Recognize Your Employees

Your employees work hard for you, so recognizing their effort is the least you can do. In exchange, you’ll reap many tangible benefits, such as reduced turnover and increased employee engagement. To properly acknowledge an employee, you should identify their contribution and sincerely explain how they have made a difference. Where possible, publicize their accomplishments, whether in a team meeting or on your website. You should also create a culture of gratitude in which you encourage employees to recognize each other’s contributions.

Steps

Thanking Individual Employees

1. Chat with your staff. Something as simple as stopping by to talk to employees will make them feel recognized. Stop by on a Friday afternoon so that employees can feel validated before heading off to the weekend.
   • You don’t have to say much. Ask them how their week went and what their plans are during the weekend. Be prepared to share your own plans.
   • Some employees are uncomfortable talking to the boss, so note if they don’t have much to say. You can recognize them in other ways.
2. Write a thank-you note. Almost 75% of people save handwritten thank-you notes. You don’t have to say much. Remember not to give a generic thank-you, but identify the accomplishment and explain its significance.
   • For example, you can write something like, “Jaxon, thanks for working late all last week. We’ve closed the quarter with the most sales ever, thanks to you.”
   • You have to be sincere. Accordingly, you shouldn’t write a thank-you note unless you really have a reason to thank them.
   • Write out thank-you notes ahead of time. For example, write “Kevin, I want to thank you for” and then leave the rest blank. When you think of something, you can fill in the rest of the sentence. By writing notes like this ahead of time, you’ll be on the lookout for excellent performance to reward.
3. Buy small tokens of appreciation. The gift doesn’t need to be large. In fact, it should be proportional to the accomplishment you are rewarding. If someone stayed late on Friday afternoon, you can give them a small gift costing no more than $10. However, someone who increased your department’s sales by 50% should be given a much larger reward, in addition to a bonus.
   • Try to find out what your employee likes ahead of time. Generic gifts are okay, but it’s better to give them something you know they’ll appreciate.
   • For example, where do they get coffee in the morning? You can get them a $20 gift card to the coffee shop.
4. Take your employee to lunch. If you don’t know what to give someone for a gift, then take them out to lunch and pick up the tab. This is a great gift because you can get to know your employee by asking them questions about their life.
   • Be honest with yourself. If you aren’t that interested in talking to your employees, then don’t take them to lunch, which could be awkward. Your employee will pick up on the vibe that you aren’t really interested in talking to them.
   • However, to facilitate conversation, you can have them choose a coworker to come along.
5. Tell your employees when you hear them complimented. You might be at a meeting with other department heads when one of them praises a member of your team. Be sure to relay this compliment to your employee.
   • All you need to do is drop by someone’s desk and say, “I just spoke to Carl in Accounting. He said you helped him reconcile some numbers last Thursday. He couldn’t stop praising how helpful you were.”
   • You can also create a recognition bulletin board. Print out emails from people complimenting your team members and post the email to the board.
6. Use small rewards to build momentum. You can be strategic with the rewards you give. For example, a mediocre employee might need a lot of reinforcement right out of the gate. Remember to celebrate small accomplishments, such as someone’s first sale or their first week on the job.
   • Of course, an employee eventually needs to do excellent work without the positive reinforcements. But it can’t hurt to reward people early, so that you can reinforce positive work habits.

Publicizing Your Employees’ Accomplishments

1. Compliment staff at meetings. Your staff meeting is an opportunity to praise employees in front of their colleagues for outstanding effort. Take advantage of these moments. They don’t cost anything, and you can increase employee performance by doing so.
   • All you need to say is something like, “I need to give a shout-out to Melissa’s excellent work on the Kingsley Account. I heard back from Arthur Kingsley himself, who told me Melissa had answers to all of his questions.”
   • However, you must be timely. Preferably, you should recognize someone within a week of the event that warrants the praise.
   • Spread around some of the love. If you only compliment the same one or two people, then the other staff will become resentful. However, don’t feel obligated to praise someone if they don’t deserve it.
2. Send a note to someone’s supervisor. Instead of praising someone directly, you can praise them by sending an email to their direct supervisor. Make sure to copy the employee on the email.
   • For example, you can write something like, “Tom, I just wanted to give you a heads up on what a great speech Chris gave to the company’s shareholders yesterday. She’s a credit to your unit and I’m sure she’ll go far.”
3. Celebrate birthdays. Everyone has a birthday, and you can make them feel special by having the entire office recognize it. Shut down an hour early (if possible) and gather the entire staff in a conference room for cake and other treats.
   • You can also recognize employees for “business birthdays,” i.e., milestones such as 20 years with the company. However, you still need to follow the advice in this article—make sure the recognition is tailored to the employee and mentions specific things they have done for the company. Simply sending a plastic keychain won’t cut it.
4. Name an employee of the month. Walk into any grocery store and you’ll probably see people’s pictures on a wall as employees of the month. Do something similar in your office. If you don’t want to put up people’s pictures, then give them a plaque or other gift.
   • Also post your recognition to your website, if there’s space to recognize accomplishments.
   • Feel free to skip a month if you don’t think an employee has done anything to warrant recognition. You don’t want employees to think all they need do is “wait their turn” to be given recognition.
5. Avoid recognizing some employees publicly. True recognition must be tailored to the employee. If someone doesn’t want public recognition, the worst thing you can do is to ask them to stand up in front of their co-workers as you talk about them.
   • Be alert to how your employees handle public recognition. Do they blush when having to speak in front of others? They might be shy.
   • If you sense an employee hates being publicly praised, then choose some of the other options discussed in this article. A thank-you note might be better.
6. Put on a recognition ceremony—the right way. Some larger businesses have monthly or annual recognition ceremonies. Unfortunately, these ceremonies usually hold little meaning for employees because they are not individualized. Instead, an employee is given a plaque by someone who they don’t really know, and the praise is general.
   • A better approach is to make sure that the person giving the award knows the value of each employee’s contribution. Accordingly, don’t have someone from Human Resources give the award. Instead, a direct supervisor should.
   • The supervisor should also write down in detail how the employee has contributed to the company. Be specific. For example, “Michael’s first five years with the company has seen a 120% growth in revenue, most of it in his department alone” is much better than “Michael is such a great member of the team.”

Creating a Culture of Gratitude

1. Ask employees if they feel valued. Recognition involves more than naming an employee of the month. Instead, you must also create a culture of gratitude. Begin by asking staff whether they feel appreciated. For example, you can create a survey on SurveyMonkey or ask them in individual meetings.
   • Also ask people what their idea of a fun event is. Look for patterns. For example, most of the fun events probably involve food.
   • Ask employees how they would prefer to be recognized. Publicly? Individually? Cash? Non-cash rewards?
2. Be available. Time is valuable, so having an open-door policy tells your staff you value them. Make sure to set aside your work if they do come in to talk. It’s rude to be scrolling through your email as staff members are trying to talk with you.
3. Support peer-to-peer recognition. Tell your staff that on Thursdays everyone needs to thank a coworker for something they have done over the past week for them. If they can’t think of anything, then just thank the colleague for being there.
   • Don’t make people sit in a conference room as they thank each other. This is too much of a chore. Instead, announce “Thank-You Thursdays” by email and leave it to employees to thank each other.
   • Remember to set the tone and thank each member of your staff. Your employees will follow your lead.
4. Encourage mentoring. Mentoring helps seasoned employees and new hires flourish. You give established employees a boost of confidence by trusting them enough to mentor.
   • Mentoring also allows the mentor to recognize the mentee’s accomplishments, thus increasing the self-confidence of new hires.
5. Help employees grow. Prove that you value employees by giving them opportunities to develop as people and professionals. Encourage your staff to take classes outside of work and reimburse them for the tuition.
   • Also pay for employees to attend trainings or an annual conference.
   • You can also create a learning library. Buy books, audiobooks, and videos that employees can check out and take home. Also solicit their input about what material the library should stock.
6. Treat the entire office. You can change the culture by having fun events for all staff members. This differs from individually recognizing people. Instead, you are giving a thank-you to the entire office, which is much more inclusive.
   • For example, schedule something fun on Mondays to ease people back into work. You can buy coffee, donuts, and bagels for your staff to enjoy.
   • Schedule a dinner for the entire team once a month and pick up the tab. By getting to know your employees in a social setting, you can find out what motivates them as well as what triggers negative reactions.
   • Also think about shutting down the office early on a Friday afternoon so that everyone can start the weekend early.
7. Don’t forget your part-time employees. It can be very easy to overlook part-time employees as well as temps. You shouldn’t. They want to feel recognized just as much as your full-time staff. Include them in team dinners and praise them during staff meetings.
8. Discourage blaming. Blame is the worst kind of recognition. Blame is also contagious, so your office can soon descend into a culture of back-stabbing. Actively discourage blaming in your staff meetings as well as in your individual interactions with staff.
   • For example, you can say, “It’s not really important who is to blame for the printer running out of ink. I’m just interested in making sure we have the problem fixed so it doesn’t happen again.”
   • Also own up to your own failures. This can create a sense of security in the office, as your team members realize they can fess up to mistakes without fear of punishment.
   • Of course, sometimes you need to know who is at fault so that you can help them learn how to avoid making the mistake. Call employees to your office and ask what happened. Stress that you aren’t going to punish anyone, you just realize training has fallen short somewhere.

Sources and Citations

See also

• Create a Productive Working Environment
• Be Appointed to a Board of Directors
• Become a Better and Effective Team Leader
• Develop a Consultant Team
• Set Up an Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
• Retain Good Employees
• Be an Artist Manager
• Build a Management Team
• Use an In Basket
• Write an Employee Handbook

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