Improving Employee Service Award Programs– Part 1

According to a Gallup’s research, “actively disengaged employees -- the least productive -- cost the American economy up to $350 billion per year in lost productivity.” You may have seen this statistic a few years back and wondered how much money your business was losing to actively disengaged employees. You may have just ignored the statistic or you may have tried to do something about it, i.e. starting an employee service award program perhaps. If your company has a service award program in place, but is still seeing low engagement numbers, you are probably not alone. Dale Carnegie Training released an employee engagement white paper this year showing among employees surveyed, “29% are fully engaged and 26% are disengaged. Almost half (45%) are partially engaged.” Why don’t service award programs seem to directly impact employee engagement numbers?

As many of our readers may have found out, employee service award programs alone don’t always lift engagement levels in the long run. Service awards are generally given to employees every 5 years. If you were only recognized once every 5 years, you would probably feel great initially after your recognition event, but each month as the memory fades, you wouldn’t feel as recognized or rewarded by it. Another reason service awards alone don’t impact employee engagement is that managers and HR people are often so bogged down by the whole process, they forget how special the event is to the individual and don’t dedicate the time and personalization they should to each employee’s service milestone. Over the next two weeks, I would like to share with you 5 easy steps to take towards improving and enhancing your employee service award program to increase employee engagement.

Step 1: Change from Service Awards Only to Employee Recognition Programs

Sometimes managers use the terms service awards and employee recognition interchangeably, but they really are two different concepts. Service award programs are just one aspect of an overall employee recognition program. Service awards are important to recognize and reward, but they cannot be the only way employees are recognized if you are looking to create employee engagement. One of my clients who awarded for birthdays and anniversaries only, and was expanding her program to include a variety of new ways to earn recognition, put it to me this way, “In the past, people just got recognized because they showed up. They didn’t have to do anything but be there to earn points. That was fine, but we didn’t want to continue spending all of our budget on people who just showed up. That’s why we decided to start pushing the budget towards goals that people had to actively participate in to earn points.”

Step 2: Recognize More Often and for a Variety of Reasons that will Positively Impact your Business

When you add different ways for employees to receive recognition, your organization is going to benefit in two ways. The first is that your employees will know exactly what behaviors managers are looking for and how they can receive recognition and rewards. This is what helps to keep employee engagement stable over time. The second way your organization benefits is that your employees will know what goals you want them to achieve, which should go a long way in improving your bottom line. When you add new employee recognition goals to your program, be sure they are objectives your organization wants to achieve and that by achieving the goals, your business will be improved. I have a list of sample goals and what the desired end result of achieving the goal would be below.

Check back next week for the next 3 steps to improve your employee service award program and increasing employee engagement.