Did you know that nearly 50% of employees feel underappreciated in their current role?
If you run a business, you should do everything in your power to make employees feel appreciated. After all, if employees feel as though you care about them, they’ll likely perform better.
Read on, and you’ll discover some employee recognition ideas that’ll lead to an improvement in employee morale. Implement these strategies and employees will feel as though they’re an essential part of your company.
Let’s begin!
1. Provide Additional Compensation
One of the ways you can make employees feel as though they’re recognized is by providing financial rewards.
So, you might give someone a financial reward if they manage to land a client, or if they contribute an idea that saves the company a lot of money.
You might also want to consider the option of offering employees a bonus at the end of the year, based on a percentage of the total profits. In doing so, employees will feel as though their hard work throughout the year counted for something.
If you’re going to go down this route, make sure you bring your accountant on board. With their help, you’ll be able to figure out how you can provide this extra compensation without jeopardizing the future of the company.
2. Give Employees a Chance to Be Heard
In many cases, making employees feel recognized simply comes down to giving them a chance to be heard.
Following this, you might want to create some open office hours, wherein people can book some time with you.
During this time, you should give employees the chance to talk about the things that are bothering them within the company. This could include things such as career progression, or maybe even the way they’re being treated by their managers.
3. Provide Experiences
Earlier, we mentioned that you could provide financial rewards if you want employees to feel recognized. Yet, it’s worth noting that you can also offer experiences if you want employees to feel as though you value them.
It’s because of this that you should think about offering some kind of employee retreat.
This is when you take employees to a certain destination, and you make the event feel like a holiday. Now, you can talk about work-related tasks during this retreat, but you also want to make sure the event is going to be fun.
You might want to ask employees for some advice in terms of where you should hold this retreat. By bringing them into the planning process, they will feel recognized, and this can lead to better results when the event finally takes place.
If you don’t like the idea of an employee retreat, you might want to consider taking employees on a team-building exercise instead. This kind of event is usually shorter, and often less intense than a retreat.
During a team-building exercise, you try to improve the relationships between employees. In some cases, this will involve some kind of physical activity, wherein you do something together as a team.
Yet, in other instances, it might just be a discussion. So, you might act as a moderator as employees discuss some of the challenges they’re facing with their role.
Note that if you want these events to have a significant impact on your company, you need to hold them consistently.
Therefore, if possible, you might want to set a specific date on the calendar that’s associated with these kinds of events. This will give employees something to look forward to, while also creating some consistency.
4. What Do Employees Want?
If you want employees to feel recognized, you may want to take a straight-forward approach and just ask them what you can do to make them feel recognized.
One way you can do this is by holding a quarterly meeting, wherein employees can talk about the changes that they’d like to see.
The other option is to send employees an email each month, which allows them to provide some feedback. You might do this by creating a questionnaire that employees can fill in, and you can do this with the help of Google Forms.
Creating employee feedback forms from scratch can be a bit difficult. However, you can make things easier by emulating existing surveys.
5. Celebrate Your Employees
Another way you can make employees feel recognized is by ‘celebrating’ them.
What this means is that you hold ‘mini-parties’ should there be a significant event in the life of an employee. So, if it’s someone’s birthday, you might take everyone out for a meal.
Or, you may just want to take everyone out, whenever there is a ‘work anniversary,’ of which relates to the date that someone joined the company.
If you can’t afford to take everyone out, you may just want to consider giving the employee in question a small gift. This could be something small like personalized lapel pins, or even an Amazon gift card that allows them to buy whatever they want.
Managing all this can be a little bit tricky, and so you may want to put someone in charge of keeping track of this information. If you have nobody that can do this, you might just want to spend a day or two logging these dates on your calendar.
Will You Implement These Employee Recognition Ideas?
If you use these employee recognition ideas, employees should feel as though you appreciate them.
That said, if you use these tactics, you probably won’t experience a significant improvement overnight. It takes time to improve the way employees feel, and you’ll need to put in some consistent work before employees experience a shift in emotion.
Following this, you just need to implement these tactics and accept the fact that it’ll take some time for the benefits to kick in. If you can do that, there’s no doubt that your business will experience some serious improvements in the near future.
Did you enjoy reading this post? If you did, make sure you visit our blog to read more content like this!