Recognition is essential to retaining and engaging employees, but few organisations 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 behaviours it wants to recognise. Ninety-two percent of employees agree that when they’re recognised 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 organisation.
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7 employee behaviours organisations should recognise
Recognising and showing appreciation encourages employees to repeat behaviours that are essential to success at your organisation. Here are seven behaviours you should recognise 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 organisation. When employees provide input, you should quickly act on it — and recognise 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 organisations give every employee the ability to recognise positive behaviour 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 organisation keeps employees motivated as they look forward to trying out new skills and taking on new responsibilities. Encourage leaders and peers to frequently recognise 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 organisation, but they can’t reach their full potential without the help of their fellow team members. Make sure that everyone at your company recognises great collaboration whenever it happens.
5. Living your culture
Your organisational 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 behaviours. So when team members engage in the actions that you want to define your culture, recognise 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 organisation. 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, recognise them to motivate the entire team to improve their performance.
7. Showing reliability
Even the most successful organisations will experience difficult times. When challenges arise, it’s even more important to recognise 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 behaviour your company chooses to prioritise 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. Recognise behaviours in the moment and your team will be eager to repeat them.
- Specific. Avoid generic, vague gestures. Instead, explicitly connect recognition to specific behaviours 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 recognising winning behaviours with Achievers
Achievers Recognise is an award-winning, science-based recognition platform that makes recognising employee behaviour easy for everyone at your organisation. 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 organisation, contact Achievers today for a free demo.
