How to write a simple employee recognition letter to thank and congratulate your employees

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An employee recognition letter is a powerful tool for expressing your gratitude for staff. Taking the time and effort to put one together goes a lot further than just a hasty “thank you”.

That’s not to say you should be gripped with performance anxiety. You’re not presenting an episode of This Is Your Life, you’re just telling an employee what they mean to you.

Follow our simple guide, and you’ll knock it out of the park.

Write your simple employee recognition letter:

Be personal and earnest

The most important element of an employee recognition letter is that you put the effort and time into expressing yourself.

Be honest about what impressed you so much about someone’s efforts and achievements. Share your honest feelings. It’s the only way to have a genuine emotional impact.

Get to the point

Excessively flowery language is less effective than simple, honest statements. Say what you mean, say it simply, and rely on your honesty and confidence to make the impact.

Cite specific examples of achievement

Be sure to mention exactly which projects, jobs, or achievements you’re so impressed with. Don’t be vague, or washy, about why you’re recognising someone.

It diminishes the impact of celebrating them, and feels disingenuous.

Explain why those examples mattered to the company

Talk about how your employee’s achievements or behaviour affects the company overall.

Knowing that their work has a benefit to the business as a whole gives employees greater satisfaction and pride in their work.

Focus on tangible downstream impacts

Don’t just harp on about numbers. Only a few sales people can really get fired up about making graphs bigger. If you’re going to mention the outcome of work, relate to something more human and evocative than just numbers.

Mention your values and purpose

Relate positive behaviour back to what your company stands for, and why you come in every day.

Generating lasting employee engagement means letting employee see how their achievements at work relate back to your company’s ethical core and brand purpose.

Explain why they matter to their peers

Approval and acceptance from peers is a powerful motivator. It’s a part of being human no one can escape.

Even if you don’t have an actual peer-to-peer recognition program, your employee recognition letter should mention how vital your employee’s contribution to other people was.

The most important thing is sticking to point one; be honest and personal. A thoughtful, earnest employee recognition letter becomes a trophy.

Something your employees can treasure and reflect on. Something that increases their self-worth, improves their sense of belonging in the office, and helps them engage with your brand.

peer-t0peer recognition boosted productivity in fruit pickers

How peer-to-peer recognition programs boost motivation and productivity

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Peer-to-peer recognition programs help build a sense of belonging and a positive place in a business. In turn, that leads to more motivated staff and better productivity.

A recent study from Harvard Business School (HSB) put this assertion to the test with a group of fruit pickers.

Their results back up what we tell all our clients. Recognising your staff, particularly peer-to-peer recognition, leads to happier and more productive employees.

How the study worked

HBS researched fruit harvesting staff in the Western United States. The work is relatively lonely. There’s minimal social interaction, and few chances for an employee to hear positive feedback from peers.

A sub-group of fruit pickers were asked to watched a short video. It was presented by colleague from their company, detailing how the work they do has a positive impact on the rest of the business.

The video was deliberately inclusive in tone. It focused heavily on how quality work benefited the company.  Not just the company’s success, but how they affected the work of employees further down the production queue.

The employees exposed to positive expressions about their work were more motivated and did more work.

The motivating effect showed up again in a similar lab study too. Internal recognition and affirmation had a positive effect on employee motivation and productivity.

The key conclusion

The most important line in the study is this:

“Contact with an internal beneficiary…yielded a persistent increase in productivity.”

As in, when a colleague took the time to make an employee feel good about their work and recognise its value, they did work compared to a control group.

Their peer-to-peer recognition program boosted output.

Why peer-to-peer recognition programs work

Our need to feel welcome, and our need to belong, are fundamental parts of the human experience. In the distant past it was more than just a good feeling, it was about survival.

Being part of a group increased our chances of survival. As a result, humans are bred to seek belonging.

How humans live has changed. But how we interact is still fueled by those most basic needs: We need positive interactions and we need to feel we have a valued place in a group.

Being recognised by our peers gives us that sensation. In turn, we feel more compelled to repeat the behaviour that gets recognised.

What this means for your business’ peer-to-peer recognition program

Recognition works, and feeling included matters. We could have told you that without an ambitious study like this, but it’s nice to see the evidence in black and white.

The take-home for your business is that you need to make sure your employees feel included and valuable among their colleagues.

Even if you don’t want to roll out a peer-to-peer recognition scheme, staff need to feel included and valuable. They’ll feel better about working for you, and work harder in turn.

