It’s Budget Season
What has your Service Awards Program done for you lately?
August through to October is budget season for many companies. A time to assess the past year and determine the goals and priorities for the next. Are you starting to mentally prepare for cuts and questions about your HR projects?
As nerve-wracking as this season is, it does provide an opportunity for HR. Given employee costs make up the vast majority of a company’s fixed costs (outside of capital investments), HR plays an integral role and can have considerable influence with the executive team.
Source: World at Work Trends in Employee Recognition 2015
The key is to propose and position initiatives that support the business’s strategic direction – measurably.
While proposing new programs during the frenzy of funding time can be a tough sell, it is a good time to look at ways you can save costs and enhance ROI on the programs you already have.
How do I measure success?
Take your Service Awards program.
According to World and Work, 87% of companies have a Service Awards Program but only 10-15% of employees benefit/achieve a milestone anniversary each year.
What if your Service Awards included ALL employees and provided simple tools accessed from your Intranet or Internet that:
- Encourage managers and peers to recognize great work – more often
- Automatically celebrate birthdays and all anniversaries
- Provide reports to help managers prepare for performance discussions
- Show executives the managers who are good (and not so good) at giving thanks
- Let you poll employees on the progress of strategic new programs, tap into morale, identify workload issues or any other questions
- Eliminate the time consuming and error prone job of manually preparing employee milestone files
How do I enhance ROI and save money?
Encouraging employees to give and receive non-monetary thanks (publicly or privately) reinforces behaviors that:
- Boosts your engagement scores – only 1/3 people in a Gallup study had received praise in the last seven days. Hmm… and 33% of employees are engaged – coincidence?
- Improves Retention – employees who are formally recognized for their contributions stay far longer
- Enhances Individual and Team Performance – 69% of employees say they would work harder if their efforts were better recognized
These and other studies prove employees who are recognized for their work perform better and are more likely to stay with your organization – delivering stronger business results including profitability, productivity, and customer satisfaction. This is the ROI you and your executives want to see.
Why pay more for employee recognition tools when you don’t have to?
With CSI STARS Service Anniversary Program Plus employee recognition tools, you get peer-to-peer thanks, pulse surveys and a social recognition newsfeed (at no additional cost), without giving up the symbolic elements so many employees cherish.
Provide us with your HRIS data and your Service Award program becomes the baby step (that doesn’t cost a cent more) that brings you a step closer to other results-driven recognition programs such as Performance, Safety, Incentive, and Wellness programs that further support your HR and business strategies.
It’s never too early to promote a modernized Service Award program to your executive team that plants the seed for additional strategic solutions that drive engagement and improve business results.
Want a quick personal demo? Contact us and we’ll show you how to recognize your stars AND maximize the return on your service award investment – quickly and easily.
Lori is the VP of Recognition for CSI International Inc. She has a MBA with a minor in Human Resources, is a Certified Recognition Professional and member of the SHRM blog squad. Prior to joining CSI STARS, she worked at Mercer Human Resource Consulting and Youthography, a youth market research agency. Connect with CSI STARS on LinkedIn to learn how we cultivate a workforce that loves coming to work.
