In a previous post I covered Part 1 of Embedding Recognition in the Everyday Life of the Company. There we looked at how you can integrate recognition practices and philosophy at the very beginning of an employee’s career by putting recognition into your onboarding strategy and practices.
For this post, I will address some additional ways you can embed recognition into some typical work structures and practices that go on in most organizations.
What About Your Meetings?
A lot of departmental meetings occur every week or month in an organization. These are a great time to give a shout out or kudos to people who have done exceptional work since the last meeting.
The recommendation I want to give you is to check out where recognition is on the meeting agenda. We often say that our people are our greatest asset, but then we put giving recognition or shout outs to people at the very bottom of the agenda.
To show how you sincerely appreciate people, start prioritizing staff recognition at the top of your agenda. This way you will begin all of your meetings by expressing recognition to people and valuing their contributions. Never let acknowledging your staff fall to the end of your agenda.
I know of a healthcare facility in Indiana along with MGM Grand in Las Vegas, that holds first thing Monday morning announcements or daily pre-shift meetings, to share success stories of employees or associates. They typically describe how an employee or associate is living their stated organizational values or showed a specific customer service principle.
And don’t forget management meetings. When managers get together for collective meetings or forums, recognize outstanding managers or their departments for actions observed or reported. Invite your senior leaders to acknowledge exceptional performance in these management meetings.
That’s exactly what the president of BCIT, in Vancouver, British Columbia did, when I was there several years ago. He encouraged all managers in attendance to mirror the same pattern of recognition giving in their departments.
Take advantage of every meeting opportunity—whether in-person or virtual meetings—to insert recognition wherever you can.
Put More Recognition In Your Learning
Learning is a lifelong commitment when working for a progressive organization. Likewise, every learning experience is a chance to recognize the employee through this step.
Use online learning courses, internal program offerings, and conference attendance, to reward and recognize employees for stellar performance or outstanding achievements.
You can recognize your employees even at the pre-learning stage by commending and encouraging employees whenever they access your available education calendar or inquire about your organization’s learning programs.
Invite staff to set realistic learning goals and encourage them to explore appropriate course options to enhance their workplace competencies and skills. Always reconnect with your staff so you can recognize them for the learning initiative.
Have trainers and presenters pay attention to employee participation during courses and promote thanking them for their contributions in various reinforcing ways. Trainers should set transfer of learning goals where participants establish personal or group goals to apply what they’ve learned back on the job. Give employees ownership for implementing learning tasks.
What about post-Learning? This is where you can plan in for the learner to report back to their manager on what they learned and how they feel they will apply the skills and knowledge back on the job. Having this quality time with their manager provides another act of recognition and a chance to acknowledge the learner.
Some organizations expect their participants to receive a certificate of completion after they’ve done the course. But is the course really done? Hold off on handing over a certificate of completion until the employee has followed through on the goals for after the course and implemented some desired outcomes. You may even have the learner share their newly gained knowledge with others on the team by teaching an overview of the course to other staff in a lunch and learn session.
You as a manager can reinforce the learning gained and provide another recognition opportunity by presenting the certificate of completion according to the recipient’s wishes—publicly in front of the team or one-on-one with their manager.
Hopefully, these ideas have stimulated you to think of additional ways you can implement recognition into your meetings and learning and development.
Recognition Reflection: Do your meetings provide the opportunity to recognize your employees?
Roy is no longer writing new content for this site (he has retired!), but you can subscribe to Engage2Excel’s blog as Engage2Excel will be taking Roy’s place writing about similar topics on employee recognition and retention, leadership and strategy.
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