Speaker 1: In this video, we're gonna talk about what are the best and what are the worst ways to reward employees. Stay tuned. According to a Deloitte study, recognition plays a major role in employee engagement and satisfaction, which is not altogether surprising because if you think about the times that you've been rewarded for doing a good job, it's incentive for you to do more. And that works exactly for our employees as well. So in this video, let's talk about what are the best and worst ways to reward your employee. Let's go. The best way, number one, provide public recognition. Everyone loves being recognized for a job well done. This could be something as simple as a thank you or a formal public announcement of your team's great effort. Rewards like giving public displays of recognition or reward serves as both an incentive and a reminder to your team of what are the values that we're placing on our workflow and what are the things that we wanna continue doing. And most importantly, it gives the rest of the organization access into what your team is doing and what they're doing really well. The worst way, number one, to reward your employees is by assuming that everyone likes the same things, like pizza parties. Yes, while I am a big fan of pizza and I love treats, when it comes to employee recognition, it's not always a one-size-fits-all solution. So if you assume that everyone on your team is going to like the same thing or the same type of reward, you're gonna miss the mark. What's important to know here is that every employee has unique motivators and things that get them going when it comes to reward and recognition. What you need to know here is what every employee on your team distinctively finds as a motivator or an incentivizer. Instead of doing a pizza party for everyone, you give someone a free movie ticket or you give them a gift card to their favorite restaurant. By going the extra mile, it makes it a little bit easier for your team to feel rewarded and feel like what they've accomplished is something that's not only greater for the organization, but it's meaningful to you as the manager. Best way number two, create a holistic recognition and rewards program. So if you're looking to create a holistic recognition program, what are the components that you need to value? I have four things that I think that fall under a holistic recognition program that are important. Multi-level recognition, integration into existing systems, tracking employee networks, and customized rewards. And to this, I wanna point to the sponsor of this video, LuckyCarrot. LuckyCarrot is an integrated system that allows businesses the ability to acknowledge the achievements of their teams and reward the employees accordingly. By having a full integrated system like LuckyCarrot, it's really easy for you as a manager to get your team involved, get your team engaged, and actually reward them on a very, very individualized basis. So in the case of LuckyCarrot, which I think is really cool, you can integrate it into your systems and you actually have employees get a certain allowance of carrots that they're actually able to send to other employees that they're able to redeem at a later date. It's something that's scalable, so you can start as small as you want it to if it's something as simple as just doing recognition to something as large as redeeming for items or getting executives involved or tracking employee network. So let's talk a little bit more about what are the components of what a holistic recognition program should look like. When we talk about multi-level recognition, we're not just talking about top-down recognition. Really the most impactful way of getting employees engaged is by using a system where employees can recognize each other. Usually you think of recognition coming from the top-down, so the CEO, the VPs all giving people below a chance to say, hey, good job. It's very difficult for an employee to tell their supervisor that they did a good job or tell the, let's say, an individual to tell their CEO that they did a good job. A lot of times we think of it as top-down. The cool thing about the way that LuckyCarrot is set up is people can actually recognize those above them as well as people on their level and people below them as well. So it really opens up the possibilities for other people to share and recognize when someone's doing something really well. The other thing that you wanna think about when it comes to a holistic rewards program is making sure that it integrates into the systems that you currently have. Now, as someone who had a background in communications and marketing, when you roll out a new system to employees, it's really difficult for employees to buy in to a new system when they already have five or six or seven different platforms that they have to manage. So the cool thing about LuckyCarrot is it does integrate with systems like Slack, for example, which if you use Slack on a daily basis, you know how important it is to be able to integrate your systems into the tool that you use on a daily basis because it becomes an intuitive and natural part of recognition. And you as a manager can encourage employees to send more carrots, to get more engaged, and just to help out kind of facilitating the recognition and rewards program. Like I talked about before, the other thing that you wanna do with the holistic program is making sure that customized rewards is something that's available for employees to take part in. Not everyone likes pizza parties. Some people want individual items, experiences, gift cards that they can take and actually redeem. The cool thing with LuckyCarrot is once an employee has a bank of carrots that they've received from other people, other employees, they can actually start redeeming those carrots for real life rewards, which is a huge differentiator, in my opinion, as I have seen a lot of different rewards programs where it's just, you can say something and then it falls flat and there's not usually a lot of follow-up to come behind the rewards and the recognition. But by allowing employees to redeem their own gifts, they can choose how they want to reward themselves using the recognition and carrots that other people have given them. The last thing that I wanna talk about from a holistic standpoint, a holistic rewards program, is tracking employee networks. So while it is important