A Forbes article states that the employee recognition market is a $46 billion market and that companies spend 1-2% of payroll on employee gifts like gold watches, pins, thank-you awards, and plaques. This isn’t surprising when you consider how valuable employee recognition initiatives can be for businesses. Employee appreciation can help improve work relationships, increase employee engagement, contribute to employee loyalty, and build high-performance cultures. With these benefits in mind, forward-thinking companies are doing whatever they can to make giving and receiving appreciation a much more common occurrence in the workplace, and a peer recognition program can be an effective tool for accomplishing this. In this post, we’ll share 3 peer employee recognition ideas you can implement to build a rewarding work culture in your organization.
For years, employees have had to rely on annual performance reviews with managers to get feedback on their work. Performance reviews definitely serve their purpose, but the problem with them is that a lot of the time, employees actually spend much more time engaging with their team members or customers than they do with their immediate supervisors. As a result, many aspects of their performance can go unnoticed.
To tackle this limitation, business leaders are pivoting to peer employee recognition models instead, where colleagues are encouraged to show appreciation for one another regularly throughout a typical work week. Peer-to-peer recognition is proving to be a much more effective means of making employees feel valued since it happens more frequently, is less biased, and helps build a culture of equal recognition.
Here’s what the research on peer recognition tells us so far:
If you’re looking to improve how praise is given and received within your organization but aren’t sure where to start when it comes to moving to a peer-based model, here are a few peer employee appreciation ideas you can get started with:
Set up short and sweet 10-minute appreciation meetings once a week to give staff the opportunity to give thanks, props, and kudos. For example, Stew might use this time to thank Sandra for delivering an excellent sales presentation to a client that week. These casual meetings take very little time and are sure to leave a smile on people’s faces!
If you don’t have the bandwidth to host these separate meetings, you can dedicate 5-10 minutes of your existing weekly huddles or status meetings to recognition instead.
The best way to start building a positive work culture is to do it from the top-down. Spend time training your leadership team on how to give recognition that is timely, frequent, and specific and have them lead by example by giving recognition publicly. When upper-level management and senior leadership set the tone for how appreciation should be shown and actively participate, the rest of your staff will soon follow suit to model the same behaviour. Since employees feel valued the most when they receive praise from those higher up the ladder, it’s extremely important that leadership gets visibly involved in the peer recognition program.
If your employees are spending the majority of their workday online, why not give praise online too? Employee rewards and recognition platforms like Bucketlist Rewards simplify giving recognition, giving employees the ability to show appreciation for another publicly and in real-time. There’s even more that you can do with purpose-built recognition software, like:
By going the extra mile and re-modeling to include a peer recognition program in your organization, you can expect to see positive transformations in your company culture no matter what industry you’re in.
Interested in learning more about how to take your employee rewards program virtual? Contact us for a free demo!