Alongside other studies, like this one showing a link between employee recognition and improvements in mental and physical health, the benefits of prioritising recognition are clear.

It’s something you need to embrace and utilise for the health of your company and your employees.

 

Read this and you’ll thank a colleague every single day

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Thank a colleague for what they do. It improves the physical and mental condition of both that colleague and you yourself. That’s the evidence from a recent study by Portland State University and Clemson State University.

The study explained

The university staff ran a study of 146 nurses practicing in Oregon, USA. Nurses in the USA are subject to burnout at an especially high rate.

That’s due to the physical and emotional stress of their work. The stress is why they were perfect for the study.

Over three months, the nurses completed surveys about their experience inside and outside work. There was a notable correlation between nurses being offered gratitude at work and uptick of mental health.

How “thank you” boosts health

Thanking colleagues affects both their mental and physical health. The two are inextricably linked, and inform each other.

Alleviation of mental stress from being thanked is the catalyst for other health benefits.

Mental health

Improving a co-worker’s mental health is a noticeable result of taking the time to thank a colleague.

They’ll feel appreciated, and they know their work is appreciated. They enjoy a positive afterglow they’ll carry into the hours and days after hearing your thanks.

Feeling gratitude increases overall job satisfaction. And it lowers the stress employees feel while going about their work.

That lower stress makes it easier to handle difficult situations in the workplace. the result is a more overall more positive work experience.

Giving gratitude, in turn, makes us feel good. Contributing to a positive feedback mechanism gives us a sense of wellbeing of our own.

Physical health

The physical health aspect comes down to two areas – lower stress and better self-care. Both have a strong link to the mental health benefits of hearing gratitude.

On a direct level, people who feel less stress from work get sick less often, and they enjoy better sleep. But there’s also a knock-on effect; less stress leads to employees exercising more self-care.

By lowering overall stress levels and making staff feel better, the nurses in the university study showed a greater level of self-care.

When hearing gratitude, the nurses in the study were more likely to make positive lifestyle choices. In turn, that fed back into their physical health.

Time to take action

Get out there and thank a colleague doing something worthwhile. When you see someone doing well, let them know.

Not just behaviour that benefits you and your work directly. Include performance that benefits the whole workplace.

Ethical behaviour, exemplary service, improvements in their performance, or even small but worthwhile gestures for other staff.

Or, if you’re in management, encourage and facilitate your employees showing gratitude for each other. Put systems and schemes in place that make it simple for your staff to express gratitude.

Good for you, good for your business

Thank a colleague today. It’s good for you. It’s good for your co-workers. And if you’re an employer, that’s good news for more than just your conscience.

Long term, having a more mentally and physically healthy workforce is good for business. Lower stress and healthier lifestyle choices reduce the amount of working days lost to sickness.

Mentally healthy employees, with lower levels of unhealthy stress, are more likely to be productive and stay in your company for longer.

Everything you need to know about social recognition in five minutes

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Five years ago, very few HR pros were talking about social recognition. Now, it’s at the forefront of our business. And it takes up much more space in the HR world.

Having a coherent understanding of social recognition, and employee recognition, isn’t negotiable any more. Your leaders need it.

This blog outlines the basics of social recognition. Get to grips with the idea in just five minutes.

Employee recognition at a glance

To get why social recognition is so important, you need to be familiar with employee recognition overall.

Employee recognition is about validating and affirming positive actions.

It creates positive reinforcement that encourages more good behaviour. That has a knock-on effect of improving your company, and company culture.

What you’re highlighting could be many things. Anything from a metric-driven success to an example of someone living out your company’s values. When you recognise behaviour, you highlight it as desirable.

Making staff feel good about that makes them more likely to repeat it.

Keeping that recognition close to your values has benefits, too. It strengthens your company’s sense of identity and purpose. In turn, that helps you build engagement.

Social recognition explained

social recognition described at a glanceSocial recognition is recognition that doesn’t have to follow your company’s hierarchy.

The recognition is between peers, across departments, from lower in seniority to the higher. There’s no restrictions on who recognises who.

Most employees already do a version of this. Probably verbally, with a hand-written note, or through an email.

Telling each other job well done, saying thanks for some help from another team. While it’s normal, it’s limited to just those two employees.

Social recognition platforms give those expressions a public venue. It makes sure the recognition is in line with your values.

And it gives all employees a central place to post and read messages of gratitude from around the business.

When the recognition is public , other employees can see what’s important to company culture.

Then everyone can see for themselves what’s important to their colleagues and the company.

