Any business strategy needs the involvement of senior management, previous analysis of financial and operational goals, outcomes, and proper direction of where the company is headed.
These are also needed when a company is creating recognition programs for employees.
Employees are the most valuable asset of an organization. Therefore, it should be considered as important as other corporate business strategies.
However, many companies may not have the opportunity to get senior executives and departmental heads or business unit leaders in a room at once. Therefore, creating employee recognition programs can pose huge challenges.
In such cases, a basic structure outline can help you create a quick and recognition strategy. In this article, we will discuss these outlines briefly for your convenience.
Types of Employee Recognition
Depending on employee impact and frequency, employee recognition can be divided into three categories:
- Formal recognition
- Informal recognition
- Day-to-day recognition
Formal Recognition: Formal recognition occurs once a year in an organization. The top employees of an organization earn recognition here. There are specific criteria on which employees are awarded recognition.
In formal recognition, the employer considers corporate values, excellence in accomplishing tasks, and extraordinary performance of an employee. Only a few employees ranging from 1 to 10 percent are recognized here.
Informal Recognition: informal recognition is given to employees for completing projects, accomplishing goals, and achieving certain milestones. It is not as hard and fast as formal recognition. However, employees need to show certain results for getting recognition.
Informal recognition may occur in a company on a monthly or quarterly basis. It can impact almost half of your employees.
Day-to-day recognition: This is a constant recognition process for employees. Whenever employees do something outstanding, they are appreciated for their work. This is a multi-dimensional recognition process. Here the employee receives the recognition verbally or by a handwritten note.
All the employees in a company are eligible for receiving day-to-day recognition. It boosts the morale and loyalty of the employees towards the company.
Creating a Quick Recognition Strategy
Step 1: A Quick Review
The first important thing to do for a recognition strategy is a SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for strength, weakness, opportunities, and threats. It is a technique to organize data to see what works best for the company.
Strength: While analyzing for strength, you need to consider what kind of recognition will be good for your company as well as for your employees. Which recognition strategy worked in previous years, and what resources are available to you.
Weaknesses: Here, you will need to evaluate what recognition strategies need to be improved and what is not working. Additionally, you will need to find out the disadvantages of the recognition you offer and what your employees struggle to deal with.
Opportunities: Upon evaluating your strengths and weaknesses, you will need to consider turning your strengths and weaknesses into opportunities. Additionally, you will need to consider what improvements you can bring and what will be most impactful for employees and the company.
Threats: In threat evaluation, you consider the obstacles that come in your way while recognizing employees. Here you also consider how the weaknesses prevent you from achieving your recognition goals, things challenging the success of your recognition process.
After careful evaluation, you can have certain guidelines to what you need to do, what areas need more focus, and how to make the recognition process more engaging and effective.
Step 2: Purpose of the Recognition Strategy
In this step, you determine the purpose of your recognition program. Here you clarify what the purpose of recognizing your employees is and how it will help the organization. It can outline where this program will lead the company and what can be accomplished with this strategy.
Here you need to focus on why the company should give recognition and the benefits the company and consumers can get from this program.
Step 3: Determining and Accomplishing the Goals
Before applying to any recognition program, you need to clarify the goals and objectives you want to accomplish. And when the program is applied, you need to take specific steps to accomplish those objectives.
The SWOT analysis will help you draw the results, Then everything you are applying should work toward achieving that goal. It is your responsibility to steer it towards the optimum results.
Step 4: Goals and Areas to Improve
Last but not least, you will need to plan how you can improve your employee recognition program. The SWOT analysis can once again help in determining what wrecked in your favor and what didn’t.
Use measurable data to calculate your success. Find out what you could do to make the numbers even better. It will give you ideas and insights to plan better programs and improve the goal of your employee recognition program.
Final Words
By working through each step, you can successfully create a recognition program. SWOT analysis will provide you with the necessary data and insight to help in every step.
While crafting your recognition strategy, make sure it resonates with your employees’ expectations. Also, this recognition program should help the company to achieve success as well. An excellent recognition program must address both of these concerns.