The benefits of great staff morale are well known; increased productivity, fewer sick days and decreased staff turnover to name a few.
Giving awards to recognise staff achievement is a tactic employed by many companies, both large and small. But these awards tend to be restricted to the sales teams for when they hit targets and quotas. So what about all the other teams in your business? How can you use awards and gifts to recognise the achievement of all employees and help boost their sense of wellbeing?
Here’s five of our top tips for using awards throughout the company.
Peer to Peer Nominations
If awards are given for meeting KPIs it can foster a sense of competitiveness amongst your teams. Whilst this can be a good thing it has the potential to be slightly negative too as staff may become fixated on their own performance at the expense of team working.
Peer to peer awards are a way of facilitating team spirit as winners are nominated by their fellow team members for something great they’ve done. This could be staying calm during a particularly difficult customer phone call or going the extra mile to help someone else achieve their targets.
You don’t have to limit these nominations to within teams. How about asking sales to nominate the member of the accounts team who’s helped them get in their payments, or the accounts team could nominate the sales rep who’s handed over the best presented set of expenses. With a range of awards available, from items costing a couple of pounds upwards, these awards can be used for purposes as trivial or as serious as you like.
Customer Nominated Awards
Businesses are increasing their focus on gathering customer feedback through things like Net Promoter and other mechanisms. These are great for gathering quantitative data and producing scores, but they can also be used to receive qualitative information.
If customers feel well served you can ask them if they’d like to nominate the person or team they’ve worked with for a special award to recognise their service. People like dealing with people and if customers feel that the feedback they are giving will have a direct impact on another person’s situation, they may be more inclined to leave it than if they are simply asked to rate the service out of five.
There benefits of this type of award are twofold. Firstly, team members are more focused on creating personal relationships with the customers as they know the feedback will affect them. Customers also feel more valued, which can have a positive impact on their loyalty.
Special Occasion Mementos
Is your company looking to launch a new product or service, or open new premises? Perhaps you’re about to celebrate a major milestone such as a decade in business or your millionth customer?
For special occasions such as these companies will often throw a celebratory party where everyone can have a good time. The problem with parties is that the memories can fade quite quickly. Giving a memento of the occasion, such as a paperweight, glass or even one of our new Acrystalic awards, is a great way of making sure those positive memories are more pervasive.
Rotating Awards (The Brag Item)
These awards are passed between winning team members and kept by them until the next winner is selected. For example, if you gave an award for dealmaker of the month, that award would sit on the desk of the most successful sales person for however long they hold that position.
Because these awards remain visible to the team rather than being taken home and placed on a shelf, the provide continual motivation. The award holder has the pride and prestige of being the winner whilst the rest of the team have a reminder of what they are working towards.
As well as the more serious uses, these awards can be quite fun. For example, you may want to have a clean desk award or a top tea maker trophy. They choice of award, and duration of ownership, are as flexible as you need them to be to meet your needs.
Customer awards
This last award turns the tables a bit. You can ask you staff to nominate your customers for special recognition such as nicest call of the week or most entertaining email signature. The trick with these awards is to keep them trivial and spontaneous so they don’t feel like a run of the mill reward for placing a big order.
These awards help boost customer loyalty by making recipients feel truly valued by the company and it builds positive relationships with your team members. In turn, your staff empowered in their ability to make decisions about customers. You can even introduce a reciprocal reward for the team member who nominated the winning customer to encourage them to think about those relationships even further.
These are just some of the ways awards can be used throughout your business to create a positive impact. With a wide variety of award types and prices, along with innovative decoration techniques, we’re sure we can find the best type of award for your business and situation.
Have you used awards in an ingenious way in your business? Tell us and send us your pictures and we’ll share them on our social feeds.