Communicating employee recognition with an employee communication platform: easy and impactful

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

Imagine this: you put in your best effort at work every day. You go above and beyond your job description to achieve great results. You routinely perform your daily tasks on a high level. But nobody ever notices. Or, at least, nobody ever recognizes you for it. Would you keep working hard? Would you even stay at your company? Communicating employee recognition isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s vital when retaining top talents, keeping staff healthy, and motivating your employees. Plus, doing it with an employee communication platform is easy and impactful.

Employee recognition should be a part of the natural interaction in your organization: teammates look out for each other, support each other and help each other get the attention they deserve from leadership and managers. Employee recognition makes employees feel valued for their work, provides a sense of accomplishment, and motivates employees to keep working hard. Research by Gallup shows that the most effective employee recognition is genuine, continuous, and personalized to employees’ preferences, as you can recognize employees for their achievements in countless ways.

Employee recognition: your staff’s preferences

To make your recognition program more impactful, it would help to know which employee prefers which type of recognition. It can also be very insightful to identify whether employees think they get enough recognition for their work when setting up an employee recognition program.

Both can be done easily with polls or pulse surveys. Ask employees how they would like to be recognized in a non-anonymous survey and give them the option to vote for various types of employee recognition, such as public or private recognition.

The most important thing is that the type of recognition you choose fits the employee. Someone who doesn’t like to be in the spotlight will appreciate a handwritten card a lot more than a shout-out on the intranet or on your digital signage screens, and vice versa. A little can go a long way, as long as someone gets the recognition they were looking for.

Private or public employee recognition

Whatever type of recognition you choose, make sure to match the praise to the effort. There’s a variety of accomplishments and behaviors that organizations desire to encourage. Some accomplishments are bigger than others, so some accomplishments deserve bigger praise than others. Recognition loses meaning if it doesn’t match effort and results. Acknowledging small accomplishments with a private or quick compliment may well be enough.

However, praising employees in public will be well received when employees enjoy the spotlight. Not only will this positively impact morale, but it will also send the message that you recognize and appreciate extra efforts. On top of that, studies show that recognizing and praising the best team member for a job well done can increase the entire team’s productivity.

Communicating employee recognition publicly

Achievements can be praised publicly by sharing them on an employee communication platform through multiple channels. Our employee communication platform allows organizations to spotlight their employees by communicating employee recognition via digital signage screens, corporate digital signage, corporate screensavers, a desktop app, and a mobile app.

Did someone make a big sale or finish a large project that took months of intensive labor? Put it out for all to see on your digital signage, screensavers, desktop, and mobile app. When employees know everyone will know about their achievements, it will make them feel appreciated. An employee recognition message is made with low effort, but the impact is high.

Putting your recognition messages on an employee communication platform also allows employees to celebrate their coworkers and their achievements: they can comment on recognition messages to congratulate their colleagues for a job well done, which all adds to a positive vibe. If this is done continuously, it will help create a culture of recognition in which employees will want to put their best foot forward.

Targeting employee recognition messages

When you’ve conducted your survey to find out your employees’ preferences regarding employee recognition, you may have found that some employees don’t appreciate company-wide employee recognition messages about their achievements. In this case, targeting your messages is a great way to spotlight their achievements while keeping recognition low key.

Target messages and publish them in a certain location, department, or even team, so relevant people will still know about their achievements without them being out in public for everyone to see. This will help employees feel appreciated without feeling uncomfortable about it. The spotlights aren’t for everyone!

Public recognition: an example

One of our customers, Piedmont Healthcare, has a very impressive and elaborate employee recognition program to recognize and celebrate Piedmont’s staff for their inspiring work. Public recognition is a big part of it.

Kelli Newman, Director of Internal Communications at Piedmont, explains how they use their employee communication platform for communicating employee recognition: ‘We share employees’ stories weekly. We have a system-wide employee recognition program for which employees can be nominated for making a positive difference. Various winners will be selected for various awards. These are always stories that we want to promote through Netpresenter. People will then be redirected to the complete story on the intranet, where they can comment and engage with the content.”

Kelli: “Colleagues will endorse the person who’s won and congratulate them. It absolutely affects our employees positively; they always engage with these stories. We love that. It’s a really nice way of not only recognizing our employees but also allowing others to celebrate winners.”

Watch the video below for Piedmont Healthcare’s experiences with the Netpresenter employee communication platform.

Do you want to start communicating employee recognition? An employee communication platform allows you to recognize employees in all kinds of ways and will help you build a culture of employee recognition in your organization. Get in touch with our consultants to see how our customers did it, or schedule a free 30-minute demo to find out what our employee communication platform can offer your employee recognition program. Or download the free self assessment to measure the levels of engagement in your organization.