4 types of employee recognition

Working for a company that values and rewards its people may boost your motivation and general attitude about your job. Understanding how to encourage and retain employees who are satisfied with their employment is aided by learning about employee appreciation and the difference it can make. In general, recognition is a special act of recognizing and rewarding the company’s employees for their work ethics, contributions that they made to the company, and overall advancement. According to Harvard Business Review, making employees feel more appreciated and supported might benefit the individual and the company as a whole. Recently, another survey was conducted by Workhuman and the results were pretty surprising. For example, according to the survey employee appreciation had a direct beneficial effect on retention in 68 percent of businesses. On the other hand, 51 percent of the employees are thinking of quitting their current job and searching for a new one, simply because they do not receive recognition. In this article, we will discuss four different types of employee appreciation, their effectiveness, and their effect on the workers.

Day-to-day recognition

Celebrating employees’ success daily might be beneficial not only for the workers themselves but also for the managers since they would get to know their colleagues better and create stronger bonds. Employee appreciation and acknowledgment should be accessible, decentralized, and regular on a daily basis. Sometimes workers are accomplishing small things which should be appreciated and not always the central leadership may notice it. In this case, managers must express regular gratitude since the manager-employee connection is vital to the employee experience.
The following things may potentially trigger day-to-day appreciation, for example, if the employee is helping other teammates, actively reaching his targets and pursuing leads, showing his leadership within the company, and speaking at companies or other important events. The main question is how a manager can show appreciation towards his employee? Start with a simple “thank you”, since sometimes the power of words is underestimated, but sometimes it can make a difference. You may send a note of gratitude or give a public shout-out, either in the office or online in your team chat.

Informal recognition

Informal acknowledgment sometimes may look similar to the day-to-day one, but it should occur only when it is deserved. Informal “prizes” should be unique, spontaneous, meaningful, and consistent. When to give informal recognition? Some of the situation examples may include: an employee overachieving his monthly targets, delivering better results than initially anticipated or a manager can try a “spot recognition” method. This approach seems to work pretty nicely among the various companies, it is given to a worker for a specific behavior, contribution, or when milestones appeared. What is more, you can show appreciation to your employees straight away or whenever you think it would be the perfect time for it.
On the other hand, you may offer your worker flexible hours, or a day off. Informal recognitions are useful and easy to implement, especially if your company prepares for you a list of criteria that you can use in order to evaluate your worker’s efforts.

Formal recognition

Formal employee recognition should also be linked to a remarkable employee achievement or milestone and should be accompanied by a meaningful and significant reward. Formal employee recognition, in contrast to day-to-day appreciation or informal recognition, is centralized, which means it normally exists inside a defined program and is overseen by your Human Resources or People Operations teams. Most organizations develop their own unique recognition programs, but the core values are similar. For instance, a company should be realistic and create measurable objectives, analyze programs' effectiveness, ask you, employees, for feedback and improve it if needed, lastly, sharing success stories around the company, may motivate workers to participate and even make them more passionate about theory occupation. The formal recognition award should be given to the employee if he has done some significant work, demonstrates his passion for the company and its values, or if he brainstorms and implements new ideas within the team.

Bonuses

Everyone is familiar with bonuses and always tries to get them, the company’s employees are no exception. However, there are multiple kinds of bonuses that can be given to your worker. incentive bonuses include referral and retention bonuses. Employees who propose candidates for available positions receive referral bonuses, which leads to the hiring of these individuals. On the other hand retention bonuses are given to the valued employees in order to show the company’s gratitude towards them, their loyalty, and hard work.
Performance bonuses are also widely used in many companies and employees are rewarded with them for their outstanding work and contributions. Such bonuses may be given to the individual or even to the team or the whole department. Performance bonuses can be given in the form of a gift card, cash, stock options, or even a small holiday trip.