Where social recognition beats top-down recognition

As we’ve pointed out, recognition is traditionally top-down. Managers recognise their employees for notable behaviour.

That recognition is valuable, but it doesn’t have the same effect as social recognition.

Top-down recognition doesn’t empower staff, or encourage a culture of mutual appreciation.

Employees showing appreciation for each other has impacts top-down recognition can’t match.

Social recognition builds connections

social recognition connects employeesSocial recognition builds the strength of the bonds between employees. Staff feel valued and feel that their efforts are noticed and celebrated.
This improves mood at work, and builds strong connections with their colleagues.
 
It also builds attachments between employee behaviour and your company values. Increasing employee engagement depends on strong links between positive behaviour and company values. 
 
Channeling achievement through those values builds engagement with your business and your goals. It lets employees see how they’re having an impact on something bigger than their daily tasks.

Social recognition improves businesses

Individuals, teams and organisations benefit from social recognition’s effects. It makes a difference to a range of areas, including:

Teamwork

Social recognition makes teams work better together. Recognised employees see that they’re a valued member of a team.

When they feel valuable and respected, they work better with peers. In turn, they become more valuable to that team. When these patterns repeat themselves across department, teamwork is significantly uplifted.

Leadership

Leaders can take a top-down view of who recognises across a social recognition system.

This gives your managers key insight on how your employees interact (or don’t, as it might be). As we’ll explain below, managers can also capitalise on a social recognition system to recognise staff.

Ethics

When your values are celebrated daily, they come to life. Your employees see that you’re earnest about them.

And they see that employees who live them out are recognised by their peers. This creates more ethical behaviour in the future.

Wellbeing

Knowing that your contributions are valued at work reduces stress.

There’s less worry about an employee’s place in social hierarchy or team. Reducing stress is a major factor in employee wellbeing.

Sentiment

A good environment for staff improves how they see your company. By bringing your values to life, you let employees see your company as ethical.

By recognising their contributions, you make staff feel good about being associated with their colleagues and your company.

Culture

Together these benefits improve your company’s culture. The recognition helps everyone feel closer.

Closer to each other, and closer to your company and what it stands for. That makes it easier for employees to embrace your company and become more engaged staff.

The benefits of recognition are measurable

Companies that take recognition seriously see measurable boosts to measurable boosts in performance. They include:

  • Loyalty
  • ‘Recognition-rich’ working environments have a 31% lower employee turnover rate.*
  • Productivity
  • Companies that practice strategic peer-to-peer recognition cite a 32% increase in productivity**
  • Engagement
  • Employee engagement is observed to increase by 61% when employee recognition programs are offered.+
  • Profit
  • A 15% higher employee engagement rate correlates with 2% percent uplift in operating margins.~

Managers can still chip in

Opening the floor to social recognition doesn’t mean managers are left out of the conversation.

It’s still vital that leaders make sure they recognise the positive and outstanding things their staff do.

Having an open platform is also a gift to managers. It gives leaders a bird’s-eye view of who is recognising who, and for what.

Acts of recognition a manager might have missed become visible. That gives managers a chance to double-down on recognition, and offer their own congratulations.

Summing up social recognition

Social recognition is celebrating positive behaviour without relying on company hierarchies.

It’s held close to the values of your organisation, to keep employees close to your company’s values.

This builds engagement with the company. And it strengthens the bonds between employees.

Ultimately that helps you build more loyal, satisfied and productive staff.

*Bersin by Deloitte research
+ Society of Human Resource Management 2012 study
** 2015 SHRM/Globoforce survey
~ Towers Watson

8 sales promotion ideas you need to steal

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Stand-out sales promotion ideas change the game for consumer-facing businesses. You, like any business, are locked in the endless struggle to secure fresh sales. No matter what else you do as a business, you’ll eventually live and die on actually making some sales.

Almost nothing is so good it sells itself. Which is why sales is a whole industry and specialisation. And, consumers are more apathetic and jaded than ever about embracing new things. Eye-catching sales promotional capture customer attention and interest, making more likely to make purchases.

8 sales promotion ideas you should consider

Rewards

Broadly speaking, rewards work. It’s our speciality. They delight and they demand action. Attaching a voucher, gift card or digital reward to your products makes them just a bit more attractive when the customer is weighing their options or deciding whether to make a purchase.

Loyalty rewards

Customers that stick around deserve to be shown some love. You can make these schemes informal and simple or do something more robust. It could be a simple stamped card after every purchase, a store card that gives them a discount at the till, or full points-banking system that tracks purchases.

