A new study has found that organizations that give regular thanks to their employees have a 31% lower voluntary turnover than their peers, and yet 78% of all organizations still only use tenure-based awards systems.
Best practices as summarized by Forbes:
- Be specific in recognition
- Implement peer to peer recognition, not top down
- Share recognition stories
- Make recognition easy and frequent
- Tie recognition to company values
Kudos does all of these things! Each employee of Creative Arc has a finite amount of points to "give" each month. Along with the points, you can send a message to that employee explaining why you are giving thanks. In addition, you can select the values (at least one) that you think that employee exhibited. We each have the same amount of points to give each month, regardless of level of leadership.
Since Kudos is online, we always have access to it. Even when I'm driving home from work after a busy day and finally have time to reflect on what happened, I can give Kudos when I'm sitting at a red light (not driving, of course!).
Once a certain amount of points are accumulated, they can be exchanged for gift certificates and merchandise. We love that there's an actual reward associated with the points.
The average budget for a rewards system is only 1% of payroll - which seems like a small price to pay for a higher level of employee engagement coupled with lower turnover.
Source for image: http://brandongaille.com/48-creative-employee-recognition-award-names/
