If you’ve just secured (or are on your way to securing) management buy-in to launch an employee recognition program, you might be feeling excited to see your ideas come to life. You might also find yourself feeling anxious about taking the next steps. What if the whole workplace incentives program is a total flop and your employee engagement with it isn’t what you imagined?
Not to worry — this can be avoided with careful planning before, during, and after you launch your recognition program. In this post, we’ll share a few ways you can maximize participation in your employee recognition program as you go through the rollout process so that you’ll be on your way to building that strong culture of connection your organization has been missing.
There are plenty of creative ways you can build recognition practices into your company culture, like encouraging managers to give recognition in departmental meetings, creating service awards, or encouraging peer to peer recognition. But ultimately, when building recognition programs you don’t want to go overboard and add so many components that they become overwhelming to participate in. This is why many leading organizations have shifted to using purpose-built recognition software. These tools keep matters simple by centralizing recognition practices all in one place for staff at all levels of the company to see. A huge plus of recognition platforms is that they are built to integrate into popular company communication tools and workflows to make giving and receiving recognition a straightforward task. Before you roll out your recognition program, evaluate how easy or complex it is to understand, and decide whether the use of employee recognition software will help you reach your goals more easily.
Building a strong culture of recognition is a team effort. The best way to inspire your whole company to participate in your workplace incentives program is to involve the company leaders within your organization first. Having your leadership team model the behavior you want to see rippled through your company as program champions is one of the best ways to make the most impact since people are likely to repeat the behaviors they see from those they look up to.
Before you launch your employee recognition program to the whole company, host a few dedicated meetings with your leadership team to:
Using this top-down approach will help set the tone for the rest of your organization to follow.
How you launch your workplace incentives program is everything. If you fail at generating enough excitement around your program or developing enough awareness around its launch, it’s not likely your staff are going to be very eager to participate.
It’s up to you to decide what marketing mediums you want to use to launch your program, but we recommend going with a marketing mix of internal communications so you have more than one touchpoint to excite your staff with for a positive impact. Some ideas are:
Now that you have some ideas on where and how you can launch your program, here are a few things to cover during your launch:
Just like with your leadership team, share the big picture of your recognition program with your staff. Explain the reasons for starting the program and the benefits you expect to see both short and long term. Be sure to always mention what’s in it for them.
Successful employee recognition programs that drive employee engagement come paired with strong communication strategies that clearly share the tangible benefits of the program.
How do you keep the buzz around your employee recognition program alive once your staff have gotten in the flow of it? Always be on the lookout for ways to shed light on your recognition program both in the office and in your internal company communications. If your company offers a hybrid working model, then you need to make sure you’re doing both.
Some ideas for increasing the visibility of your program are to:
Launching your recognition program can be a very exciting time and the start of a brand new chapter in your company’s history. We hope we’ve given you some good ideas on how to maximize participation and engagement with your new program and helped you understand the work that needs to be done before, during, and after launch for it to truly be a success.