Recognition is essential to retaining and engaging employees, but few organizations provide enough of it. A startling 82% of employees wish they received more recognition for their efforts. Before your company can implement an impactful recognition program, it must define what behaviors it wants to recognize. Ninety-two percent of employees agree that when they’re recognized for a specific action, they’re more likely to repeat the action again.
Not sure where to start? Here are seven valuable employee behaviors that should be recognition priorities at every organization.
Download Achievers’ State of Recognition Report
7 employee behaviors organizations should recognize
Recognizing and showing appreciation encourages employees to repeat behaviors that are essential to success at your organization. Here are seven behaviors you should recognize to take your recognition program to the next level.
1. Providing and acting on feedback
Offering pulse surveys and other easy-to-use employee feedback channels is a great way to give your employees a strong voice within your organization. When employees provide input, you should quickly act on it — and recognize them for doing so to ensure a steady stream of key insights. As employee feedback should be anonymous, this is best done with a recognition platform that automatically and confidentially provides reward points.
2. Passing recognition on
The best organizations give every employee the ability to recognize positive behavior in real time, and they reward those who provide recognition to others. This is a great way to keep the cycle of appreciation going and cultivate an engaged, grateful team culture.
3. Pursuing opportunities for learning and development
Creating a culture of learning at your organization keeps employees motivated as they look forward to trying out new skills and taking on new responsibilities. Encourage leaders and peers to frequently recognize and reward team members for their learning and development accomplishments, whether it’s getting certified in a new skill or being awarded a long-sought degree.
4. Collaborating with others
You may have talented, motivated, and creative employees at your organization, but they can’t reach their full potential without the help of their fellow team members. Make sure that everyone at your company recognizes great collaboration whenever it happens.
5. Living your culture
Your organizational culture is created by the values, expectations, and practices that guide the daily actions of all team members. It’s what makes your company unique, successful, and a great place to work. Your culture needs to be more than a few inspirational terms — team members should live it through consistent, authentic behaviors. So when team members engage in the actions that you want to define your culture, recognize them for it. Before long, you’ll notice that your company culture better aligns with the ideal everyone is striving for.
6. Growing from mistakes
Mistakes happen every day at all levels of any organization. Although it’s tough to confront errors head on, they’ll only repeat again and again if employees don’t receive feedback. Have a productive discussion about how the mistake happened, how to deal with the impact, and how to prevent similar errors in the future. When employees act on feedback and show growth, recognize them to motivate the entire team to improve their performance.
7. Showing reliability
Even the most successful organizations will experience difficult times. When challenges arise, it’s even more important to recognize your team, especially for their reliability and resilience. Acknowledging the reality of the situation gives your team the chance to share their concerns, which builds mutual trust and lets employees know that their efforts to help the company during tough times are noticed and appreciated.
How to make recognition easy and meaningful
No matter what behavior your company chooses to prioritize for recognition, there are best practices that you can follow to ensure success. The RISE paradigm, which outlines four essential elements that should be included in the design of your recognition program, is a great place to start:
- Regular. Recognition should occur frequently and be part of every employee’s daily work habits.
- Immediate. Recognize behaviors in the moment and your team will be eager to repeat them.
- Specific. Avoid generic, vague gestures. Instead, explicitly connect recognition to specific behaviors you’d like to see more of.
- Encouraging. Recognition from managers and other leaders isn’t enough. A culture of recognition requires all team members to start showing appreciation.
These best practices apply to both social recognition and rewards. If you’d like to make it easy for all team members to get involved with the latter, adopt a points-based system that lets your team earn and redeem points for rewards that they actually want. Employees receive an allowance of points they can provide to other team members, and they love seeing their own points balance rise as they receive meaningful recognition.
Start recognizing winning behaviors with Achievers
Achievers Recognize is an award-winning, science-based recognition platform that makes recognizing employee behavior easy for everyone at your organization. With an intuitive user interface, exceptional customer support, a mobile-first experience, and integrations with tools you already use every day, it’s easy to create a winning recognition program for your team. If you’re ready to make a positive impact across your organization, contact Achievers today for a free demo.