Managing staff turnover: Employee recognition
Employee recognition has a positive impact on employee engagement, employee experience, morale and job satisfaction, especially in environments like contact centres, making it one of the most effective factors in reducing turnover and improving retention. In this quick read, we look at the importance of employee recognition and share our tips for developing an effective employee recognition program.
Why is employee recognition important?
Employee recognition matters because, no matter what level we’re working at in a business, we want to feel that our efforts are noticed and valued.
High turnover can be the result of people feeling like they are undervalued or underappreciated. Acknowledging employee contributions can directly counter this by signalling to employees that what they do in the workplace is both valued and appreciated.
What’s more, when people feel like their efforts are acknowledged, job satisfaction and morale improve; people are also more likely to feel a sense of belonging, which impacts team collaboration, workplace culture and employee engagement.
Employee recognition:
- instils a sense of purpose as people feel like their contributions meaningfully impact team and business performance
- promotes a culture of positivity and collaboration, which impacts employee engagement
- improves loyalty and productivity as employees who are acknowledged are more likely to be committed to their workplace and their role.
Team members and employees understand that businesses may go through challenging times but when employees feel valued they are less likely to leave. This makes employee recognition a key factor in retaining your top talent.
Employee recognition strategies
Using a variety of methods to recognise employees will provide effective results and ensure that your recognition program is sustainable and meaningful.
Ensure leaders recognise their people
Personalised recognition from leaders resonates with employees. It involves leaders genuinely acknowledging the behaviours and/or outputs of an individual employee. Identifying positive behaviours, changes and even the efforts that a staff member is making and commenting on them in a regular check-in will make a strong impact.
Personalised recognition should always be a key element of any employee coaching that’s delivered by a team manager or leader. As part of an employee coaching program, it is a key element in celebrating success and progress, helping to keep employees motivated.
A personalised approach to recognition should consider an employee’s preference for recognition, and can involve public or private recognition. It is key to developing a culture of recognition and will lead to both improved employee morale and more engaged employees.
Foster peer-to-peer recognition
Encouraging employees to notice and celebrate each other’s efforts and successes fosters a positive workplace culture. You can formalise this by implementing something like a company values board, where people can give a ‘shout out’ to colleagues, or running a regular awards event asking people to nominate colleagues for specific awards.
Set up a calendar
It’s important to not just recognise the big achievements where someone has had a particularly successful sales month or worked on an innovation. Remember to also recognise long-term commitment and dedication by celebrating work anniversaries and other key milestones, such as getting to the end of the financial year or implementing a new software system or program. Consider how you can structure team meetings to include highlights of recent team successes and high performance from individuals.
Share customer feedback
Customer and client feedback can provide a great opportunity to recognise individuals and teams. Highlight improvements to customer satisfaction scores and share qualitative feedback where individuals have received praise from a customer.
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Employee recognition tips
Employee recognition programs can ensure that employee recognition efforts are consistent, sustainable and personalised, and feel genuine to employees. There’s no point carving out one day to highlight successes. For employee recognition to make an impact in reducing turnover, it will need to be implemented across an organisation.
Use software
YakTrak helps embed a coaching culture, ensuring regular check-ins with staff and opportunities to recognise employee efforts, behaviours and outputs. YakTrak sets up a rhythm for on-the-job workplace coaching, motivating people to keep improving after they’ve completed formal development and training.
Motivate employees with rewards and incentives
How can you reward employees as part of your recognition efforts? Consider the following ideas:
- Take the team out of the office for lunch, bowling or to the movies etc.
- Give vouchers or monetary prizes as part of awards events
- Use bonuses as part of performance programs
- Offer upskilling and leadership pathways to top performers
- Implement flexibility rewards (e.g., work-from-home or shift preferences).
Encouraging leaders to start implementing recognition strategies can have an immediate effect on engaging and motivating employees.
Read more about how you can create an employee engagement strategy and employee retention strategies.
Photo by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash