Recognising your employees and rewarding them for their hard work and achievements is essential to ensure you build and maintain a positive, engaged and motivated workforce. However, when it comes to recognition, this doesn’t have to come at a great expense to your company. In fact, some of the simplest ideas are completely cost-free! With a new financial year just started, this is the perfect time to think about how you can build a culture of recognition into your workplace and it is possible to do this, no matter the size of your business or your budget.
Here are some of our top recommendations for ways to implement recognition in the workplace which won’t break the bank:
- A simple “Thank You”
Starting off with the simplest and zero-cost way to implement recognition into your everyday working life, simply saying “thank you” or “well done” to an employee can make their day. If you think about how busy people often are in the workplace, the fact that you have taken the time out of your day to talk with them or send them a thank-you message will make them feel appreciated and as though their contribution really matters. Although it can be a nice gesture, you don’t always need to give a reward to your employees when practicing recognition. In fact, as employee appreciation should be part of your everyday practice at work, it would get expensive very quickly if we did this! - Give them a work-related treat
If you do want to give your employee(s) a treat for their hard work, there are more unconventional rewards that you could give than the typical gift card or bottle of bubbly. Why not reward them with something that might make their working day that little bit better such as an extra day’s holiday, a longer lunch break or an early finish for that day or week. - Presenting regular awards
Whether this is an employee of the month award or recognising key employees each quarter or year, many businesses have found a regular awards programme to work well for them. Publicly recognising employees can be a good option for recognising particularly impressive performance or achievements which warrants more than the usual “thank you”. And these can be easily tailored to meet your budget – you could give each employee receiving an award a small token of your appreciation such as a bottle of wine or it could simply be a place on the employee honours board, where the most recent award winners are showcased. Furthermore, if you wanted to invest more into rewards for these winners, then you could simply change the number of employee awards or frequency that they are given out to manage company costs. - Adopt a more formal employee recognition programme
Another idea is to introduce a more formal recognition and rewards scheme – this will allow you to set guidelines on how employees should be rewarded and for what reasons, ensuring a more uniform and fair approach across the business. Employees may earn points for meeting their objectives, displaying company values or exceeding targets and these could then be redeemed for small rewards which they get to choose themselves. By rolling out a more formal recognition scheme, it will be a lot easier to monitor and maintain in the long-term. Whilst this might sound like it is a costly option, it doesn’t have to be as recognition schemes can be tailored to meet your needs and budget. The advantage of this option over the others is that you will be able to monitor the recognition going on in your organisation and the buy-in of different departments and staff members into the scheme.
About Each Person
To find out more about the Each Person employee recognition and reward scheme, visit www.eachperson.com.