Tag Archives: Service Awards

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How To Turn Your Career Milestone Event Into Something Memorable

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An employee’s career milestone, whether in person or virtually celebrated, is a special event and very important to them. You need to show staff that this is a big deal to everyone else as well—their immediate manager and senior leaders alike.

Celebrating an employee’s work anniversary should be something that is easy to acknowledge. After all, you are thanking them for their length of service with the organization and expressing appreciation for their contributions. 

I will lay out for you the 4 P’s you need to follow so you will honor every employee’s career milestone the right way.

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Top 10 Ways to Celebrate Career Milestones

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Your role in presenting a career milestone award on a person’s work anniversary is to create an experience that the recipient will always remember. Managers must learn how critical it is for them to honor employees on their special day.  Follow theses Top 10 Ways to Celebrate Career Milestones and put these steps into practice.

  1. Make managers responsible for milestones. You must assign managers to acknowledge their employees before or on the day of their anniversary. Hold them accountable by following up on what they did and share their employee’s reaction.
  2. Work hard to honor the person. Plan ahead of time to collect information and insights about award recipients to help everyone remember them and their contributions. Allow these musings and memories of years of service be reflective and memorable.
  3. Highlight a recipient’s attributes. Interview previous bosses and colleagues to discover their unique characteristics and attributes. Find out what makes them an excellent employee. As appropriate to the individual share these thoughts in the presentation.
  4. Plan who the attendees should be. Lower year anniversaries are informal and can be their team members or one-on-one with their manager. Longer years of service merit finding out if a senior leader or family members should be present. Always find out their wishes first.
  5. Find the right place to present. Check out your organization’s facilities and see if there is a “perfect” setting to add to the whole award experience. Discover if there are special memories associated with specific spots that could create a unique memory.
  6. Capture memories of this day. Do whatever you can to assign someone else to photograph and video record the presentation. Have a sign in book or cards for people to write their congratulations and thoughts. Or create a video book where people leave messages.
  7. Request the right person present. Whether it is their immedate manager or a senior leader figure out who the best person is to present their award. It must be someone the recipient has a positive relationship with and who they personally respect and admire.
  8. Recognize their achievements. You have the opportunity to acknowledge all the employee has done up to their anniversary date. Let them know how their contributions and work have impacted others and made a difference to the organization.
  9. Treat them like a star. Consider the Oscar awards and treat your career milestone employees as a celebrity, because on their anniversary day, they really are. Strive to turn every service award day into a celebration and not just a presentation.
  10. Connect the employee’s achievements. Make the career milestone recipient’s feel fulfilled by showing them and others how they have lived by the organizational values. Let them know the organization could not be where they are today without their contributions.

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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Embedding Recognition in the Everyday Life of the Company – Part 3

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This is the third post in a series on Embedding Recognition in the Everyday Life of the Company. In Part 1, I addressed integrating recognition into your onboarding strategy and practices. Then, in Part 2, I took up how you can weave recognition into your meetings and learning opportunities.

This post will cover more traditional recognition moments such as career milestones (length of service anniversaries) and retirement recognition.

As you read these ideas, evaluate how you are doing with recognition in your organization in these areas, and if there are steps you need to take to improve things.

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How to More Effectively Approach Milestone Recognition

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Career milestone award or service award recognition programs have been around for many years.

Over those years there have been the customary plaques, symbolic crystal awards, and gold watches—and these used to start when a person reached 25-years of service.

But as tenure reduced significantly with economy and business changes, and retention of employees was harder to maintain, career milestones now begin at 5 years and 5-year increments thereafter. Today, you will find many companies now start career milestones at an employee’s first year of service.

The reality is, whether you give an employee something tangible or not, they always have a workplace anniversary every single year.

How do you plan to make the next round of your milestone recognition celebrations more meaningful and effective?

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Get More Video Happening In Your Recognition Programs

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Isn’t it about time you incorporated video into your recognition programs? After all, everybody else seems to be doing so.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg implied this when he said, “Video is a critical part of the future. It’s what our community wants, and as long as we can make it social, I think it will end up being a large part of our business as well.”

Check out these statistics:

  • In 2019, Wyzowl found that 63% of businesses were using video as a marketing tool. By the start of 2018, that had risen to 81%. Now, as we arrive in 2019, the number has increased again to 87%. (Wyzowl)
  • By 2022, online videos will make up more than 82% of all consumer Internet traffic—15 times higher than it was in 2017. (Cisco)
  • Social video generates 1200% more shares than text and image content combined. (G2 Crowd)
  • On average, people spend 2.6x more time on pages with video than without. (Wistia)
  • 83% of marketers would increase their reliance on video as a strategy if there were no obstacles like time, resources, and budget. (Buffer)

Using video in your online recognition programs is the next best thing to being there in person.

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Taking a Quick Look at Career Milestone Awards

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How are your career milestone or service award programs doing these days?

It seems the majority of organizations have tenure or long service award programs. According to WorldatWork’s 2017 Trends in Employee Recognition, length of service recognition remains the top ranked recognition program with 85 percent of organizations. 

Historically, and especially within the public sector, career milestone years were only acknowledged when an employee reached 25 years or longer. Today, most progressive organizations commence with at least 5 years and then celebrate every 5-year increment thereafter.

But when you look at the US Bureau of Labor Statistics the average tenure for salaried employees is 4.2 years. That average drops to 2.8 years for the mobile 25 to 34 year old employees.

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Right Words of Recognition for Years of Service

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What do you say to a person who reaches a specific milestone level in their years of service with the company?

This is something that is very important but frequently overlooked.

Over the years I have seen different milestones of recognition celebrated at many years of service award events.

Too often the years of service recognition is relegated to an online or manual process that makes things happen.

But planning the right words of acknowledgment to use isn’t always in the mix.

There should be thought put into the right words of recognition to use that accompany the event, the one on one encounter between a manager and employee, or the gift given to the employee.

I will give you some guidelines to consider for the right words of recognition. (more…)

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How To Get Employees Involved In Career Milestone Recognition

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Think career milestone recognition and you associate it directly with the company.

Companies honor and celebrate employees for their great work and contributions. It is a time for leaders to stop and thank employees for their service.

Service awards, as they are often called, are traditionally seen as a top down program, usually from an employee’s immediate manager or supervisor.

And for many companies this is still the way milestone programs are run.

But there is a new trend building for getting all employees involved. (more…)

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How to Make Career Milestones an Experience to Remember

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Celebrating an employee’s career milestone is a big deal to them and should be to you. But many organizations struggle with how to acknowledge people’s length of service with the company.

I am going to show you how to honor your employees or colleagues for their career milestone the right way.

Follow these 4 P’s and you’ll turn any award presentation into a memorable celebration.

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