Maximizing employee feedback for a winning company culture

Feeling valued at work helps boost engagement, productivity, and company loyalty. This includes recognition from management. Employees who feel their work is appreciated tend to be much more satisfied in their roles.

This not only improves retention rates, but also helps companies be seen as the top place to work, which is especially important in such a competitive labor market. But recognition has to be done properly in order to be successful.

Let’s look deeper into why recognition is so important to hourly workers and some tips on how to approach it.

Boosting employee morale and curbing burnout

In a time where expectations may be higher as a result of labor shortages, it’s especially important to recognize the hard work of your employees. Recognition, especially publicly, can sometimes help prevent burnout. Knowing their hard work has been noticed and is appreciated can be validating and instill a sense of pride and purpose in the work they do.

However, simply acknowledging these accomplishments may not be enough to sustain an employee’s satisfaction. Rewarding a top notch work ethic through recognition programs, raises, and a path to promotion will be much more effective for the long-term.

Rolling out employee recognition programs

Establishing recognition programs goes a long way to help hourly employees feel valued. Developing programs that recognize both individual accomplishments and team achievements is important.

Individual Recognition

There are many ways to reward individual employees for their hard work. Giving public praise through employee of the month awards, callouts during team meetings, or company kudos platforms is a great start, and will definitely help them feel seen and valued.

For individuals who are consistently performing at a high level, managers should be having conversations about raises or promotion opportunities. This will reinforce that hard work does pay off and provide an example for other employees on how to excel in their roles.

Team Recognition

While achievements on the individual level are important to reward, you also want to encourage teamwork by rewarding team performance. This could include taking the team out to lunch, having an offsite event held during work hours, or facilitating a team building event.

Only recognizing individual successes could result in resentment from teammates and lower overall morale. That’s why having a balance between individual and team recognition programs is crucial.

Gathering frontline employee feedback helps guide recognition approaches

How do you know what recognition programs will be successful? You don’t want to invest in a program that may not resonate with your hourly workers. Workforce engagement is the key to understanding what approach will work best.

Consistently checking in with your employees on how they like to be recognized for accomplishments will help you create a program that will drive positive outcomes. It also sends the message to your workforce that you value their input and want to provide the best employee experience for them. This will also help boost your reputation as an employer of choice and help you stand out from the competition.