Employee recognition is critical to business success. Workers desperately need their efforts to be seen and appreciated by business leaders. In addition, if staff do not feel properly valued, they quickly leave for workplaces that are more caring and attentive to their needs. Businesses use employee recognition programs to track performance and ensure that workers are receiving praise and awards appropriate to their accomplishments. However, a more powerful tool for keeping employee satisfaction high is an established culture of recognition.
This is a workplace culture, which expresses gratitude freely from all corners of an organization. Thus, workers feel incredibly supported and valued for their contributions.
In practice, a workplace culture of recognition looks like this:
Leaders Who Regularly Celebrate Employees
In a workplace that has a well-established culture of recognition, leaders go out of their ways to notice and express gratitude for the effort and achievement of employees. Appreciation is regularly supplied from the top down to ensure that employees feel seen and heard. It also ensures that employees feel supported and motivated to continue delivering high levels of performance.
A culture of recognition blends different types of recognition for maximum efficacy. Often, workplaces with a recognition-based culture maintain structured employee recognition programs, like Years of Service and Employee of the Month, which give workers rare and formal awards to pursue. Still, leaders within these organizations also feel free to provide unstructured praise and rewards, like a handshake after an excellent presentation or a team email expressing thanks in the middle of a difficult project.
Celebrating staff with a variety of forms of recognition helps leaders reach every employee’s unique drive. Receiving regular reassurance that leadership is paying attention helps employees maintain high morale and high performance. Thus, leaders working within a culture of recognition often find employees happier, more productive, and generally easier to manage — which makes business success less difficult to achieve.
Employees Who Give Thanks for One Another
Leaders are not the only members of an organization who contribute to a culture of recognition. Any workplace culture requires buy-in from the workforce to thrive. This means a recognition-based culture must include participation from staff to ensure effective support.
In some organizations, employee buy-in for a culture of recognition involves coworkers and colleagues expressing gratitude and support for one another on a regular basis. Most often, this recognition is unstructured, though staff celebrate the recognition of certain milestones. Coworkers observe the efforts and achievements of their peers, and they send messages or gifts of appreciation. This helps to uphold a strong culture of recognition within a workplace. At the very least, workers should not feel compelled to participate in cutthroat competition with one another. This lowers self-esteem and centers the wrong goals for employee effort.
Feedback Cycles That Consistently Improve Workplace Systems
Leaders recognize employees and employees recognize one another. In turn, employees must also recognize the actions and effort of their leaders. What’s more, in a strong and effective culture of recognition, employees are free to provide feedback to their leaders. The leaders in turn use that feedback to improve systems throughout the organization.
Leaders are responsible for creating and maintaining processes to improve the function and flow of the organization. However, leaders are not always well positioned to see the progress of their plans. As a result, leaders need to be open to feedback from employees who encounter challenges in established processes. Furthermore, leaders need the skills to devise workable solutions.
This is equally true in recognition programs. As leaders provide feedback on employee performance, employees should be encouraged to offer feedback on recognition-related processes and other issues affecting effort and achievement. This element of the culture of recognition is critical for lasting success.
Better Performance, Lower Turnover, and Other Benefits
It is relatively easy to identify organizations that have established cultures of recognition because they all boast similar advantages over their competitors. Typically, a culture of recognition encourages employees to give their all in their work, resulting in better performance for the entire company. Because employees tend to feel more fulfillments within a culture of recognition, they are less likely to search for other career opportunities, which means an organization is less likely to suffer from high turnover rates. In fact, top talent gravitates toward businesses with recognition-based cultures, further improving a company’s productivity and profitability.
