How Do Your Long Service Awards Stack Up?
Many companies offer long service awards as a method of recognising their most valued employees but is your loyalty scheme up to scratch? If you want to maximise the effectiveness of your years of service awards, here are six key questions to ask.
1. Are You Waiting Too Long?
If your employees are showing their loyalty to your company now, it isn’t wise to wait until they retire to show your appreciation. According to this Slide Share trend report, there is now a bigger push towards earlier recognition that ever before.
Whilst simply offering a long service award alone may not be enough to keep an employee loyal to your organisation, it can be a contributing factor in their decision making process when weighing up whether or not to jump ship. One way to improve your long service award scheme instantly is to increase the frequency of the award. Rewarding loyalty for five years of employment instead of ten could give your scheme more appeal instantly. With the average employee tenure now just 4.4 years, why wait ten years before you say thank you?
2. Are You Communicating It Well?
So, you have a long service award in place but is it gathering dust in the corner? What are you doing to promote it? You must create a buzz surrounding the presentation of a loyalty reward and give your employees a reason to get excited about it. Is everyone aware of how the award will be presented and most importantly, what the reward is? According to recent research, even though most companies have a scheme like this in place, only 58% of employees were actually aware of it. Contemplate incorporating award updates into a company newsletter or, where possible, make the presentation of the award public. This not only makes employees feel valued but it also adds a personal touch.
3. What Do Your Employees Think About It?
One of the main prerogatives when creating a long service award is that it motivates employees to work hard for your company and stay loyal to your business. But how can you tell if your employees are motivated by the scheme? Be sure to ask your employees for feedback on the scheme regularly and how it could be improved. Use pulse surveys to gauge which rewards employees find the most enticing. If the reaction to the current scheme isn’t as positive as you would like, it could be that you are offering a reward that your employees simply don’t value.
4. Is It Personal?
Finding a reward that has universal appeal and that will please the entire workforce can be challenging, so why not give each employee the option to choose their own award? That way you’re guaranteed to deliver something of true value to every individual.
5. What Are Your Competitors Doing?
In order to truly assess how your long service awards stack up, you will need to look to your competitors. A common way of rewarding employees is with monetary gifts in the form of a bonus, but this has little presentation value and runs the risk of being lost amongst household expenses, rather than being used for a genuine reward.
Monitoring what your competitors are offering as part of their overall benefits package gives you the opportunity to stay one step ahead.
6. Do You Have A Long Service Awards Strategy?
For some companies, the way they reward their long standing employees hasn’t changed since they introduced the programme ten years ago. Like any benefit, a long service award scheme should be constantly reviewed and updated, taking into consideration not only the employees themselves but the company’s business goals. If you want your loyalty efforts to stand out from your competitors, you need to constantly adapt to changing employee expectations.
It is also important to consider how you will ensure that the management team are aware of upcoming awards presentations and how you will keep a record of the employees to be rewarded. Having a formalised strategy will create much-needed focus and could make your long service award scheme more effective overnight.