Bulk and combination discounts

As a tried and tested customer acquisition technique, it works. Assemble complimentary items and offer them at a discount when combined. Or, offer a sliding scale of discounts for customers placing the big orders. It’s not complicated or wildly imaginative, but it does work. For instance, we often find that our Shout! recognition portal partners brilliantly with our discount gift card schemes.

On-pack promotions

Catch the eye of customers when your product is on the supermarket shelf. Offer a modest reward for every sale, or dangle a really big prize like a holiday or big-ticket electronics. These prizes can be mailed out on purchase confirmation or distributed digitally. A swell of sales promotion ideas hinge on offering something of greater financial value to the customer, they’re a very effective approach.

Influencers and referrals

If you have fans, make use of them. Do some research and find out if any of your customers have an influential online presence and strike a deal for your brand to feature in their sphere of influence. Alternatively, offer a reward for any customer that uses their social group to pull in more new customers.

Buy-backs and trade ins

We’re rapidly approaching an era when companies are going to be asked to take more responsibility for what happens to their products after they’re sold. A buy-back scheme lets you address that concern while generating a reason for customers to make their next purchase with you.

When you buy-back your products, you can apply a discount to their next purchase. Similar to how video game retailers operate a trade-in system – you’ll naturally always be more generous with the store credit than the cash. For a sales promotion idea it combines ethical behaviour with a tangible reward to your customer.

You can also then control what happens to your products when you’re done with them. Recycle them or refurbish and resell them.

Financing and credit

Up-front prices can be deal-breaker when closing a sale. Offering finance deals to customers with reasonable credit makes it much more likely they’ll entertain a sale.

Alternatively, if you’re working with a trade audience, credit is a game-changing difference. Dealing with 30 to 90-day payment terms while securing materials for a job can cripple trade customers. Credit for trusted clients secures sales, and secures their business in the future.

Trial periods

Companies like Leesa Mattresses, for instance, offer guarantees of refunds after a trial of their products. It takes the sting out of committing to the purchase by offering the customer an escape hatch. If your products are high quality and meet the needs of your audience, very few will be sent back.

Flash sales and time-limited deals

Urgency is a common way to promote action. Create discounts and deals that are only available in a limited period to create a sense that the purchase has to happen now. These time-specific events prey on our fear of missing out on a great deal, creating an internal pressure to grab the bargain while it’s available.

Time-sensitive checkout discounts

Urgency combats cart abandons. A lot of online retailers notice their users often abandon carts just when they’re about to checkout. This idea offers them a time-sensitive discount on individual products in the basket, or the entire basket, as long as they check out within an hour. Or half an hour. Whatever you deem appropriate.

Ultimately the key to making sales promotion ideas work is getting over the natural apathy of your audience. Attention, getting it and keeping it, has become a currency in its own right. Whatever method you choose to rope in a few more sales, consider your audience’s urgencies. Tap into their emotions and their priorities and focus on inspiring them to act.

colleague of the month enriches everyone

How about colleague of the month instead of employee of the month?

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A lot of you want an employee of the month scheme. We’ve got the blog traffic on Google Analytics to prove it. While we’re always happy to help our clients set one up, we’ve actually have been wondering if you should be searching for colleague of the month schemes instead.

Putting colleague over employee is an important shift in what you’re trying to achieve. Let your staff pick their own winners. Give up a bit of control, and hand staff a chance to laud each other for what’s important to them.

There’s a few reasons we’ve been kicking this idea around.

Employee of the month has constraints

There are limits to employee of the month, and one of them is in the name. Employee. Singular.

Just one member of staff can be recognised for their work at any one time. Twelve a year if you really stick to it. If you have a department of more than 30 people, that’s a formal recognition scheme that can only benefit a third of your staff every year.

And, worse, it’s likely to end up getting passed around a small group of staff. If you’re using metrics, your top dogs will end up near the top of the pile every time. Which leaves you in a bind. Can you give employee of the month to the same person every month just because they’re a highest performer?

On one hand, you’re alienating most of your workforce from the scheme by being honest about who’s actually hitting the highest KPIs. On the other hand, if you deliberately spread the award around you’re not really recognising the top performer. It’s kind of a participation trophy. Also-ran and nearly-there going up on the kitchen fridge. You’ll devalue the scheme in the eyes of your employees.

Employee of the month schemes strain at their own inherent limits. Moving the focus to colleague of the month alleviates that stress.

