Employee Recognition Matters to Drive Innovation: 3 Best Practices

We pride ourselves in creating a great place to work that ensures that every employee thrives. An important part of making that happen is instilling a culture of recognition. Recognizing the individual and collective achievements of team members should become part of everyone’s work routine.

?Here is why.

Recognition is the most important driver of great work, according to research by the Great Place of Work. Employees who feel recognized at work are 2.2 times more likely to drive innovation and bring new ideas forward. They are also 2.2 times more likely to go above and beyond.

Receiving feedback, recognition, and rewards are key motivators for employees to excel at work and become more productive. Employees who feel recognized are also more engaged and happier at work. A study by the University of Warwick concluded that happiness makes employees 12% more productive, while unhappy employees are 10% less productive.

There are myriad ways to show appreciation, from saying thank you after a job well done to rewards programs with monetary compensation. Most importantly, employee recognition cannot be ad hoc. It needs to be a strategic people-centric program with a focus on rewarding continuous improvement based on business outcomes.

Following are some approaches to employee recognition based on my experience and backed by research.

1.???Share Individual and Team Achievements

Thank you are the two most powerful words that cannot be said enough. I make it a point to show gratitude in all interactions like All-Hands meetings whenever we achieve a milestone. I also thank employees individually and/or collectively for their achievements and commitment in meetings and via emails. What is important to me is, that I know everyone’s name and can thank them personally for their dedication and contribution. For example, if a customer sends the delivery team a thank-you note, I want to thank the team as well and share their success with the larger team. Rewarding someone’s work means recognizing the value they bring to the team. Sharing success openly encourages peer learning. Recognition can also be shared externally, as appropriate. When team members Kirubakaran Paramasivan, Pankaj Kumar Routray and A P Lohit Kumar were granted a patent from the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for their invention to implement High Availability / Disaster Recovery provider without a downtime, I gave a heart-felt and proud shout-out on LinkedIn to share their success with our customers, partners, and fellow colleagues. While all this may seem trivial or obvious, I can guarantee showing gratitude hasn’t become a common practice yet.

2.???Connect Achievements to Strategy Goals

It’s important to define success for team members. The definition is based on our business strategy and goals. For example, at SAP Enterprise Cloud Services our mission is to secure the delivery of cloud services at a high availability and with high reliability to help our customers become more productive, agile, and more sustainable. We launched an annual employee recognition program at SAP Enterprise Cloud Services to strategically reward team members for their significant contributions to achieve our goals with a focus on customer success and innovation. Cloud delivery team members get recognized for their commitment to achieving a continued high level of operational excellence for our customers. The beauty of this program is that it recognizes team members throughout the year with quarterly awards (STEP & STRIDE) and a highly coveted annual award (SHINE). Our dedicated recognition program has proven to inspire team members to find new ways to improve operations and evolve our portfolio. It also recognizes the qualities needed to be successful, including tenacity, commitment, creativity, collaboration, and being knowledgeable. A noticeable impact is also the pride in one’s work.

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3.???Give Rewards That Matter and Promote Well-Being

Based on research by Gallup and Workhuman employee recognition can promote employees’ wellbeing at work. When feeling recognized, employees have lower burnout, feel less stressed and have stronger connections withs colleagues at work. In addition, employees are 3 times as likely to agree that their organization cares about their wellbeing.?These research results are based on feeling recognized. The positive impact can increase further by selecting recognitions that matter to team members.

?We use employee sounding boards and various other feedback channels to identify the types of incentives that excite our team members the most for our employee recognition program. For example, managing work-life balance and health and well-being in a hybrid work environment have surfaced as themes in the past years. Team members shared how much they value personal time. As a result, some of our employee recognitions include time off that team members can spend with their family and friends. Giving team members the opportunity to recharge and explore other interests outside of work, or take a class, is a win-win for all. It helps employees to stay energized and infuses the team with fresh ideas and perspectives, which in-turn helps us stay innovative.

Finally, don’t forget to appreciate also smaller moments of success. These moments are often indicative of what’s to come and the potential that the team has. Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman recommend recognizing not only outcomes, but also the actions that facilitated positive outcomes, especially as individuals can’t control all outcomes in today’s work environment. These actions can be the beginnings or steppingstones to a larger success story. Recognize them to inspire the team.

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