A Guide to Giving Employee Recognition Like a Pro

Is your intention to prioritize employee recognition to build strong and high-performing teams? If yes, keep reading.

Using Bonusly is an important step towards modernizing and optimizing your employee recognition program. Once in Bonusly, there are even more steps you can take to ensure you and your team are giving recognition like pros.

What is recognition done right?

Before we even get to writing a recognition post, it's important to outline the elements of an effective recognition strategy.

At Bonusly, we understand that when recognition is implemented effectively, it evolves into a vital habit that unites teams, strengthens company culture, and enhances performance.

Today, organizations require innovative approaches to keep teams motivated and aligned. They need modern tools to identify and celebrate impactful behaviors while clarifying expectations around critical tasks. They also need to foster inclusivity by building a workforce where camaraderie and belonging thrive. Additionally, sharing stories of success that embody their mission, vision, and core values can bring those ideals to life.

So what does effective recognition really look like?

• Recognition is feedback in action. Consistent, specific, and public recognition highlights when team members exemplify company values and sets a clear standard of excellence for everyone.
• Recognition fosters connection. Effective recognition recreates the sense of community  once experienced in shared office spaces.
• Recognition aligns with meaningful incentives. The best kind of recognition creates a positive reinforcement loop that boosts performance, discretionary effort, and overall outcomes.
• Recognition enhances understanding and growth. Recognition provides employees and managers with insights into a team member’s contributions, strengths, and areas for development, ensuring clarity around their impact and potential.

The elements of writing effective recognition

Effective recognition is timely, specific, visible, inclusive, and values-based. We’ll use these principles as a guide for giving effective recognition. Let's get started.

1. Timely 

Let’s start at the very beginning: when should you give recognition to team members? The answer is: as close to “in the moment” as possible. Effective recognition is timely. Don’t wait until a performance review or the end of the month to give recognition. The closer the recognition is to the behavior you’d like to incentivize, the stronger the connection between the two events.

If your day is full of meetings, block time at the end of each day to take five minutes to reflect on the positive events of the day. Not only will your recognized team members feel appreciated, but you'll be highlighting a skill or win that is more likely to be reinforced company-wide.

2. Specific

Just like constructive feedback, positive feedback should be specific! An employee should have a clear understanding of which behavior they’re being rewarded for so they can repeat it in the future. Let’s look at some examples of how to make recognition specific. 

First, let’s compare two different versions of recognition for the same scenario to see which is more effective: 

Recognition version 1:

Recognition version 2: 

The second version clearly communicates the desired and rewarded behavior not only to Sally, but to the rest of the organization. 

Another great way to show off the team’s work is to include imagery of the project. If you’re rewarding team members for an excellent website revamp, try attaching an image to the recognition to show the visual improvements. 

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Including a link to the work teammates are being rewarded for is an effective way to add specificity to recognition. For instance, if you’re appreciating a new landing page, blog post, or even the way a sales call was handled, share links to improve cross-organizational visibility.

3. Visible

If you use Bonusly alongside a messaging platform like Slack or Microsoft Teams, bring the two worlds together by integrating the tools. That way, employees won’t have to have the Bonudly website open at all times in order to give and see recognition in real time. Integrating Bonusly with tools employees already use and love is a great way to boost participation. 📈

You can also try tagging team members for visibility in recognition, like when a new deal closes, or if you’d like to include the recipient’s boss for visibility of the great job they’re doing. Tagging a user in Bonusly will notify them of the recognition without awarding them any points. 

4. Inclusive

Part of building an intentional, engaging company culture is making sure everyone in your organization feels comfortable and valued. Recognition is key to building an inclusive culture.

A powerful way to ensure more folks are recognized is to diversify the parties responsible for giving recognition. That’s why we always recommend that anyone on the team has the ability to give and receive recognition. Recognition from all levels provides more opportunities for contributions to be appreciated and seen. Bonusly makes inclusive recognition easy by allowing users to recognize colleagues in any country and connecting recognition back to a value of inclusivity. 

Bonus tip: Try incentivizing inclusive behaviors like new team members linking up with a tenured employee or attending a new inclusivity training. There are many ways to encourage these types of behavior like allowing team members to expense food when attending this type of event or creating Awards for desirable behaviors.

5. Values-based

Bonusly makes it easy to associate company values with recognition through our value hashtags. Core values are attached to every recognition, bringing company culture to life and ensuring that employee behavior is aligned with the principles that matter most to your organization. Plus, linking recognition with company values helps communicate to the team that everyone is working towards the same goal. 

You can promote a culture of fun with gifs and emojis, too. At Bonusly, we love using gifs in our recognition. After all, if a picture is worth a thousand words, then a GIF must be worth a million!.You can always sprinkle in a few tasteful emojis, as well.  💚

Using Bonusly's gratitude gauge

In Bonusly, we make it easy to make sure your recognition follows best practices. When you begin writing your post, a cup icon will start filling up until you complete all elements that make up an effective recognition post—from the characteristics noted above, to things like ensuring you tag a coworker, add points, include a value or goal hashtag, and attach a gif.

The takeaway

We hope this article has encouraged you to think about what makes recognition go beyond saying thanks, and towards a powerful habit that drives culture and high performance.

Ready to see for yourself? Schedule time to speak with one of our employee recognition experts.