Using recognition to better employee relationships
Good recognition is the most versatile and influential tool you have at your disposal. It can drive engagement, build relationships, and tie together a geographically dispersed team.
This section is intended to remind you of some best practices for recognition and to encourage new, creative ways of managing through recognition that will make your job easier and make your team more effective.
Why Recognition Matters
At its heart, recognition is just another word for positive feedback. That is – it is feedback that is focused on an employee’s strengths and what they are doing right. Appreciation must be seen as authentic, fair, consistent and personal in order to have the power to move your employees.
Good recognition reinforces what your employees are already doing right and offers a model for future success. When done well and consistently, recognition can make your job infinitely easier.
How Recognition Helps You Manage
Each recognition moment adds to a broader picture of strengths and weaknesses—so when it comes time to create individual development plans or evaluations, you have a real-time record of that worker’s achievements—as they were created in the moment, and not recalled months after the fact.
Recognition is also a great way to get new employees quickly oriented. By recognizing them during their first weeks and encouraging them to recognize others, you can quickly show your newest reports what it means to really practice your values and what behaviors you want most.
How Recognition Helps You Coach a Team
Recognition is also great for managing a broader team or department. Each recognition moment helps to strengthen the relationships among your team members and between your team and others in the organization—and you’ll get a visual map of those relationships just by leveraging the data that recognition produces. Relationships are how work gets done in an organization. So it follows that facilitating them will increase departmental and interdepartmental flow, break down barriers, and make it easier for your department to function.
**Recognition helps you to have proactive, positive conversations with employees about what they’re doing right—that can help avoid later, more unpleasant conversations about what they’re doing wrong. This will help boost overall supervisor employee relationship.
LUXA Enterprises offers outsourced hr solutions for small and mid-size businesses in the Tulsa and surrounding areas. If you’re considering a short or long-term approach for your hr needs, give us a call for more information at 918-928-7288.
