Change the Way Your Team Sees “Happy.”
Employee retention comes down to engaging your team. Here’s what you need to know to make an impact.
Everybody likes a reward for a job well done — it’s statistically been proven that recognizing good work has incredible benefits. From learning and development to health and wellness, overcoming your team’s hurdles and challenges with rewards is not only the best way to incentivize your workforce, but it’s also the best way to foster internal community and drive top-line growth. So what’s the best plan of action for getting started? There are a number of factors to consider when it comes to employee engagement, but the first and more important question is this: Why are employee recognition programs important?
Why are employee recognition programs important?
There’s a reason that your team needs more than just a pat on the back at the end of the day for a job well done, and that reason is simple: There’s a difference between recognition and reward.
While recognition alone is great for confidence — it’s intangible. It’s hard to quantify, and that makes it hard to work toward. That’s why pairing recognition and rewards is much better; together they create a benefit that employees can touch, feel, hold, and experience. It’s easy to quantify them, making it easy to work toward them. Simple, direct recognition will always be important and valuable, however, when it comes to incentivizing people, recognition that is paired with a reward is far better because they are transactional, have inherent value, and can be assigned to specific behaviors and goals.
However, rewards do have their own rules. While employees don’t think rewards always need to be anticipatory, it is crucial to have a defined framework of how to achieve them — otherwise teams can quickly and easily lose sight of the incentives that come from good behavior and a job well done. In fact, according to a report by ThinkSmart, companies that use incentive plans have a 79% success rate in achieving their established goals when the right reward is in place. So, what’s the next step? Figuring out how employee recognition programs can benefit you.
What are the benefits of employee recognition programs?
Employee recognition programs are designed to
bring value to your company, but what does that
mean exactly?
At Cooleaf, we take three main areas of focus:
Learning + Development
When it comes to employee investment, the first order of business is to find a way to maximize learning and talent development initiatives to best support your business goals. After all, it costs significantly more to hire a new employee than it does invest in one you currently have.
With an effective employee recognition program, you can strengthen your learning and development strategy through events and challenges, tying together personal and professional development into one reward track. By communicating, tracking, and incentivizing your learning and training opportunities, you speak to the employee desire to grow and develop in the workplace.
Growth + Revenue
At the end of the day, employee recognition programs are only successful when they generate revenue growth. Period. That’s why the way a program approaches revenue growth is critical to generating more creative lead generation, improving outbound sales volumes, and driving top-line growth.
In high-stakes environments, the desire to compete is powerful, but it’s important that the rewards build overall community strength rather than individual all-stars. With holistic integration toward specific metrics, such as lead generation, companies can create the “good kind” of peer pressure to challenge and reward their teams.
Health + Wellness
Here’s the truth: Your employees are more engaged and productive when they’re healthier. That’s why a modern, easily accessible approach to health and wellness is important. With new technology, employee recognition programs that share aspirations, activities, and progress across a team, department, or community help drive healthy engagement and reinforce community values exponentially. Everything from step challenges to health training can be great incentives for maximizing your wellness ROI and ensuring that your wellness program is working across your organization.
Who benefits from employee recognition programs?
Achieving your goal of a highly-engaged team can only happen when you take into account the entire employee experience, and factor in the individual needs, as well as professional contributions. At Cooleaf, we offer solutions for company-wide endeavors by targeting four main groups that generate success. Read more about them below:
Sales Teams
Your sales teams are unique, and they can be motivated in different ways. This is especially true as a younger demographic, known as millennials become a larger part of your team. Cooleaf enables you to incentivize front-of-the-funnel activities and metrics in your sales process with real-time rewards and recognition to achieve higher team engagement that drives top-line growth.
Customer Service
Customer service teams are often at the forefront of your company brand, which is why it’s so important to make them feel inspired, engaged, and heard. To do that, you should reward and recognize their community with team building that fosters continuous improvement.
Human Resources
Your culture is your single sustainable competitive advantage. Bring your core values to life by rewarding and recognizing employees that demonstrate core values with your customers and fellow employees. To unify your team toward continued success, consider providing year-round motivation through modernized team recognition.
Company-Wide
Companies need movements to accelerate growth. That’s why sparking a more productive workforce with modern incentives, easy-to-use technology, and a holistic ROI approach is the best way to grow in-house engagement on a larger scale.
What are the best practices for employee recognition programs?
Rewards and incentives can come in many packages, but what’s essential is that they all serve a purpose. When each reward is tied to a goal, your team not only benefits but so do you. Here are important questions to consider:
Q1
Does your rewards program have an ROI plan
The progress that can’t be quantified isn't progressed at all. To really implement change, you need an employee recognition program that can provide powerful data insight to understand how your initiatives are resonating with your team members and across organizations.
With Cooleaf's data insights and analytics, we can help you make better decisions so you can invest your time and money on effective initiatives and programs. Check out how our platform works here.
Q2
Is your peer-to-peer recognition doing what it needs to
eliminate the hierarchy? Can you also provide leadership recognition?
Team members that can easily recognize each other for living company core values — whether they be leadership or peer-to-peer accolades — further reinforces involvement in participation in team events and trainings. With Cooleaf, you can manage all channels of accolade giving, and track your entire team as they reward participation. In the end you’ll also be able to see who’s recognizing their team members most frequently, what reward has the biggest impact with certain job functions, and build a more proactive recognition effort.
Q3
Are you recognizing specific behaviors in different individuals?
Employee engagement is strongly correlated to the strength of an individual's interpersonal relationships on your team. At Cooleaf, we focus on fostering internal community from the individual upwards. That’s why we focus on sales team, customer service, HR, and company-wide developments. By achieving goals with these main groups, we can improve the entire employee experience for all.
Q4
Does everyone know about it? Is communication about who, where, why crystal clear?
A community connection is your first priority, which is why finding team members, recognizing them for their accomplishments, and allowing them to join groups of like-minded people is vital to their success. With Cooleaf, your employees can create and join events to participate in rewards, and they stay connected to the work tribe from virtually anywhere in a single, streamlined platform.
Q5
Is recognition fast, easy, enjoyable?
Engagement isn’t just a good idea, it’s a must-have. To do that, you need to strategically apply the appropriate tactics and programs for encouraging engagement. At Cooleaf, our platform is easy-to-use and applicable to different integrations to make a seamless experience for both the leadership and employees.
At the end of the day, employee engagement programs should enrich the job experience. Does yours?
Companies with modern recognition approaches that enable easy, frequent, and public recognition had 31% lower voluntary turnover rates vs. their peers. Whether you're new to this or want to upgrade an old-school approach, we can help.
At Cooleaf, we’re designed to help you achieve your goal of a highly engaged team that is more productive, delivers superior customer service, and drives improved business results. Why? Because engaged, rewarded people are happy people, and that’s something we definitely believe in.
Ready to try a demo? Fill out the form below and we’ll be in touch within 24 hours.