Employee recognition programs and organizational retention effectiveness

¶ … 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.

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.

The problem is one that few if any studies have taken into account: there is a distinction between 'organization' and 'job' and workers who may be motivated in their jobs may not be motivated for their 'organizations'. They may, in fact, dislike their organization. Employee recognition programs may not help boost motivation in this area. This is something that needs looking into.

It especially needs looking into since a healthy workplace functions according to five practices: work-life balance, employee growth and development, health and safety, recognition, and employee involvement. Efficacy in these five practices depends on communication between manager and employees and on employee satisfaction. In short, a satisfied employee spells a positive organization. It is for this reason that discovering how to motivate employees, in order to retain the right ones, has become one of the major topics of contemporary management issues.