How Acknowledging Your Best Employees Can Help Keep Them

Recognizing and praising employees who do a great job is one of the most important things you can do. Why? Employees who are praised develop more engagement in the workplace. They care about what happens on the job and to the company. And employees who have high levels of engagement are more satisfied on the job and less likely to leave it.

If they are less likely to leave, that boosts your company’s retention rates. High retention rates mean you have a workforce that is as productive as it can be. If you have to replace people, they will be on a learning curve for a period of time, and unlikely to work at peak productivity during that time. There may also be gaps before the hiring process is complete, where there is no replacement. Replacing employees is also costly.

So employee recognition can help boost productivity and keep hiring costs down over the long term. Here are some tips on how to acknowledge your best employees.

 

Make top employee recognition a goal

It sounds obvious, but if you don’t explicitly think about steps to employee recognition, it’s not likely to become a reality. Set the initial criteria for top employees. Should it be productivity on the job, teamwork, new ideas, punctuality, lack of absenteeism, or another category? Discuss it with your managers.

Remember, one of the things you want to accomplish is wide acknowledgement of the qualities a top performer has. You want other employees to see the recognition and emulate those qualities. What do you most want to foster? You also want to avoid any appearance that some employees are favored over others.

Decide upon the form recognition will take

While it’s fine to individually praise employees for good work on an informal basis, a formal recognition process is more valuable to driving better performance and retention overall. Recognized employees should feel they are broadly valued, and other employees need to see a model of what is valued.

Some companies decide upon an employee of the month program that is rotated among departments. Others provide gift cards, or days or half-days off. Determine what would motivate your employees the most.

Publicize the recognition

 If you have a company newsletter, put news about the recognition in (and the reasons for it, of course). An email blast is another idea. Plus, if your company has active social media accounts (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter), develop posts, grams, and tweets about the recognition. Encourage sharing of social media, too.

 

Contact a Staffing Firm Today

Do you need to recruit employees who are more engaged and more likely to stay? We can develop a plan and recruit. Staffing agencies are pros. We’re happy to help. Contact us today.