How To Empower Your Managers To Become Employee Recognition Champions
Managers truly are the unsung heroes when it comes to building and reinforcing a culture of appreciation in the workplace. The power of their personal praise and recognition of individuals in your business shouldn’t be underestimated! In fact, managers have the ability to directly boost employee morale and engagement, and even exemplify the importance of workplace gratitude, encouraging others to show appreciation to their colleagues. This is supported by our research-backed white paper, ‘The Heart of Workplace Engagement’, that reveals that 51% of employees are most positively boosted by direct recognition from managers.
In the modern working world, employees are seeking recognition from managers more than ever before and there’s even a perceived lack of recognition, with 52% of employees frequently feeling unrecognised for their achievements. Instant feedback from managers in the form of a ‘thank you’ or ‘well done’ is pivotal in addressing this recognition gap. Plus, managerial recognition can significantly contribute to enhancing workplace satisfaction, driving positive behaviour, building colleague camaraderie and cultivating a thriving workplace culture. Pretty powerful stuff, right?
To make recognition the bedrock of your business’ culture, your managers need to be empowered to champion it in their individual roles and take the lead in recognising their team members and other colleagues. But you can’t just tell managers to start recognising people. It’s certainly not a task to be ticked-off! Managers need to get why they should be doing it. They need to understand the valuable role recognition has in solidifying your business’ mission, purpose and values in the minds of employees. Plus, they need the right support from your business to do it – that’s where the empowerment bit comes in.
In this blog, we’re going to share some valuable tips to help you shape your managers into employee recognition champions. Ready to get started? Let’s go!
Why do leaders need to be recognition champions?
Managers and people leaders have the special position of being able to witness the big and small acts of excellence that take place ‘on the ground’ in your business. At the same time, they have the authority and influence to showcase individual achievements and efforts to the rest of the business.
Daily moments of ingenuity, dedication and teamwork that otherwise may go unnoticed or unappreciated can therefore be identified by managers and actioned so that individuals get the recognition they deserve.
Personal recognition from a manger is significant for two reasons. When recognising an employee, the manager’s professional authority and personal relationship with the individual makes it impactful. We can all resonate with the boost of being recognised by a manager, right? Secondly, managers have the influence to elevate recognition beyond a two-person exchange, so it’s visible to C-suite and other colleagues across the business.
The impact? Recognition that’s spread throughout the business and leaves a lasting impact on employees. Beyond that, some of the specific benefits of managerial recognition include:
- Increased employee engagement
- Boosted employee morale and wellbeing
- Improved employee loyalty and retention
- Enhanced employee motivation and productivity
- Stronger teamwork and workplace culture
- Increased employee confidence
- Enhanced employee visibility and colleague connection
- Improved connection between C-suite and employees
7 ways to turn your managers into recognition champions and boost engagement
To be the in the best position to lead the charge for embedding recognition practices in your business, your managers need to be equipped with the right tools, guided through their journey and empowered to act. With that in mind, here are some top tips to support your line managers, so they have the best chance of success in boosting employee morale and engagement.
Before you do anything, you need to decide who your champions are. Rather than opting for all people leaders to become recognition champions, it’s best to identify the individuals that already have the core, foundational skills that align with this important role. To put it bluntly, not all managers will be up for the job – and that’s totally ok! Champions need to be empathetic, strive for human connection and have a genuine interest in the wellbeing of their colleagues. Beyond that, a positive attitude and a strong sense of purpose, ownership and accountability is important.
1. Identify potential champions
It’s now time to co-ordinate the training required to ensure your managers have the right skills and knowledge to effectively recognise their colleagues. As part of this, it’s important to reinforce your company values and the types of positive behaviour you want your managers to look out for in their team and praise. A useful tip here is to provide best-practice examples of recognition to ensure that when managers do recognise others, they know how to do it in a way that has the biggest impact on individuals – the biggest boost!
2. Implement comprehensive training programmes
This is where the ‘how’ comes in. Make sure your managers have access to the right tools to enable them to recognise individuals in a quick and efficient way. Recognition platforms are really beneficial at this stage, because managers can easily recognise individuals in minutes, all while sticking to a framework that ensures recognition is always tied to your company values, includes a personal message and can be (if the manager deems it appropriate) shared with the rest of the business for ultimate impact.
3. Provide necessary tools and resources
Managers deserve some love, too! To help them become the best possible champions, make sure your business – and this means the C-suite and as well as colleagues at other levels – is also taking the time to celebrate manager’s efforts through recognition programmes, awards and public commendations. This all contributes to reinforcing the value of recognition and demonstrating the power of celebrating excellence in your business.
4. Recognise and celebrate managers
Just because you have recognition champions, doesn’t mean your managers should solely shoulder the responsibility of appreciating colleagues. Collaboration is key! Make sure that all colleagues in your business, at all levels, are empowered and encouraged to recognise others. Build a sense of shared responsibility to seek out positive behaviour and call it out in the moment. Building culture is collective!
5. Foster a culture of mutual recognition
Managers naturally spin a lot of plates, so it’s important to regularly remind them about their commitment to engaging and recognising team members so it remains front of mind. Keeping in touch regularly to share up to date training, additional learning opportunities and to simply reinforce what you expect from them will help maintain the momentum.
6. Communicate with managers frequently
To get the best outcome from introducing recognition champions in your business, it’s essential to measure the success of it by regularly monitoring your managers’ performance. As a starting point, having a recognition tool allows you to easily quantify how many times each manager has recognised someone. But beyond that, sit down with your champions at regular intervals to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of their approach, and agree opportunities to improve their engagement strategy accordingly.
7. Monitor and evaluate their impact
Unlock the power of employee recognition with Boostworks
A key part of supporting your managers to become true recognition champions, is giving them the right tools to make appreciation accessible, simple and easy. Managers are busy people, right? So, it’s all about taking away as many barriers as possible for them so becoming a recognition champion doesn’t feel like a burden or chore.
That’s where we come in. 👋 Being people experts and having built employee recognition technology for over twenty years (yep, we’ve been around for a while!), we understand your challenges and know how to help businesses create a seamless recognition experience that allows appreciation to easily become a daily practice for all employees.
Our recognition solution not only offers an outstanding experience, both on mobile and web, but can be easily configured to suit the unique needs of your business. Whether you have recognition practices in place that you want to streamline, you’re looking to switch providers or you’re starting from scratch, we can deliver a range of solutions to support you such as peer-to-peer recognition, milestone awards, personalised reward delivery, self-service rewards for managers and more!
Interested in finding out more? Book a chat with a member of our team today! We’re a friendly bunch here at Boostworks, and there’s no obligation for you to get on board with us. Let’s talk about your current challenges, bring our service to life and see if we’re the right fit for you.