20 Employee Recognition Idea's for your Team

To recognize our team members/peers is important to keep or establish a good working environment. Most of us spend a lot of time at work and want to do an excellent job at whatever we do so it is important to show sincere appreciation to the people we work with.
Note the goal here is to encourage the best possible performance from all team members (including yourself!) and not to try to manipulate people.  This certainly doesn't mean we all need to pad each other on the back and build a perfectly harmonic environment. In some cases it might be helpful to have a more competitive environment to achieve the best possible goal. In any case there are thousands to books, podcasts, articles etc on this topic. Below I have put some key idea's that I consider a good starting point for Employee Recognition. Note that while most of these idea's are not new we need to implement them to ensure they help our team. Are you doing any of these in your team?

Here 20 Employee Recognition idea's for your team

1. Say "Thank you!" - In person whenever possible or written to give more visibility to other people. This is easy and probably the most important but unfortunately not nearly done often enough. Note that this needs to be personal and honest! If you need to fake it don't do it!
2. Offer Job Rotations or consider Job Promotions (for people who show initiative) 
3. Start a program that allows employees to submit suggestions for improvement. In order to make this effective you need to be ready to implement (some of) these improvements
4. Allow employees to choose their next assignment
5. Provide interesting work/project
6. Facilitate Training (technical and non-technical)
7. Recognize Anniversaries (Birthdays, long service etc.). When you do that don't give away cheap stuff. This needs to be done sincerely with appreciation or not done at all.
8. Buy books and magazines for your team (not just business related books but everything that is intellectually stimulating) 
9. Have a Wall of Fame with Photos of your team 
10. Provide Gift Cards (e.g. Starbucks, Amazon, Best Buy etc.) 
11. Cinema/Movie Tickets  
12. Provide "Work from home" opportunities
13. Give publicly credit for employees who deserve it. E.g. write a Thank you message to your employees on the entrance door of your building or office, make sure senior leaders get visibility to this as well
14. Promote Team building activities (e.g. once per week/month/quarter ... whatever works for your team). This could be a company picnic, pizza party, ice-cream afternoons, get together at the end of the day etc.
15. Provide Educational Opportunities (e.g. ongoing professional development, language, scholarships etc.)
16. Setup regular Lunch or Dinner with Senior Leaders
17. Showcase your employees and their work to your leaders. Communicate clearly why they are important to your team. Add pictures when possible and appropriate 
18. Show sincere interest in your employees' professional development. You need to follow up on this with action to make it authentic. This doesn't mean that you can give everyone what they want but you can help show a way that can get them there. Keep in mind that you will benefit from a strong network as well since your employees will go off to different areas of your company or switch companies
19. Publicly communicate an employee's ideas and suggestions and their positive impact to your team
20. Time off for Charity or Volunteer work

The key for all these ideas (and the thousands more that you can find on Google etc.) is that you keep the team motivated, engaged and feeling valued and appreciated. Don't underestimate these ideas they can really make a difference. 

Some thoughts about gettings things done

There is definetely more advise on this topic out there than anyone could digest and hence I want to keep this very short. As you know there is not one way to get things done there are many ways that work for different people in different situations. What I have below is based on my experience with Business and IT Programs/Projects in the High Tech Industry.

1. Have a clear Goal!
• You can explain to anyone in the program in 2 minutes what this is program is all about
• Everyone else in the program can tell you in their own words (in 2 minutes) what benefits this program will provide
• You know what will define success and how to measure success
2. Think like an entrepreneur!
• Assume it is your money you spend on the program --> only do what is necessary to achieve your goal.  Whatever you do, do it right with 100% commitment!
• Involve the people you really need --> don't bloat the program with stakeholders if they don't have a clear role
• Be responsible - the buck stops with you! 
3. Be passionate
• You love what you do and are committed to make it successful for your customers, your team and yourself. Not being passionate is not an option!
• Engage the best people and ensure they can do their best work. 
• Everything can be improved! Therefore use every opportunity to make improvements.
4. Focus on your customer
• Make the program successful w/o looking at your own benefit will yield the biggest long term benefits!
5. Break your goals into digestible tasks
• Smaller tasks are better to understand and monitor for you and for your customers
• You need successes along the way to keep morale up. Plan for these successes.
6. Don't just talk about doing things but actually start DOING them
• Plans are very important and need to be there, nevertheless you need to start somewhere and it's probably not the ideal point. In order to get things done you actually have to start doing them. 
7. Keep things simple
• Ensure that stakeholders which are NOT full-time engaged in your program still fully understand the processes and systems you are implementing. If stakeholders don't understand what you are trying to do or disagree with what you are trying to do they can't support you. 

