Recognizing your employee performance is an important part of maintaining the morale and ambition for your staff. When you are looking for ways to ensure the top performance from your departments, you need to focus on rewarding those who go above and beyond. The goal is to reward the actions that you want to see so that everyone knows what they are striving for. Here are some tips for creating an employee reward program that will keep them working to be the best.

Recognize the Performance When it Happens

One of the best ways to ensure that your staff is correlating the rewards received to the work that they are doing is to recognize those performance milestones when they happen. Even if you don't physically issue the reward at that moment, taking the time to verbally acknowledge the effort and the fact that it is award-worthy is enough to provide positive reinforcement and clearly define the markers for success.

Make the Recognition Appropriate for the Achievement

Make sure that the recognition that you offer is actually appropriate to what the employee has accomplished. You want to recognize performance that actually nets results, not just acknowledge everything that your staff is doing. When the recognition isn't scaled to the actual results, you run the risk of workers expecting automatic recognition without putting forth the effort to earn it. At that point, your recognition program loses its value.

Put the Expectations in Perspective

You'll find that your staff is more likely to work for these achievements when you put them into a perspective that they can relate to. Most workers want to know how their accomplishments will relate to the big picture. By letting them know what each achievement means for the larger goals, it makes it easier for them to understand what they're working toward.

Random recognition isn't nearly as effective, because your workers will have no solid understanding of why that achievement matters. If you want the staff to put every effort toward making your business successful and striving for achievements, you need to help them understand what those achievements mean for the company's bigger plans and directions.

Choose a Reward That Matters

In order for your workers to truly appreciate any recognition, you need to make the award matter to them. Consider their perception of value. Many times, managers and supervisors create reward programs that involve monetary awards. While most people appreciate a bonus or a small raise, it isn't something you can put on the bookcase to show off your success. Trophy companies like Trophy Awards and otherwise will have lots of options.

Consider investing in acrylic awards or statues that you can distribute to workers for specific milestones or achievements. Even if you include a bonus payment with it, the physical award provides the worker with something that they can look at for years to come and remember the work that they did and the recognition received for it.

Eliminate the Subjectivity

Any time you have a reward program that is based on management selecting a single individual or one person nominating the winner, you have a perception of subjectivity and the potential for personal bias. If you want your reward system to matter to your staff, everyone needs to feel like they have an equal chance to win.

To do this, you need to make sure that everyone knows clearly what can earn them an award. Then, create a panel of several supervisors and management team members who will have to come to agreement on each staff member who has met the achievements. This eliminates the potential for one supervisor to play favorites and makes it clear to everyone that they all have an equal shot at success.

Whether you invest in acrylic awards or you opt for plaques, cards or other items, recognizing employee success is an important part of showing your staff that they are valued. It can significantly improve the corporate culture and the basic morale across the board. Using the tips presented here, you can create an employee recognition program that is based on measurable results and encourages everyone to participate.