Effective Methods of Employee Recognition

¶ … managers want a healthy and effective workplace. To ensure this, you attempt to hire the right workers and to retain these workers. In order to retain these workers, they need to motivate them. This is particularly so since organizational excellence necessitates employee well-being and to achieve this, you need to motivate your employees. Employees, being individuals, are however motivated in different ways. This is where the Work recognition programs have come into existence and proved popular. The question is: are they effective?

Relevance

Employee attrition is at an all-time high in the rapidly changing world of today. Being too that the business world is unprecedented in its competitiveness, managers want to not only hire the right employees, but also retain them. This is particularly so since employees may be easily wood by a job that offers opportunities of better pay or promotion, and their current company cannot compete in these particulars. Employees, therefore, have to seek for other, more persuasive and original ways of persuading them to stay. Employee retention has, therefore, become one of the major management topics of today.

Research results

1. In 2008, WorldatWork found that nearly 9 out of 10 organizations who responded to them have employee recognition programs in place and that only 7% were doing less recognition that year than they had a year ago. Approximately 90% of the sampled organizations were intending to continue their programs, and more than half of the organizations said that they were thinking of supplementing those programs with additional ones. (Worldatwork, 2008)

2. Workers are motivated by different incentives (Worldatwork, 2008)

3. Recognition does a lot for employee morale. The cash value of the gift is relatively unimportant (Whitney, 2011)

4. Motivation is important because it results in organizational growth (Manzoor, 2012)

5. Motivating employees feeds into their sense of esteem and self-efficacy and therefore contributes to enhancements of the organization (Manzoor, 2012)

6. There is a difference between job and organization and few if no research studies have made the distinction (Saks, 2006)

7. There are employees who are more motivated in their job than they are with the organization (Saks, 2006)

8. The question is whether programs such as employee recognition programs also succeed in motivating employees in the organization too (Saks, 2006)

9. A literature review identified five healthy worksite practices: work-life balance, employee growth and development, health and safety, recognition, and employee involvement. (Grawitch et al., 2006)

10. The link between effectiveness of these practices depends on communication between management and employees and on motivation of employees (Grawitch et al., 2006)

11. Employee well-being and organizational improvement is linked (Grawitch et al., 2006)

Summary

Employee recognition programs are becoming increasingly popular as today's workplace realizes that employees need more than a paycheck to keep them motivated. In 2008, WorldatWork found that nearly 9 out of 10 organizations who responded to them have employee recognition programs in place and that only 7% were doing less recognition that year than they had a year ago. Approximately 90% of the sampled organizations were intending to continue their programs, and more than half of the organizations said that they were thinking of supplementing those programs with additional ones. Consider too that the sampled population was extremely large: WorldatWork.org surveyed 4,617 WorldatWork members in the United States -- and we see that a sufficiently large number of workplaces are enthused with employee recognition programs.

Employers have a tough time finding the right individual and then persuading that individual to sign on to the workplace. Employers, sometimes, have an even tougher time motivating individuals and retaining them. The old paycheck simply does not work. In today's happiness-seeking world, employees often need more to persuade them to stay. Even more challenging is the fact that different employees -- as per individuals -- are motivated by different things. What works with one may not necessarily work with another.

One of the programs that increasingly more workplaces are relying on is Employee recognition programs. These present a variety of gifts that serve as acknowledgement ranging from certificates to plaques to cash awards and other minor or significant prizes. The element is not so much the cash-value of the reward but rather the implication.