HealthStream Research’s Check Them Out employee recognition program has been incredibly successful. It seems like somebody gets caught in the act of excellence pretty regularly around here. Not surprising—after all, everyone we hire is deemed to be among the top 25% of the nation’s available workforce!
HealthStream Research’s employee recognition program has gone through several stages of improvement over the years, and we’d like to take this opportunity to share with you what we’ve learned.
Guidelines for a Successful Employee Recognition Program
- You should have a system in place where any employee can recognize anyone. No matter what their position is (or the position of the person they wish to recognize), let them go right ahead! With this approach, it is up to each and every one employee to drive the recognition program. Our philosophy is direct and proactive: Supervisors and managers—don’t wait for your employees to do it; Employees—don’t wait for your supervisors to do it.
- Put a system of incentives into place. For our program, we have a team that reviews all employee recognition forms each month, and they determine which employees have earned a chance to “Spin the Wheel.” The wheel is packed with rewards, ranging from cash to MP3 players to a day at the spa.
- Make sure that the forms for recognizing employees are highly visible. In HealthStream Research’s break room (on the table in front of the Check Them Out board), we keep a constant stack of Check Them Out forms to use for recognizing an employee.
- Capture all the right information on the recognition forms. Give a place to record the name of the employee to be recognized, the name of the person doing the recognizing, and the date. You may find that you want to track (and reward) those employees who do a great job in recognizing others—it helps to have the name of the recognized and the name of the recognizer to track this!
- We highly recommend tying your recognition program to your organization’s values. On our Check Them Out form, we have a space for Value Exhibited. We consider this step crucial, as it really drives home our values.
- The most important part of our program—a place to Check Out What They Did: Recognition should be specific and tangible. We encourage everyone here to be as specific as possible when they recognize an employee.
Another crucial component of a successful recognition program—you should thoroughly educate your workforce about how and when to recognize each other. Either through your intranet, internal newsletter, or posters in the break room, you should provide plenty of examples.
Here at HealthStream Research, we distributed the following suggestions and examples to all employees—interviewers, consultants, supervisors, managers, everybody.
HealthStream Research—When to Recognize an Employee:
- When they do something outside the scope of their responsibilities to fix a problem. For example, did an interviewer spontaneously jump in to help explain something to a colleague? Did someone offer to come in early or stay late to help out? Did they perform useful research that helped others?
When they make a suggestion that leads to an improvement in any of our processes or when they discover a previously unknown issue that has affected productivity. For example, someone recently suggested that we use a web-based fax service. This has lead to a more streamlined process and makes faxes much easier to file, organize, and retrieve.
When they volunteer to be part of something outside the scope of their job.
When they exceed expectations for something measurable.
When they receive an accolade from a client or when they help another employee receive an accolade.
When they are part of a project where they proved to be a key player and made sure it ran smoothly.
We gave ourselves a challenge, one that might serve you well: Every single employee of HealthStream Research should strive to recognize at least one employee per month.
As you can see from the picture, we’re already going to need a bigger board!