Positive employee recognition is essential in running a business. Even saying a simple thank-you to your most valuable team members can go a long way. Of course, most of your performing employees deserve more, and it might be the reason that you started some employee recognition programs.
The biggest challenge with those programs is determining which employee deserves the recognition or prize you’ll award. Thankfully, you don’t have to do anything special. All you need to do is take advantage of workforce intelligence.
Workforce intelligence is a simple process of collecting data about past, current, and prospective employees. Your company’s human resources (HR) department often performs workforce intelligence since their responsibilities often require them to make decisions based on it.
Now, if you’re not precisely from HR but you’re managing your company’s employee recognition programs, you may want to familiarize yourself with workforce intelligence and how it can help you. To do all of that, continue reading.
Use it to let employees rate their performance
You can schedule text messages to send to your employees to check on them and let them rate their current performance. This is a simple form of self-evaluation, which can help them keep themselves checked. However, unlike the formal self-appraisal, you can do or send this message weekly or monthly instead of yearly.
Aside from keeping track of the ones who feel confident that their work is worth being recognized, making your employees report on their performance can allow their managers to take the initiative to stop any potential problems that may crop up.
You can even utilize these weekly messages to allow your employees to vote on who deserves to be the employee of the month. The important thing here is to make your employees aware that you’re following processes to recognize employees. You don’t just pull names out of nowhere.
Use it to know your employees’ potential
An employee recognition program isn’t all about gifts and bonuses at the end of each working month. It’s about letting your employees know that you’re aware of and care about what they’re doing in the company. There are many ways that you can do that. For one, you can utilize beneficial employee monitoring software. Alternatively, you can take the time to talk to them whenever you’re in the office.
Aside from using your workforce intelligence data to know who deserves the current month’s perks or rewards, you can also find it to discover your employees’ potential. Instead of giving them gifts or words of appreciation, you can provide them with an opening in their career paths. You can send them to training or business seminars to grow and know that you recognize their potential.
Use it to make sure the worthy are the ones recognized
Chaos may ensue once you mistakenly reward an employee who’s not contributing to your company’s success. Gossip and rumors can quickly spread around your workplace, and your employees’ trust in you may plummet. Once that happens, it will render your employee recognition programs ineffective.
Aside from using workforce intelligence and analytics to know who’s performing well in your business, you can also use the data you can get to identify those who are not doing well at their jobs. And instead of choosing them by mistake in the future, you may want to take the initiative to push them into an upskilling program or let your human resource department determine their fate.
Use it to determine what kind of employee recognition program they want
Workforce intelligence is not just about the numbers, metrics, and indicators of your employees’ performance. It also involves various pieces of information like employee behavior, attitude, and even their motivations.
With the data you can gather from your workforce intelligence, you can determine the most effective employee recognition program you can utilize to raise your employees’ morale further and make them more motivated.
For example, some may prefer having big celebrations to become more motivated to come to the office. If most of your employees are like that, you should launch surprise celebrations and office outings instead of giving senseless company medals and trophies. Or you can try other stuff as well, like giving out free meals, gift cards, or shout-outs in your company’s social media accounts.
Use it to let employees know that they’re monitored fairly
Employee recognition programs are only effective if people know that the ones who’ll receive recognition are worth it. They wouldn’t want to know that the candidates for such programs were chosen because of favoritism or bias. Because of that, you can take advantage of the fact that you’re using workforce intelligence to back the decisions behind your employee recognition programs.
Conclusion
Making sure that all your employees are constantly motivated and have high morale is one of the keys to ensuring your business can operate as efficiently and effectively as it can. Thankfully, you continuously achieve those things by utilizing workforce intelligence to improve your employee recognition programs.
