The 5 Ws and 1 H of Planning an Employee Service Award Program – Part 5: Why

Written by Andi | Sep 16, 2015 3:00:00 PM

Recognizing employee length of service milestones is one of the most traditional reasons to award employees but a lot of companies still haven’t tackled putting some sort of formal service award plan into place.

With all of the different reasons to recognize and reward employees you might be wondering why this type of award is so important. Here are a couple of the most straightforward reasons to begin your recognition efforts with this type of program:

Part 5: Why

Turnover is expensive
These days, employees average 4.6 years with any given employer so the typical employee often isn’t even hitting the 5 year mark. This makes the 5 year milestone a significant accomplishment and something worth officially recognizing, especially when the cost of turnover is considered. Encouraging and rewarding employees who meet your company’s longevity milestones will cut down on productivity losses that occur when positions are vacant and more time and effort has to be spend on recruiting, training and other employees working more than their normal load.

Standardized awards keeps recognition relevant, timely and fair
No matter what type of employee recognition your organization is planning, relevancy, timeliness and fairness are three main aspects that should be taken into consideration. Structured service award programs that recognize specific milestones with a predetermined awards keeps your program transparent ensures each employee will know exactly what they need to accomplish to be rewarded as well as what type of award can be expected and when it will be received.

Budgeting can be simple
Planning a budget for employee recognition programs is usually one of the largest hurdles companies run into, but we're here to help! Service award programs are typically much easier than performance based programs to budget, since you will already know how many employees are scheduled to reach milestone anniversaries each year. Reviewing a forecast of how many employees are scheduled to reach each of the milestones in the next 2-3 years will help you determine the dollar amount you’d like to spend for each award as well.

Although we tackled “why” you should start an Employee Service Award Program last in this series, it’s probably something that you should really think about first. Hopefully coming full circle to this aspect will assist in wrapping up your plans and provide you with some useful information in case you’re presenting your plan for approval and need a little more backup.

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