A Comprehensive Guide to Nominate Employees for Recognition

Different Nomination Criteria for Recognizing Employees

Every employee of an organization brings their own strengths and insights. Therefore, recognizing them for the same category is hard and sometimes unfair. Therefore, organizations need to establish different recognition criteria to recognize employees properly for the right metrics.

Some employees are more careful about completing their day-to-day tasks carefully to raise the company’s bottom line. Organizations need to set up specific metrics to recognize these employees.

A number of employees always practice the best behavior in the workplace. Their behavior educates and encourages others around them to follow the optimum company culture, and they need to be recognized for it.

Also, some employees excel in what they do and generate the best possible results for the company. They should be encouraged to keep up their good work and recognized for their talent and hard work.

Other than that, employees who demonstrate unquestionable loyalty, leadership, and regularity should be recognized as well. When these people are recognized, other staff will be more inclined to follow in their footsteps.

In the light of the above discussion, there are 5 brilliant criteria to nominate employees for recognition:

• Nominating based on pre-set criteria
• Nominating based on exemplary behavior
• Nominating based on performance 
• Nominating based on loyalty
• Nominating based on attendance records

Let’s take a look at these nomination criteria in detail:

Nominating Based on Pre-Set Criteria

Each employee of an organization has their own duties and responsibilities. They need to perform all those duties that their role demands to keep up the day-to-day activities.

These activities keep the company running smoothly and increase the organization’s bottom line. Therefore, employees who properly uphold their responsibilities properly need to be recognized.

Companies need to set appropriate metrics and criteria to encourage and appreciate their employees. Different departments of a company have different metrics to measure success. These metrics can be assigned to individual performances, and whenever employees reach those metrics, they will be recognized.

For example, employees working in sales will be nominated to recognize whenever they make a specific number of sales within a certain time.

Organization leaders need to specify these metrics that help them determine the success of operations and procedures. Then these metrics can be used to nominate employees for recognition.

Nominating Based on Exemplary Behavior

Employee behavior contributes a lot to the company culture. Good company culture is extremely important to keep the proper workflow and employees engaged. If the company culture doesn’t resonate with employees, they will feel disengaged and won’t be able to reach their full potential.

Companies that take policies to recognize exemplary behavior can achieve a great company culture which can elevate the whole production process. Companies will need to track all the rewardable employee behaviors to nominate and recognize employees to encourage others to replicate the same or better behaviors.

However, it is important to note that any behavioral recognition works better when acknowledged immediately. Otherwise, the impact and the situations can be confusing for others to understand properly.

The best practice can be something like this; whenever employees demonstrate appreciable behavior, they should be recognized immediately by the leaders, managers, or co-workers. These behaviors need to be recorded with appropriate context.  Then while recognizing formally, leaders can mention these behaviors and describe how they affected the organization.

Recognizing employees based on their best behavior allows leaders to introduce a better company culture and make employees follow the best practices.

Nominating Based on Performance

Every organization has a percentage of employees who perform better than average. They can handle the toughest projects or build amazing strategies that facilitate the company.

These talented employees are hard to come by. When companies acquire talented professionals, they should take appropriate measures to retain them for longer. Recognizing their talent and compensating them can be very helpful in this manner.

Organizations can take up “employee of the month/year” programs to recognize their top talents. With these programs, organizations can motivate other employees to replicate those results. Also, it allows other employees to come for solutions and insights to the award-winning employees. This will improve the organizational process and initiate collaborative culture in workplaces.

Different processes of an organization require different skills. Therefore, metrics can vary as well. Nevertheless, companies need to set measurable goals to nominate employees for recognition programs and award them appropriately.

Nominating Based on Loyalty

Loyal employees are the best assets of a company. They give their time and best efforts to the progress of a company. Therefore, leaders should properly celebrate their achievements and loyalty to keep them affiliated with the organization.

The longer employees stay in an organization, the more value they can bring to it. These employees know the organizational processes better than fresh talents and can help others become familiar with the overall process. Thus, they become an essential asset to the company.

Every organization needs to have loyal employees to succeed in the long run. Therefore, they need to inspire other employees to become loyal to the organization. Recognizing long-term employees gives company leaders excellent opportunities to achieve this goal.

