In my previous article “Hierarchy of Employee Needs” I wrote about how recognition of good work is the psychological need for esteem. To fulfill an employee’s need for esteem an employer must always make an employee feel like they are contributing to the success of the organization.
Recognizing good work is important because an appreciated worker is loyal, works harder, helps other employees, and becomes engaged. If you create a proper recognition program employees may not even demand higher pay.
Read below to get more details!
Worker Loyalty
A loyal employee is a great thing to have especially when times are tough. Loyal employees will stick it out longer helping to reduce your bad turnover. When business is down the last thing you need is to have to re-hire and re-train a new employee.
Word of mouth can be a major business driver for some organizations. This word of mouth can be amplified multiple times when your loyal employees are also telling people about how great it is to work for you. Customers and clients do like doing business with an organization where the employees are happy!
Hard Workers
If I’m being paid enough and feel appreciated enough by the organization, I work for have no trouble staying late to get work done. Happy employees are more likely to put in the extra effort and not worry about asking for overtime.
Naturally, in some industries or organizations, you have to pay overtime but, in many cases, if you have an employee classed as a manager they may not qualify for overtime. Working overtime as a manager means you are doing people management work outside of regular hours and your higher base pay should reflect that.
At the very least a hard worker may be an employee that arrives early to start work at the correct time because they have time before work to get ready and chat with co-workers. This hard worker normally will also work right to the end time and then pack up to go home after their shift is over.
Helpful Employees
Happy and recognized employees work better with their teams. Instead of seeing co-workers as competition for a raise or bonus, they can concentrate on helping the team members achieve team goals.
For this same reason, new employees will get better on-the-job training and mentorship from current employees. This will lead to new employees becoming productive sooner reducing the lower performance time of new employees.
In most industries, it may take six months before a new employee really understands their role. If you have a welcoming team environment this could be reduced to a few weeks!
Read my article “Top Ways to Create a Good Work Environment” to learn more about work environments.
Engaged Employees
If you have a large percentage of your employees engaged, you’ve won the best boss award! This is the gold standard when it comes to organizations. You get all the benefits listed above and now employees are actively working with you to make the organization better.
Engaged employees take the lead on new projects even if they are not related to their jobs. Although, this goes one step further as engaged employees bring ideas and projects to you. This means you as the owner, manager, or supervisor no longer need to be the only source of new ideas.
This really is the place you want to be but remember it can all fall apart if you don’t continue recognizing good work.
Higher Pay Dilemma
Employers are always scared of recognizing good work because they assume employees will demand higher pay. If done correctly this should not happen because you should already be paying them well! Read my article “Top 5 Reasons to Pay Higher Than Industry Standard” to learn more about pay.
If your organization depends on lower than industry standard pay or minimum wage, then you have a serious systemic business issue that needs to be solved. It’s time to get creative and find a way to pay well. If you can’t pay well then you will never gain any positive benefits from a proper recognition program.
You have people with brains working for you. So, be daring and ask them how to solve the organization’s issues that are preventing better pay.
What Next?
It’s time for you to figure out the best ways to make employees feel important for your industry and organization. As mentioned above, don’t be scared to ask your employees how they want to be recognized.
All articles on this website were written by Ian Hopfe. Connect with Ian on LinkedIn!