In this recent WorldatWork Post, Rose Stanley discusses an increase in the number of employee recognition programs that include specific business results objectives – in addition to the more traditional years of service programs, above and beyond and peer to peer, etc.  One additional reason for including business results in your employee recognition program is that you are now using incremental revenue or incremental savings depending on the objective to help fund your program.

Similar to a traditional channel sales incentive program, companies will have a lot easier time dedicating funds to budget a recognition program when those results directly contribute to the bottom line.  If your business results objective is to reduce costs spent on shipping by $100K in a year and you have 100 employees and are willing to dedicate 5% of your savings to a recognition program.  For argument’s sake, let’s say you hit $100K in savings on the nose, the company puts $5K towards recognition and each employee earns a $50 award, while the company saves $95K.  That’s a win for everybody.

This does not mean one should abandon the more traditional recognition program objectives such as years of service.  Those are still prevalent and, as Rose Stanley points out, are “quite valued by employees and still an important piece of employee recognition programs today.  But what we are seeing is that supporting employee’s efforts for driving results continues to grow in popularity and helps to keep the momentum going.”