Empower the people

Having a voice is empowering. Colleague of the month, instead of employee of the month, gives staff a voice in who deserves to be recognised.

Being part of elevating and celebrating others is also empowering in itself. It’s positive for your whole department, because It lets employees see what traits and behaviours their peers treasure. Everyone at colleague-level gets a clear view of what values and behaviours they should embrace to succeed. Everyone buys in, everyone gets a voice, and everyone benefits.

As a result, a formal recognition scheme becomes a shared experience. It’s a big change from an inscrutable boss handing down recognition for their own reasons, or a scheme doggedly sticking to performance metrics.

And there’s a good reason why you’d want to move away from top-down recognition in general; what makes staff exceptional to each other isn’t always what makes them exceptional to you.

Exceptional employees and exceptional colleagues

When you’re running an employee of the month scheme, you’re highlighting what matters to you. And, as a manager, you’re a bit biased. That’s not meant as an insult, it’s just reality; you have a different set of pressures and priorities to the people you’re managing. That has a fundamental impact on how you determine their worth at work.

I doubt you think of your own peers exclusively in terms of their KPIs. Unless you’re a bean-counting robot that values nothing but efficiency. There’s a swirl of tangibles and intangibles that make up the worth of a co-worker. Ideas, support, shared experience, opinions, attitude, and so much more. Too much for a spreadsheet.

Giving staff a chance to elevate workplace heroes from inside their own ranks means employees are recognised for what makes them valuable to the workplace as a whole. Not just to managers. It’s a huge assumption to think that what you value in staff as a manager is also what brings the most benefit to your employees.

If you do want to run an employee of the month scheme, you should. We’d encourage anyone to get involved in recognising their employees. Call the Love2shop Development team. They’d love to hear from you.

But, before you do that, seriously consider the value of opening the floor to your staff as well. Give them more voice, let them single out the people around them who bring the most to the workplace. Ask us about colleague of the month instead.

You’re killing staff morale without even realising it, and we can explain how

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Staff morale is an insidious crisis. As we’ve pointed out before, up to half of your staff are thinking about leaving. Keeping those employees in your business, and happy to be there, needs to be top priority.

Morale is more than smiling faces and chipper attitudes, though. It’s how your staff approach their work, how they treat each other, and how they see their own place in your company.

But, what you’re doing to hurt morale won’t always be obvious. There are nine ways you could be destroying staff morale without even knowing you’re doing it.

Not giving staff a voice

Workers are only human, and humans need to be heard. Their point of view needs to be considered, and their opinions need to be given weight to keep staff morale high.

If employees think their opinions on their job aren’t wanted, they’ll start to feel undervalued and ignored. Feeling that their point of view doesn’t matter to senior colleagues, morale will quickly spiral. Everyone needs to receive feedback. And leaders must be seen to seek it out.

Not recognising employees

Recognition is the one thing you could start doing today that would improve staff morale. You don’t have to wait for the budget or approval to roll out an employee engagement platform to get started. Even though they do make recognition a much easier task to manage.

Recognition, filtered through your company’s values, shows employees the value and worth of their daily work.

Not talking about the future

When you’re taking a train, you check where it’s going before you hop on. You don’t just hope the train is going somewhere nice, or blindly assume it’s going to the right place.

Staff without any idea where they’re going are like lost passengers who think they’ve got the wrong train. Looking out the windows for landmarks. Asking other passengers where they’re going. And, ultimately, thinking it’s best they hop off the train now before it’s too late to turn back.

Give employees a firm idea of where their company is going. It lets them get invested in the journey, and smooths out the fear that they’re not heading somewhere worthwhile.

Undermining your company values

So, you’re an energetic, agile company on a mission to change the face of central heating repair forever. You believe in integrity, quality and unmatched customer service. But, does your work practice live up to that? Do your leaders? And, crucially, are you both held to account?

If your values aren’t seen to be carried out, they won’t be seen as important to how you do business. It also presents your company’s leadership as two-faced; wanting the benefits of appearing to be values-led without the inconvenience of carrying those values out.

That creates a dysphoria in how your staff see your brand. Employees can’t embrace their work as driven by values if they don’t get to see those values in action.

Letting excellence go unrewarded

Outstanding behaviour doesn’t just deserve to be rewarded, it needs to be rewarded. Don’t miss the opportunity to mark special moments in an employee’s time with your company. We’ve got a whole blog post over here detailing when you need to be breaking out your rewards for staff.

Failing to find purpose

What does your company do? Beyond just revenue, profit and loss. What’s the outcome of your company’s efforts, what’s different in the world when you meet your objectives?