Developing different employee service award programs allows leaders to reward employees for their loyalty. In these award programs, employees who have been with the organization for longer times are nominated for recognition. Most organizations set the benchmark of more than 5 years for getting this award.

As employees receiving employee service awards have given a huge portion of their time to the organization, companies will need to customize the award accordingly. Also, during the nomination process, leaders need to discuss all their long-term employees and reward them based on their service and personal characteristics.

Nominating based on Attendance Records

Regularity is the key to success for any organization to progress and thrive. And this regularity can be achieved in an organization when the employees are regular and attentive.

When employees are less likely to miss work, the organizational process can go without any delay. However, company culture can influence highly in keeping employees regular.

Companies can adopt a recognition program to recognize their regular employees. This will allow company leaders to encourage employees to be regular in their workplace for the best organizational workflow.

In this reward program, companies nominate their most regular employees to reward for their appropriate behavior. This inspires other employees to follow the behavior and make the company more efficient.

However, companies should not force employees to come to work regularly. Also, they should give employees chances to cover up their lost time due to unavoidable reasons. Recently, companies have seen a boost in productivity when offering employees flexibility in choosing their work schedule and even workplace. So, if a company can offer flexibility to the employees, they will certainly see a boost in regularity.

When employees take minimal leave and have attended to work on most workdays, they will be nominated for attendance record awards. Companies can reward all of the nominated employees to encourage them along with others to keep up the good practice.

Importance of a Proper Recognition System

All the organizational processes are systematic. Without maintaining the proper system, the organizational processes will turn into chaos and cause more problems. This will hinder an organization’s success.

Recognition allows organizations to keep employees satisfied and inspire them to keep up the good work. However, without a systematic process, recognition programs can miserably fail.

A recognition program needs to be based on solid metrics, mention the best practices, and should be able to steer employees to adopt the appropriate behavior. If a proper system is not maintained, companies won’t be able to achieve any of these perks. Thus, it will make the whole program pointless.

Additionally, if the recognition system is not transparent, employees will have a way to accuse it of favoritism. This will bring resentment among the employees and severely hurt the company’s reputation.

The proper way to recognize employees is to set the appropriate metrics first. Then, companies will need to calculate these metrics and find employees who resonate with those values. After nominating the candidates, leaders need to determine who is more deserving of recognition and reward them. While choosing the reward, leaders will need to customize it according to the employee’s personal choice.

If any of this process is missed or kept obscured, it will bring bad results for the whole organization. Thus, the company would struggle to progress and crumble down sooner than later.

Importance of Recognition

Employee behavior has changed a lot over the years. Most employees nowadays are from the millennial generation, and they are aware of their rights and responsibilities. Millennial employees are more concerned about getting recognized for their work.

Many surveys have shown that lack of recognition has made many employees quit their jobs and look for other opportunities. Therefore, if a company has no effective recognition program, it will see a higher turnover rate.

Recognition allows employees to know that their leaders care about them and value their work. So, when companies adopt effective recognition programs, employees become more engaged with their company.

The growth of a company depends highly on the employees’ contribution. If companies don’t acknowledge these contributions, employees can get frustrated and will not add much value to the company.

Recognition and appreciation for employees’ work and appropriate behaviors give employees a sense of security and make them feel valued. Therefore, they will put extra effort into their work to help progress the company.

Good recognition programs can motivate employees and reduce employee turnover rates. Therefore, companies will be able to retain fresh talent and can successfully steer the company towards success.

Bottom Line

A company thrives when it can offer a good environment to its employees. Otherwise, a company’s success can be severely affected, and its reputation will get compromised. No business owners want to face such adverse effects.

Appointing effective recognition programs and properly maintaining them can go a long way for organizational success. It helps organization leaders to encourage, motivate, and engage employees to initiate a better organizational culture. This can eventually lead to better success for the organization.

Generating appropriate recognition programs can be hard and consist of different moving parts. Taking help from online recognition platforms can help leaders generate better recognition programs. These platforms record necessary data and give insights to add appropriate metrics to recognition programs. Also, one can automatically get recognition once they have reached the appropriate metrics.

Leaders need to generate better recognition programs and nominate employees fairly to make the organization a better place for all employees equally.