HealthStream has had tremendous success with our employee recognition programs, collectively known as Excellence in Action.  Along the way, we’ve gathered best practices from our high performing clients, as well as coming up with a range of best practices discovered through our own experimentation.  Here is how HealthStream has achieved success with our monthly employee recognition program, with ways that you can improve employee recognition in the healthcare setting:

• Establish a Recognition Team/Committee.  First, the team should be comprised of employees from all levels of the organization.  Our team includes members from every location and every level of HealthStream.  This has had several benefits—we get multiple perspectives for each decision, we create ambassadors that represent the program throughout the organization, and it provides young and/or inexperienced employees with an opportunity to have an impact on the entire company.

• Make Recognition as Easy as Possible.  The easier it is for employees and managers to submit recognition, the more activity the recognition program will have.  For our monthly program component, called Rave Review, HealthStream’s Excellence in Action Team set up a dedicated email address and designed a PDF form that makes submission a snap!  Anybody can recognize anybody—it is not just for managers.  Also, the form has a link at the top that automatically saves the form, opens Outlook, attaches PDF, and populates the to: fields with the appropriate email addresses. 

• Align Recognition to Core Values.  HealthStream’s recognition program requires that Rave Review submissions include how the individual exhibited ‘above and beyond’ behavior or actions through our corporate values.  This approach helps to hardwire knowledge of values throughout the organization.

• Measure Satisfaction and Engagement at the Unit/Department-Specific Level.  You can’t manage what you don’t measure.  For recognition programs to work, you’ve got to do more than measure across the entire organization as a whole.  In most organizations, there will be managers who are adept at reward and recognition and those who are not.  By measuring at the unit-department level, you can easily identify areas where recognition is succeeding (these are the managers to model) and areas where it is not.  This model can be supported by capturing unit/specific information on the recognition form itself.

• Have a Fair, Engaging, and Dynamic Reward Process.  In large organizations with multiple departments, choosing which recognized employees receive specific awards can be tricky, as there can be perceptions of favorites or biasing.  HealthStream has found that a lottery-approach works best at the monthly level.  We place all Rave Reviews into a spinner, and we randomly pull out Rave Reviews based on a set ratio.  For every 10 Rave Reviews submitted, we pull out one to ‘spin the wheel.’  The wall-mounted wheel has slots with varying award amounts.  The randomly selected winners have a public ceremony for the wheel spins.  While recognition does not always have to be about money, recognition does need to carry some value.

• Broadcast Employee Recognition Throughout the Organization.  In addition to the public wheel spin ceremony, all recognized HealthStream employees are shared in a report that is sent out everyone in the organization.  By globally sharing details of employee recognition, you can spread knowledge, insights, and best practices to everyone, regardless of location, unit, or department.

There are many more details that have helped make our employee recognition program a success.  If you would like to learn how you can implement a similar program in your organization, send an email to researchinfo@healthstream.com.  One of the leaders for our recognition program will be glad to assist you.