How Using Employee Recognition Improves Productivity

Employee recognition programs can improve productivity in the customer experience space by motivating employees. When a team feels appreciated, they become more engaged, more focused, and more driven. Here’s how employee recognition can be used to increase productivity.

Why Employee Recognition Is Important

As demographics in the workplace have shifted from baby boomers to millennials, careers have become somewhat less focused on compensation than it has been in the past. Increasingly, professionals want careers that give them a sense of purpose. Employee recognition helps employees feel like the work they do matters. Employee recognition also help your team members know that they are doing a good job, which motivates them to want to keep trying their hardest. An effective recognition program can also increase retention. Having a more stable team will, in turn, increase productivity. For example, at Blue Rock Search, we award “Best New Idea” awards (a trophy with a lightbulb on top of it and a small cash award) to the employees who offered up changes or tweaks to our process, brought on new vendors, etc. If it improved our business or we adopted it into our day-to-day work. We recognize our employees for their time and thought in bringing the “best new thing” to our company.

Build Recognition into Your Company Culture

While grand gestures can be meaningful, gratitude and recognition need to be built into the company culture. Small acts like sending out thank you notes or giving out frequent compliments can create a more enjoyable work environment for employees. Small acts of recognition reinforce positive behavior and remind your team that you appreciate their hard work. It is important to recognize small and major feats, not just from individual employees but from the team as a whole. You can show appreciation for team-wide accomplishments by hosting a celebratory lunch or with a fun surprise.

Reward Positive Behavior

The key to employee recognition is knowing what behaviors and achievements to recognize. If you compliment everything your team members do, your employees will feel good about themselves, but it won’t necessarily translate into higher productivity. You want to recognize achievements in employees that correspond with overall company goals. If employers are too liberal with compliments, they may unintentionally reinforce behaviors that don’t align with their business strategy. To be successful, recognition has to encourage behavior that improves performance and productivity. For example, at Blue Rock Search we sometimes award a small cash prize to the employee who was the most engaged the previous month on our social media channels. Since we are a recruiting firm and engagement on platforms like LinkedIn is important for the ongoing growth of our recruiters’ reach – it is a fun way to show them how a few more interactions make a difference in their personal profile traffic. And many employees now take a few minutes to read the company blogs and our partners’ and employees’ online contributions as a daily exercise. This is good for the company and since many of the blog posts are about company culture it is a win-win in letting our employees know what we are thinking and why we do what we do.

Collaboration Leads to Better Productivity

The best employee recognition programs focus on acknowledging good teamwork. By encouraging collaboration, employee recognition can motivate your team members to work together toward business objectives. When your team feels like they have a common goal, they have higher motivation and can work more efficiently.

In customer experience, employee recognition can improve productivity by increasing engagement and promoting better collaboration. Showing gratitude and recognition can reinforce positive behavior, give employees a sense of purpose, and help further business goals.

by Christopher Rios