There are definetely many more great tips out there but the above is a good starting point to get things done. 

Some things to consider for your next IT Plan of Record (POR) task

Many of you work on IT Plan of Records and it always seems a struggle to communicate why your teams requirements are more important than requirements from another team. Please note that in general it is very important to put a Dollar ($$$) value on your requirements. This could be for cost savings or for revenue increases but it needs to be crystal clear to everyone (Business/IT) what the expected benefit is when this requirement gets implemented. If you think you can't put a dollar value on it think about potential customer satisfaction and something like customer retention rates. How does your company value that?  Below I have put some notes and an example you might want to consider next time you work on an IT POR

To Do

1. Collect all business requirements from your stakeholders (global + regional requirements)
2. Determine overlap of these business requirements
3. Determine if you have cost savings or revenue increases when you implement these requirements
4. Size and prioritize the business requirements
5. Present to IT POR committee 

Example

1. Business Requirement: All products that are added to a quote need to remain valid as long as the quote is valid.  Example: Quote 123 is valid for the next 30 days. Product ABC is only valid for 10 more days hence product ABC should not be added to the quote.
2. For our example let's assume that this is the same in all our regions (Americas, Europe/Middle East and Africa and Asia Pacific).
3. This is clearly a cost savings requirement (.. with some additional aspects ...)
4. Questions to ask
• How many deals are currently impacted by this business requirement?
• Is every region equally impacted by this business requirement?
• What is the (manual) process to fix this issue if a product that is not valid for the whole quote validity period is added to a quote?
• How much time is needed to address this issue? ... and who is fixing it?
• What is the average annual Salary of the person that is fixing the issue?
• How much time is needed to communicate the solution of the issue (to the customer?)? .. and who is doing it?
• At the end we could have the following $ number (simplified)
• Quotes with invalid product numbers per year : 1,000 (globally)
• Time needed per quote to (in Min) to fix issue: 30min
• Communications needed (email, phone calls etc.) to clarify changes / confusion with customer/others (in Min) per quote: 20min
• Average Salary of person that is fixing the issue (according to HR tables): $60,000
• Average Salary of person that is communicating the fix for this issue (according to HR tables): $50,000

• Resulting $ amount
• 1,000 x 30min = 30,000min  (= 500 hrs / = 62.5 days)  (time to fix issue) 
• 1,000 x 20min = 20,000min ( = 333 hrs / = 41.5 days) (time to communicate fix)
• Annual work time for employees ... check this link. For the US it is 1,790 hours per year
• Average hourly cost (simplified) for the person fixing the issue: $60,000 / 1790 hours per year = $33.52 per hour 
• Average hourly cost (simplified) for the person communicating the issue to the fix: $50,000 / 1790 hours per year = $27.93 per hour
• Final numbers: 
• 500 hrs x $33.52 = $16,760.00  (Cost to fix issue)
• 333 hrs x $27.93 = $9,300.69 (Cost to communicate fix)
• Total cost = $26,060.69 Total cost savings amount. This needs to accompany your IT POR requirement 
• NOTE: This does not include customer satisfaction challenges (e.g. customer retention etc.) or the cost of fixing this issue (you need a cost benefit analysis for that). 

Next time you work on your business requirements follow this idea to increase your chances to actually get your requirements approved. It should help you to think more thoroughly about your requirements and hence come up with better data to justify the requirement.