Finding areas to improve your employee recognition scheme often requires looking deeper into the behaviours behind reward and thinking outside the box to find the little nuances that can make a big difference.
Here, we’ll look at some of the elements of employee recognition you may not have thought of to help find new ways to improve your employee recognition scheme.
Be wary of biases
Fairness and equality is a hugely important aspect to any employee recognition scheme. Any well-meaning individual wants fairness and to treat people equally. However, unconscious bias can often play a part.
Research has shown that typically managers and colleagues are more likely to reward or commend a colleague they can see in person.
In a world where flexible working and remote working have provided much positivity and many benefits for both employers and employees, be wary that they’re not causing unconscious bias and that this doesn’t play out in any employee recognition scheme.
Unconscious bias doesn’t just surface for situations where individuals can physically see their colleagues, but where they can see the work of their colleagues too.
Often work goes unnoticed if it’s not physically seen or if it’s taken for granted and it’s important to not let any employee recognition scheme accentuate this.
Making employees and managers aware of these unconscious biases during training or when implementing peer-to-peer recognition can help create a fairer and more equal employee recognition scheme.
Consider the broader picture behind positively received behaviours
Certain behaviours may appear to be positive for the team or business on the surface. However, they may be doing the individual harm.
Overworking, picking up extra work and going the extra mile may be indicative of a colleague with the best intentions who deserves to be rewarded. However, does this speak more of poor job design? Or other team issues? Furthermore, working extra hours shouldn’t be encouraged or in-fact rewarded.
Feedback on the types of rewards handed out combined with data on employee health and wellbeing, absenteeism along with individual feedback from employees may help uncover any issues such as these.
Peer-to-peer recognition technology, such as that we’ve developed for our clients at caboodle, will help in providing this data as well as making it easier and more efficient for employees to recognise their colleagues digitally through their employee benefits platform.
Discover our innovative reward and recognition platform for more.
Make it personal
For recognition to be effective it must be genuine. By all means, businesses can guide recognition through the ideas mentioned above such as through training, but that’s all it must be, guidance.
Whether it’s manager-led recognition or peer-to-peer recognition, recognition of personal achievements or milestones should be encouraged and facilitated.
Employees mustn’t feel as though they can only recognise colleagues for their professional achievements.
Peer-to-peer recognition technology can support this too. The reward and recognition technology we’ve developed for clients includes personal and professional Ecards designed to facilitate both personal and professional recognition.
Data taken from this kind of technology can help identify areas where teams could benefit from stronger social connections.
Teams who recognise each other more professionally rather than socially or personally could benefit from programmes which encourage stronger social connections to boost performance.
Align your employee recognition scheme with your values
Recognition, particularly peer-to-peer but also manager-led, can be a great tool to strengthen company values and culture.
When encouraging and facilitating recognition, encouraging recognition for demonstrating the values of the businesses can help in this instance.
Through peer-to-peer recognition on the reward and recognition platform we provide to clients, the professional Ecards employees can send to each other have the option of including a company value for the businesses to show recognition for demonstrating this value in the employee’s work to help strengthen these values.
Furthermore, where values are closely linked with KPIs and important business objectives, strengthening and rewarding these values will improve business performance.
Utilise the right technology
Face-to-face recognition should always remain hugely important in any employee recognition scheme. However, to deliver an effective scheme, technology must be utilised correctly.
This is particularly true for companies based across several locations be it nationally or internationally.
Technology should facilitate monetary and non-monetary rewards digitally across international borders, encourage and facilitate peer-to-peer recognition that strengthens company values and host effective reward schemes and ideas digitally to be accessed by employees wherever, whenever.
At caboodle, we provide all this and more for companies of all shapes and sizes to help businesses create more effective employee recognition schemes.
For more, discover the innovate reward and recognition platform we provide to clients globally.