Boosting employee adoption

Make your program fun for your employees and get them excited to both give and receive recognition.

In the previous article, we talked about improving manager and leadership adoption. The next element of maintaining a successful recognition program is Boosting Employee Adoption. 

Some important things to keep in mind when trying to improve adoption is to ensure that the program is meaningful and engaging. At the end of the day, a successful recognition program is ultimately about your employees. You need them to find value in the program and be excited to both receive and give additional recognition when they have the opportunity.  

To boost employee adoption you can:

1. Communicate the value of recognition.
2. Get employees excited about the program.

Communicating the value of recognition

It’s key to communicate the value of peer-to-peer recognition and answer that “what’s in it for me?” question that may be lingering:

• Recognizing peers will help you build stronger connections with colleagues, and make you both feel more a part of the community.
• Recognizing peers will make them more likely to want to help you with your projects and achieve your objectives.
• Recognizing peers consistently will make you more visible to leadership as a contributor to building a strong culture. This will open more opportunities in the form of better projects and promotions.
• Recognizing peers will help you develop your leadership skills and prepare you for leading teams, as consistent recognition will provide you more space to also provide constructive feedback.

Getting employees excited about recognition

Once employees understand the value of recognition, there are some events and initiatives you can leverage to get them engaged:

• Run events:
  • Run limited campaigns in which you encourage people to send recognition tied to certain themes (e.g. ‘Teamwork week’) or even link recognition to specific dates on the calendar (e.g. International Friendship Day).
  • Tie Guusto to existing events happening (offer Guusto gifts as prizes in your regular team building events, wellness challenges, etc.).
• Gamify recognition:
  • Use Guusto’s Leaderboards to see which employees are being recognized most over a given period of time, and who’s sending the most recognition.
  • Highlight your top performers regularly in team meetings and in internal communications, and even offer additional rewards for monthly or quarterly leaders- a great way to celebrate people who are really embracing recognition, and inspire others to up their game.
  • Use Guusto’s Draw feature, which randomly selects Shoutouts from all those received during a specific period of time, draw a few Shoutouts each week at meetings, and offer rewards to your winners.
• Leverage internal advocates
  • Your top performers deserve the spotlight! Employees who are actively using the tool could be great program advocates by being internal champions, filming a short promotional video for the tool and just letting other employees know why they use it.

All of the winners from some of these games and the top performers can be recognized over email, in internal newsletters and during any team meetings or town halls. 

Prioritizing peer-to-peer recognition is a great way to tie into any of your greater DEI initiatives. It’s really important for employees to feel like they “belong” at work, and recognition is a great tool to help them feel like they fit in by being heard and seen with the work they do.