Informed by the theories mentioned above, the primary goal and objective of an employee reward and recognition program is to create a positive working environment, a culture of recognition and to motivate employees to achieve high performance. In order to accomplish this, goals must essentially follow the SMART concept which means goals must be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely. Having structured, set goals is what upgrades goals to becoming objectives.
Specific goals have higher probability in being accomplished; therefore we would like to encourage communication by letting employees provide open feedback to each other and recognize what they are doing well in, through the E-Awards recognition program which will be explained in detail further on. By providing positive feedback, it does not mean that we should ignore weaknesses; rather we are not making weaknesses the primary focus of the feedback. Imagine everyone criticizing each other, people will only learn how to hide their mistakes or shift the blames to others. Instead, we will focus on reinforcing desired behaviours by giving out rewards and recognition to those who are nominated by their peers.
The goals mentioned must also be measurable because success must be monitored and evaluated. In order to meet company’s goals, management teams must keep track on how employees are doing and monitor their work progress. After these stages, goals must be verified that it is realistic and doable. Employees will only be happy to assist in bringing the company to a higher level as long as the tasks they have to do seem reachable. Employees must believe that they are capable of receiving the reward and make them feel that the process if fair or else the program will fail to motivate and engage employees. When a job is well done, they will be rewarded sufficiently to recognize their top performance such as showing strong communication skills, seek to build positive relationship, value company mission, always looking to improve and more. Our goal for the E-Award program is that everyone in the department will get at least one prize over a two year cycle since awards are given every two weeks which makes it easier to attain for employees. Even if they don’t receive a nomination through the two week cycle, they can continue to try for the next two week cycle, since nominations may vary depending on the amount of votes collected. This encourages employees to impress each other in the workplace to gain more votes by their peers because everyone must vote once and cannot vote for themselves.
Creating a positive working environment is definitely beneficial for the company because by encouraging consistent networking in the workplace helps identify what is perceived as top talent to help grow a continuous culture of high performance within the company. The E-Awards winning results are open to employees to help them understand what demonstrates high performance and common characteristics that show high performance.
As of the time-bound, our goal is to encourage all employees to vote at the end of the two week cycle on Friday for their most ideal candidate to win the two week performance reward. As mentioned above, this cycle will happen every two weeks and at the end of the year, two top E-Award performers will be selected to receive the grand prize such as ongoing education funds which will be discussed further in detail in the implementing section. It is very important to understand that everyone needs recognition because it tells people that what they are doing is right and worthy. This is the most powerful motivator to drive behaviour and help reinforce our goals and objectives. Although money drives business however we must not under estimate the value of rewards and recognition in the workplace.