Elevate Productivity and Culture with Employee Recognition

Employee recognition programs offer a variety of benefits, including increased productivity, quality of employees, improved team culture, higher loyalty, and a decrease in employee turnover, stress, and absenteeism.

Over 50% of employees state they would like to receive more recognition from their immediate manager, and over 40% say they would like more peer-to-peer recognition. Organizations with sophisticated employee recognition programs are 12 times more likely to have strong business outcomes as a result of employees feeling valued and connected to the company culture. So, what are the different ways you can recognize your employees? 

Types of Employee Recognition

There are a variety of ways to recognize employees, from formal employee recognition programs to focusing on milestones. Let’s discuss some of the ways in which you can recognize your employees:

  • Employee spotlight
    The most common form of employee recognition is perhaps a spotlight based on merit. By implementing an employee of the month, quarter, or year program, you can make your team members feel valued and appreciated.
  • Service awards
    Recognize employees by celebrating work anniversaries and promotions, showing them that you appreciate their hard work and effort. Service awards are a simple way to autogenerate content for employee appreciation.
  • Peer-to-peer
    Create a culture of recognition in which employees feel comfortable giving recognition to each other.
  • Milestones
    Recognize employees at different stages of their career, for example, give a shoutout to new hires, or simply recognize them for milestones they hit outside of work, such as birthdays.

How to Improve Your Employee Recognition Initiatives

A successful employee recognition program typically has a way to view analytics, engage socially, and can be easily implemented and modified. There are a few different platforms we recommend for hosting your employee recognition program, which we’ll discuss below.

SharePoint Web Parts

We recommend leveraging your SharePoint intranet to spotlight employees, as this will help improve your intranet engagement by directing users back to your SharePoint site. SharePoint offers a few web parts that you can utilize for your employee recognition efforts, including news posts or digests, and custom lists.

For news-driven employee recognition, you can create news tags for new hires, promotions, or milestone anniversaries. This is more of a manual process as it requires you to write and publish the news, but it allows you to showcase specific employees and make them feel recognized. With the news you publish to SharePoint, you can create a digest that sends to customized email recipients with links that open your SharePoint intranet.

With custom lists, you can pull in data such as employee name, hire date, years of service, and more to highlight employee birthdays and anniversaries. This is an easy way to give employees quick automatic recognition and you can engage with them directly from the list.

Power Apps

Hosting your employee recognition program on Power Apps is a good solution if you are looking to customize it. Power Apps allows for extremely precise customizations, and you can enable it to do pretty much anything you want. Organizations often use Power Apps to highlight anniversaries and milestones, and it can automatically pull user data like profile images and names from other sources.

In Power Apps, you can add commenting and like functionality which is useful if you are looking for social components for your employee recognition program, as well as a recognition wall for spotlighting highlighted employees.

Power Apps can be built into a SharePoint page, which is useful for when you want to drive users to your intranet.

Praise

Praise is a custom solution for peer-to-peer recognition. The Praise option can be used in Microsoft Teams or Yammer and works with Viva Insights to showcase or filter all praise history. Praise is a quick way to show employee recognition, as you can easily send a Praise right from Teams. You can edit the note, title, and background color before sending Praise, and it often provides recommendations for who to send to, and how to send it to them, based on who you have been working with.

Praise works similarly in Yammer, and it allows you to select multiple people to send to. You can also use a Shoutout Template in Power Apps, which requires minimum development to be enabled, but can be embedded into your SharePoint intranet so your team can send Praise right from the intranet.

Klarinet Solutions is Here to Help!

In order for you to retain and attract talent, it is important that your employees feel recognized and valued. An employee recognition program helps accomplish this by showcasing employee achievements and milestones, and providing positive reinforcement so that employees feel more satisfied and connected to company culture, and as a result, show an increase in productivity and efficiency.

Let us work together to come up with a digital workplace solution that makes the most sense for your business. Get in touch with our experts today!