What Kind of Recognition Program Do You Need?
Not all recognition programs are created equal. There are different kinds of programs that serve different needs, and come with different budgets and permissions for your team. Broadly, they fall into three categories.
Milestone programs
A milestone program is exactly what it sounds like, in that you recognize employees when they reach certain milestones in their professional or personal lives.
Most commonly, milestone programs are used to celebrate years of service at a company, but you can also recognize employees for other professional achievements, such as promotions, or even completing training.
Gifting for holidays and professional appreciation days can be included in your milestone program, too. Some companies also recognize personal milestones like birthdays, weddings, or those welcoming a new addition to their families.
A milestone program won’t have the same transformative effect on your culture as a real-time or peer-to-peer program, but it can still be impactful for companies with smaller budgets or a larger number of employees to serve. It can also be a good way to test out recognition before implementing it on a wider scale.
Using Guusto for Milestone Programs
Guusto makes milestone programs easy to implement and administer. You can completely automate your process by uploading employee lists in bulk and scheduling recognition ahead of time, so you never have to worry about missing an important milestone.
You can customize the colours and logo of your milestone recognitions to fit your brand, and personalize your messages for individual employees.
Your employees will also love the variety of reward options our gifts offer, which will help make the recognition more meaningful to them. And with no markups or fees, every dollar you spend on rewards goes directly to your employees.
Real-time Recognition Programs
If you want to unlock the true power of recognition, real-time programs are the way to go.
In a real-time recognition program, you recognize employees on spec whenever they do something you feel is worth celebrating, rather than just on special occasions.
This could mean sending them a reward for doing a really good job on a project, going out of their way to help a teammate, or any other way that they go above and beyond.
In doing so, you can show them just how much their contributions are valued, and encourage them to continue going the extra mile for your company.
Real-time recognition has been shown to improve morale and engagement, encourage collaboration, help align teams, and even boost retention.
While a real-time program requires more investment than a milestone program, it will be far more impactful, and it doesn’t have to break the bank. You can easily plan a successful program that fits your budget.
Using Guusto for real-time recognition
To set up a real-time recognition program in Guusto, you simply need to allocate monthly or quarterly recognition budgets to anyone you want to be able to send recognition.
Smaller companies will sometimes have a single admin sending all recognition, but it’s much better to allocate budgets to your managers to empower them recognize their people directly. Having recognition come directly from your managers makes it more meaningful and impactful for your people, and also makes it more instant by cutting down on the work of your admins and eliminating bottlenecks.
If you’re getting positive feedback about your program, you may want to give budgets to other employees as well.
Once you’ve allocated budgets and funded your account, you're ready to go! Your team members will be able to send rewards whenever they want to show their appreciation to their colleagues.
Peer-to-Peer recognition program
If you want to take your recognition efforts to the next level and empower everyone at your company, a peer-to-peer program is the way to go.
A peer-to-peer program works the same way as other real-time recognition programs, but everyone in your company is able to send recognition.
This means that all of your employees have the opportunity to celebrate and encourage each other, amplifying the effects of your program on culture and engagement.
Peer-to-peer programs typically require the largest amount of investment of all the program options, but also generate the largest return. You can also use non-monetary peer-to-peer recognition to lower the cost while still giving all of your employees a chance to participate.
Using Guusto for Peer-to-peer recognition
Guusto offers two options for peer-to-peer recognition.
The first is a budgeted peer-to-peer program, where every employee is given a monthly or quarterly budget to send recognition in real time. You can allocate different budgets to each team member (e.g. larger budgets to managers and smaller funds to employees) depending on your preferences.
The other option is Shoutouts, a non-monetary recognition tool that allows team members to send recognition without a reward. To maximize your flexibility, Shoutouts can be sent to both team members on your platform and people outside your system. You can rename your Shoutouts program to customize it to your company.
You can build a successful peer-to-peer program using either of these options. You can even combine both, allocating budgets to some team members (we often see organizations starting off by giving managers and leadership teams a budget) and giving Shoutouts access to everyone else, or send rewards to team members who have received Shoutouts to further celebrate and recognize these culture stars.
Monetary vs. Non-Monetary Recognition
Guusto offers both monetary and non-monetary recognition options. Monetary recognition involves sending recognition with a tangible reward attached, while non-monetary recognition allows your employees to show appreciation to colleagues without rewards.
Here are advantages and disadvantages of each option.
Pros and Cons of Monetary recognition
✅ Rewards give recognition more value- Attaching a reward to recognition makes it more valuable to employees by giving them something tangible to show for their efforts. This can make it a lot more meaningful for them.
✅ More empowering for employees- Giving your people their own recognition budgets can be quite empowering for them. It tells them that you value their opinion and voice, and are prepared to give them the agency to recognize what’s important to them.
✘ You might not be able to give budgets to everybody- While recognition is a relatively low-cost program to implement, large organizations or those with limited funds can find it difficult to give decent budgets to everyone at their organization. You might need to limit your program to just managers and executives, and allocate fairly low budgets to your team.
✘ Limited budget = limited recognition- Even if you give your everyone a budget, they might still not have the funds to recognize everyone they want to recognize! If several of your employees are knocking it out of the park on a regular basis, your managers might find it difficult choosing where to put their budgets.
Pros and Cons of Non-Monetary recognition
✅ Get everyone involved at a low cost- A non-monetary recognition option like Shoutouts makes it possible for you to give everyone at your company the chance to recognize each other for a very low cost.
✅ Unlimited recognition- While monetary recognition programs are limited by budget, there’s no limit to non-monetary recognition. Your team can recognize whoever they want, whenever they want, without having to worry about whether they have enough funds to do so.
✅ Can be supplemented with monetary rewards- Non-monetary recognition can be supplemented with monetary rewards. In Guusto’s Shoutouts feature, for instance, users have the option to recommend a reward amount to their admin when recognizing someone. You can also use the Draw feature to randomly select Shoutouts recipients for spot rewards at team meetings.
✘ Some actions deserve a reward- While non-monetary recognition is fine for celebrating small wins, it’s not necessarily appropriate for recognizing an employee who spent months working on a big project, or a salesperson who just landed a huge client. When an employee does something really special, their recognition should ideally come with some kind of more tangible reward attached.
✘ Harder to maintain participation- In monetary recognition programs, budgets resetting each month or quarter create a natural reminder for people to use the system. With non-monetary recognition, admins often have to do more work to try and maintain consistent participation across their team.
The important thing to remember is that both monetary and non-monetary can have a huge impact on your company culture and help to align, connect, and empower your team. Regardless of the reward involved, having the tools to appreciate their coworkers, and be appreciated in return, will be invaluable for your people.