Why Formalise Your Employee Recognition Program

Why Formalise Your Employee Recognition Program

TRICIA MIKOLAI
Managing Director - Oceania BI WORLDWIDE

It's a good question: why should you formalise your employee recognition program? There comes a tipping point when your organisation will outgrow spreadsheets for tracking service anniversaries and when leaving recognition up to managers creates an inconsistent employee experience. You will also discover that your employees have high expectations regarding how often they should be recognised and how much they want to share it socially. Further, you'll find your team spends too much time tracking reward spend and trying to report FBT - not a good value of their time when it can be automated.

When you near that tipping point, here are the benefits to consider by creating a formal recognition program.

Senior Leadership

Your senior leadership team is focused on the financial objectives of the organisation. To best meet those objectives. every employee needs to be focused, responsible, productive and customer-centric: what most would call an -engaged" employee. Unfortunately, research shows that 87% of employees are not engaged at work'. Yet, according to analysis by Aon Hewitt, every incremental percentage of employees who become engaged predicts an incremental 0.6% growth in Sales.

Other Gallup research indicates that organisations with highly engaged employees outperform their peers by 147% in earnings per share, with 41% lower absenteeism. 10% higher customer loyalty and 70% fewer safety incidents.

Focusing on employee engagement clearly benefits the organisation - but why make it formal? The primary reason is measurement. Senior leaders won't get accurate. Senior leadership real-time data across dozens of program metrics using a spreadsheet. Without measurement, neither planning nor change can take place.

Another reason is communication. A recognition program serves as the hub to communicate Employ corporate objectives and reinforce cultural behaviours, and it provides the tool to circulate that information consistently and evenly throughout all levels of the organisation.