Pouring emotions into work, and taking personal satisfaction from it, means having something to point to when it’s all done. Something more than a graph being bigger than a graph you made earlier.

Purpose gets employees invested in what your company is, and what it does. It creates people loyal not just to their paycheques, but the differences your company makes to the world around them. Long term, that builds real engagement with your business.

Assuming quiet employees are happy

Squeaky wheels get the grease, no news is good news, and so on. As a blanket rule for work, it’s nonsense. Dissatisfaction festers in the shadows, and employees at risk of checking out and looking for another position are likely to go quiet on you.

Unhappy and silent staff have stopped looking at leadership as a way to fix issues. Restoring that relationship means getting them talking again and asking about what’s making them unhappy.

Enforcing inflexible work

Flexibility is one of the most-demanded perks across the country. And for good reason. Time outside work is at a tremendous premium, and the demands of work aren’t easing up either.

To meet the demands of professional life, many employees chip in with their personal time. No shocks for anyone there. However, it’s unreasonable for a company to demand staff give more than their contracted hours every week, but still feel entitled to tell them where all of those hours get spent.

There has to be give and take. Without flexibility, staff will grow frazzled trying to juggle ever-increasing professional and personal stresses. Ultimately, that means looking elsewhere for a more flexible working arrangement.

Stifling job scope

Employees often end up feeling like they’re in a box. In trying to streamline roles and make working processes efficient, what staff actually do can become extremely constrained.

Work becomes a production line of tasks, designed to run at max capacity for eight hours a day. It doesn’t leave much room for creativity or expression. Or any space to gather and express new skills. When staff feel trapped their relationship with their work turns hostile. In turn, that creates a huge drag on morale.

Recognising these problems, and acting to reassess your behaviour as a leader, is how you can turn the tide. Otherwise, poor staff morale only leads to problems with staff retention, productivity and engagement.

Rewarding an employee: 6 times you should step in and break out the rewards

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You have to capitalise on the moment to make rewarding employees count. The best time to be there with a reward is when the dopamine rush of achievement is still whizzing through your employee’s brains.

Here are six occasions you need to be recognising and rewarding employees. There’s more to this than just hitting a sales target.

6 situations where you should have a reward in your hand for employees:

Self-improvement

Education and skill-building are vital. Investing in staff builds employee value to your business, and your company’s value to them in turn. Celebrating employees for building their professional skills shows how much your company values self-improvement.

Reward employees for completing courses, passing tests, high achievement on their professional development work, or even for the first project they complete with a recently-learned skill set.

Volunteering for your causes

Social causes bring employees closer to your business, closer to other employees, and closer to your values. Make sure you’re rewarding staff when they use their time outside of work to support charities and causes you hold close.

That might be organising a charity sports event, sorting out charity collections in your offices, or just giving up a bit of time on the weekends.

Helping other employees

A collaborative, constructive environment is a productive environment. Make sure employees are rewarded when they build connections between teams.

That includes staff who train their colleagues, go out of their way to help other employees finish work, help new employees settle in to their role, or deliver valuable leads to their peers.

Moving and improving

The workplace can be improved without overt focus on core job roles. Staff might take responsibility for site safety, lead a health initiative, organise group exercise, provide healthy snacks for the office, or manage a tobacco reduction scheme for their department.

Be sure to reward behaviour that makes for a happier, healthier place for all of your staff to work.

Crushing targets

KPIs, sales targets, and hard numbers are the old reliable for rewards. On one hand, it’s the least imaginative reason to reward your staff, and it really only reinforces and promotes behaviour that produces the cold numbers. On the other hand, every department has to hit their numbers.

It’s still worth rewarding staff for smashing their targets, as long as you don’t fall down the rabbit hole of chasing nothing but the numbers.

Bringing values to life

Living your values in their work. Not always tied directly to a KPI-related outcome, but worth rewarding when they’re making your business closer to its best version of itself.

Your values, and bringing them to life, is a vital component of employee engagement. When staff excel by adhering to your values, be sure to reward them. It shows not just that you value achievement, but that part of achievement is bringing the company’s values to life.

Longevity and milestones

Staff often expect to see some recognition for their long service after just a year with a company. Rewarding staff for their longevity helps create a more intense and lasting connection with your business, increasing the chance they’ll stick to your business.

Make sure to be timely with when rewarding employees to maximise their benefit to your business. Anticipate when staff are going to be full of beans from a recent achievements and swoop in with a reward.