that you get your recognition program up and running, it is also really important that you make sure that you're able to track and use the data behind that recognition and rewards to actually provide some business intelligence for you as a manager to move your business forward. The cool thing with LuckyCarrot is it actually tracks who is giving carrots to who. And the thing that I think is really cool with this is, I'll put a visual up as well, you can actually see the networks that exist within businesses. So it actually spans across teams where you're not just looking at your close team, but you're actually able to look as an organization and see what parts of your teams are working together well with other parts of the organization. And when you're looking at these networks, you can also start to see trends in employees who are becoming more engaged or less engaged, depending on the carrots that they've received. If you start to see that an employee is putting in more applications or they're starting to put in more effort into their work and they're getting more recognition because of it, you can track and say, okay, what are the things that this employee is doing, whether it be training and development, whether it be a promotion or things like that to see what's actually incentivizing employees within your organization to outperform others. And contrary to that, you're actually able to see when employees are starting to become disengaged and start offering them more customized support when it comes to helping them find their purpose and passion, giving them the career training that they need, maybe offering them a different type of incentive if they're working off of a, let's say a bonus structure, something like that. But all of this is really part of the holistic recognition program. And I always like to say LuckyCarrot's a really great example of that. I'll put a link below so that you're actually able to reach out to them, schedule a demo if you like. I've met with them. I think it's a really cool platform for employees and managers who are managing a team and they want to kind of up their rewards and recognition game. But for the people watching this video, check out that link for sure. If you're interested in creating a holistic recognition program. The worst way, number two, to do rewards and recognition is top-down recognition. So we talked about multi-level recognition, how important that is. But if your recognition is only coming from the top-down, it's not always a great thing, although that can be really motivating and there is some benefit of a top-down recognition. If that is the only way that your recognition program is structured, you're gonna need to add in more depth and more dynamics into how that's gonna operate. And the main reason why top-down recognition doesn't always work is because employees feel like if they do something right, they have to wait for someone to recognize them for the good work that they're doing. As opposed to the multi-level recognition where if an employee does something really well, a peer can say something to them right away and they're able to get that satisfaction or that kind of the fulfillment of a good job without having to wait for a top executive to recognize their work. Best way, number three, is to encourage limitless recognition. In my opinion, rewards and recognition are always, always, always based in the company culture. If your culture is very scarce and your team feels like things are not free to come by, like things like recognition, it makes it very hard to promote ongoing and inclusive recognition because your team is viewing things as a scarce mentality. If you're able to encourage limitless recognition, that is, let's say every week people are recognizing each other left and right, it uplifts the entire team, but it also creates a culture that they don't have only a small number of recognition and thank yous that they can give and receive in a given week. Now, I know that sounds conceptually kind of weird, but if you are able to shift your culture from one of being scarce to one of feeling like abundant, it makes it a lot easier for you to move your rewards and recognition program forward because employees feel like recognition and rewards is just built into the culture. It's part of how your team operates. It's part of what you guys value as an organization as opposed to the other where you feel, oh, we don't really recognize each other here, those type of mentalities. So focusing on limitless recognition. And what does that look like? It looks like celebrating milestones when they happen. Someone's birthday, someone's promotion, someone's having a baby. Those type of milestones really stick out to people and special occasions, the more that you can build those into your schedule and make your team feel like every day is something special that they can celebrate or if there's a lot of activity and things that are happening, it makes it really, really great for your team to start experiencing more recognition than they had before. And the worst way to recognize employees, number three, is tying recognition to performance reviews. A lot of managers and a lot of supervisors actually hold back a lot of their recognition where they don't think about how to recognize employees until it comes time for performance reviews. Now, not all the time are performance reviews things that are negative, things that have to be viewed as something to be scared of. But if you're only giving feedback and only giving positive recognition during your performance reviews, you're missing a huge opportunity for the rest of the year to be able to tie in rewards and recognition into your workflow and into your management style. So try to separate the two. If you're able to keep employee and recognition separate from employee reviews, performance reviews, you're gonna be having a lot more success with your rewards and recognition program. Let me know, are there other ways that you prefer to be recognized or you prefer to recognize your team? And are there ways that you really don't? Like, do you get pizza parties at work and you just hate it? Let me know in the comments below. What are some of the best or worst ways that you've been recognizing that you've been recognizing your team? And if this video was helpful, don't forget to leave a thumbs up. And with that, I will see you on the next one.