KPI’s and employee awards in employee recognition programs

Key Performance Indicators in employee recognition programs are essential

Once you’ve established the program goals for your employee recognition program, now, you need to attach specific measurement criteria or goal posts, if you will, for when performance hits a level where it triggers employee recognition within the scope of your program. I hope that makes sense.

Another way to think of this is your job is to provide guidelines to your managers on when it is appropriate to give tangible employee recognition. Basically, what behaviors or results do you want your managers to recognize? That’s what you’re defining.
Speed, commitment, focus, passion for the business, teaming, knowledge sharing — all potential goals that you’ll need to figure out how to measure progress.

Surprisingly, this is actually a rather tricky task as well because money again, we’ve talked about that that that’s not the answer. The employee recognition needs to be personal and have a large enough breadth that it will capture the span of your employees.

Employee Awards
As mentioned here, you can use symbolic employee awards. You should think about levels of success depending on the employee’s performance. And on those symbolic awards, they could be certificates of achievement, trophies, things like that.

And then within each level, is it a different type of employee awards or different type of certificate? Maybe it’s a certificate first and then a trophy next. Options are a really good idea in employee recognition. The more, the better. Although in the beginning, it’s best to keep it manageable and roll out a successful program with limited rewards then expand as the program gains merit. So again, you may kind of pilot a program first and then go in and, you know, start expanding options.

Relevant employee rewards
Awards need to be relevant. New York City had a blackout in 2002 something. At Oxygen, pins were made in the shape of a light bulb that were given to the team of folks who help keep everyone informed and get the company back up and running.

The CEO told all employees to thank anyone who had gotten a light bulb employee award as they got the company running again. They were all handed out on card stock with a note from Geri, our CEO. The note was duplicated but all were signed by her. So it’s very, very relevant.

NBC did the same for the thousand or so employees working on the Olympics. They give out the coolest pen with a note as an employee award from the president of Media Works. I was so proud to display that pen as it represented a lot, of blood, sweat and tears that went into pulling that whole show off. Look that’s not a lot of money but it is very, very relevant to what was going on at the company at the time.

Now to clarify that last point. Yes, your manager should say thank you for work accomplished. Those two simple words go a long way. But your program is about more than those two words. It’s about taking it to the next level of recognition. That doesn’t replace saying thank you, it merely enhances the thank you, actually.