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Do you want to make yours the kind of workplace where people want to work and where the best candidates compete for positions? You need to create a culture of recognition.
Creating a recognition culture can help keep your employees more engaged, retain your best employees, encourage the best performance, and draw in the most qualified job candidates. It’s all about creating a company culture in which people aren’t afraid to express gratitude or praise others for their hard work, reliability, and commitment to company goals. Follow these five steps to encourage a culture of recognition in your company.
1) Start with Support From Leadership
You absolutely can’t make a culture change in your company without the support of leadership going all the way up to the top. Change must come down from the top. Leadership at all levels should be modeling the kind of recognition behavior it wants to see from team members. When management starts handing out more recognition, team members will emulate the behavior.
2) Don’t Hesitate to Give Recognition
Recognizing your employees for their hard work, achievements, and contributions almost always makes people feel better about themselves and their work. It makes employees feel valued and seen and makes their work feel more meaningful to them.
That’s why you shouldn’t be stingy when it comes to recognition. You should begin praising and expressing gratitude to employees as soon as they’re hired and continue regularly and frequently. Every time you see an employee doing something you like, tell them so. Thank them for coming in early or staying late. Tell them they did a good job on the last work assignment they produced (if indeed they did so). Implement employee anniversary recognition rituals and recognize personal milestones like birthdays, births, graduations, and deaths. People want to be told they’re doing a good job, and they want to be treated like more than a cog in the corporate machine.
3) Implement a Peer-to-Peer Recognition Platform
Praise and recognition shouldn’t be coming just from management. You should empower team members to recognize one another. A peer-to-peer recognition platform should allow team members to directly acknowledge one another’s contributions and thank them for their support. You can buy employee recognition platforms with peer-to-peer recognition tools, or it could be as simple as a “praise wall” where employees are encouraged to write down their praise of one another on sticky notes or on a large piece of paper.
4) Make It Easy to Give Employee Recognition
The easier it is for managers to recognize team members and team members to recognize each other, the more recognition will be flying around in your company, and that means the better people will feel about themselves and their jobs. Recognition platforms need to be accessible to all employees, and employees need to be trained in how to give recognition to their peers.
Mix informal recognition platforms and programs with more formal ones – so, for example, you can have your usual Employee of the Month award alongside a social media page on which employees can post recognition for peers throughout the day-to-day. Peer recognition programs will do a lot to forge stronger connections between peers in your workplace, and will help support high employee engagement. It’s important that everyone is praising one another, because that way, there will be plenty of recognition to go around.
5) Support Employee Growth
Most people don’t take a job expecting they will stay in that job forever. Instead, they have career goals that might include working their way up the ladder or remaining open to opportunities at other companies.
Your employees will feel more valued and appreciated if you take the time to discover their career goals and help them get into a position where those things are possible. When employees feel appreciated and supported in their career growth, they’re more likely to stick around – and your business will be stronger with a workforce trained into the business for their careers.
Do you want your company to grow and prosper with a happy, engaged workforce committed to their jobs? First, you need to build a culture of recognition in your company. A pervasive culture of recognition could make yours the kind of workplace everyone wants to be, so your best employees will stick around and the pool of candidates you have to choose from will improve, too.
You may also like: Best Practices On Creating An Effective Employee Recognition Program For Your Small Business
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