Recognize contributions with observable evidence and role-relevant criteria. Do not compare employees on measures they cannot control, and do not require public recognition as a condition of receiving appreciation.
Managers can thank employees for specific, observable contributions such as clear communication, collaboration, useful feedback, taking responsibility, reliable follow-through, mentoring, and planning.
Recognition data can describe program activity; it does not by itself establish engagement, morale, productivity, customer loyalty, retention, or return on investment.
Recognition may be valued by employees, but it cannot establish or ensure retention. Review it alongside compensation, benefits, management quality, workload, development, flexibility, and workplace conditions, and evaluate turnover separately using appropriate workforce data.
Use the campaign builder to configure branding, eligible recipients, recognition choices, delivery rules, and reporting. Before launch, publish eligibility, criteria, approvals, and accessible alternatives.
Many employee awards, including cash-equivalent rewards, may be taxable or reportable. Ask qualified tax and payroll advisers to determine treatment. Customer, partner, public-sector, and healthcare-related gifts may also be subject to recipient policies, anti-bribery rules, and value limits; obtain appropriate legal and compliance review.
Confirm funding, fees, expiration, replacement, unclaimed-value treatment, privacy, nondiscrimination, labor, accessibility, and messaging requirements for the selected program. Related reading: automated employee recognition and employee anniversary recognition.
Confirm configuration, pricing, tax treatment, gifting rules, and terms before launch.
Program controls and service scope vary by configuration. Review current security, privacy, accessibility, employment, tax, and compliance documentation during procurement.
With the return to the office, or at least a partial return to the office, organizations have more reason than ever to recognize employees.
Employee recognition , expressing gratitude to workers by awarding incentives and having employee events are more important than ever.
Of course, pay, benefits, and workplace flexibility remain the key expectations of employees. But it’s also critical to engage employees in other ways.
It’s more important than ever to budget for recognition programs, spot incentives and less-tangible benefits. It’s time to ramp up the fun aspects in everything you do to recognize and reward employees.
Great Place To Work-Certified company O.C. Tanner looked at employee engagement and found that 37% of their workforce considered personal employee recognition as the single most important driver of encouraging them to produce better work more often.
In fact, that was far higher than the 7% who said “pay me more” was the most important driver of great work.
A study by Great Place To Work also showed that “recognition makes employees feel promotions are fair, spurs innovation and extra effort,” when it analyzed 1.7 million employee survey responses.
Nearly 80% of people admitted to abandoning their New Year’s resolutions by February every year, according to Forbes.
You know the story. The first few weeks of January have gyms packed to the gills and then the crowds slowly fade away. 80% of Americans who make a New Year’s resolution had failed by the start of February. Just 8% keep resolutions all year according to recent studies.
Don’t let your employee recognition fall victim to the same dynamic. One survey found that 65% of employees haven’t received any form of recognition for good work in the last year!
Plan for Success
Delegate to Managers
Be Consistent
Include Fun
Avoid “All work/ no play”
Make it Part of Management Objectives
Plan for Peer-to-peer recognition
Learn
A healthy workforce is good for the business. It’s also a chance to encourage employees to engage in healthy behavior and to reward employees. Rewards and incentives such as fun merchandise, gift cards or payments are both effective motivators for encouraging employee health as well as a strong signal of the importance you place on wellbeing. And healthy organizations may also pay lower insurance rates.
Be Inclusive
Many significant milestones may be celebrated. Employee recognition should include and reward all employees for their contributions.
Just for Fun!
Business Metrics
Easy-to-measure business metrics can be celebrated individually and departmentally. Business results, like achieving sales goals or achieving high customer service satisfaction scores, are significant. It’s important to recognize and reward them.
And don’t forget plenty of the informal “Thank you!”
But every person should be acknowledged.
Teamwork and impact within the organization may also be celebrated – and rewarded.
Make sure that managers take the opportunity to thank employees on a regular basis for accomplishing great work, for putting in extra effort, or for helping their own team by mentoring and collaborating with others.
It’s important to reward employees. Two research studies that The Happiness Advantage author Shawn Achor was involved with suggest that successful recognition programs can help scale organic praise, have a high ROI, and lead to significantly higher levels of employee performance and engagement, and increased customer loyalty, as measured by net promoter scores.
Satisfied employees decrease turnover, reducing the costs of hiring new staff.
