Not too long ago we weighed the pros and cons of having an Employee Of The Month Program and got some great feedback from our audience.
Within that feedback we were asked to go into more detail on how you can design your own Employee of the Month Program. Here it is:
Your step-by-step guide to selecting the Employee of the Month
1.Set up your main HR objective
An Employee of the Month Program is great to boost employee engagement and workplace happiness. But if it is to succeed, you have to build it starting from an HR objective. It could be employee retention, employee engagement, productivity or employee advocacy.
Let’s say your most important objective right now is employee retention. Your Employee of the Month Program will be designed as a supporting activity to reach that objective.
If the program is not correlated with your business objectives, it will be a costly initiative that will not bring any visible results. You’ll feel like you wasted your time and money on some useless polls and giveaways. You can download our free white paper on creating an engaging employee experience using people analytics to get some pointers in that direction.
If you’re planning on implementing an Employee of the Month Program, you’ll also need someone in charge, someone to coordinate the program, gather votes, compile and present the information.
2.Create the voting system
Answer these main questions:
- Who can vote?
- How many votes does one person have?
- How often will people vote?
- *What’s the voting criteria?
I’ve left the most important element of the voting system last because it requires a bit more information. First of all, depending on your company culture and values, you need to decide who gets to weigh in on these criteria. If your work environment is a collaborative one, I suggest inviting everyone to debate and decide the final voting criteria.
You could propose your company values as the main voting criteria and see if there are any other relevant behaviors you’d like to encourage, going back to your HR objective. Remember, your main goal is to support that objective, that’s why you want these criteria to reflect your main drivers for that particular objective.
In our example, if you’re looking to boost employee retention, your criteria could include: work involvement, being a reliable team member, demonstrating the company values, supporting innovation etc. If your objective is performance your criteria will target sales numbers, revenues and proactivity.
3.Set the rewards
The final part of the system is the reward mechanism. An Employee of the Month Program can act as a great engagement driver for your team, bringing into focus people’s achievements, their growth and encouraging a sense of community through peer recognition.
You can offer financial rewards or non-financial rewards, or even both, for those chosen Employee of the Month. The best rewards are the ones that are best for your team. So ask them!
Listen to your employees, find out how they feel and come up with rewards that will bring value to your program. Diplomas might work for some teams, tech gadgets for others. Different companies have different needs.
4.Follow-up
You’ve set up your system. Now you need to make sure it’s building up to your HR objective and keeping employees engaged.
Get employee feedback on how the system works, possible improvements and its impact. Assess its ROI by tracking and measuring results over time and revisiting the objectives you’ve set every couple of months.
Bottom-line
Start off by deciding if this is a program that might work in your company. If you think it fits your needs, follow the steps above and create an Employee of the Month Program to support your HR objectives.
Feel free to get creative and involve your team in designing this program. Let us know how it went! We’d love to find out your Employee of the Month story!
Download the white paper and see how you can create an integrated, engaging employee experience using people analytics!
Image via StockSnap.io under C.C.0 license
I think it’s really awesome that you brought up creating a voting system to choose an employee of the month. My work actually participates in a voting system, and it is really great! In this way, you never have to worry about the boss choosing who you think is the office favorite! It resolves tensions and allows you to say good things about one another as well!
Well, we’re really happy you found this article interesting :) Thanks for sharing!
Does anybody have any voting strategies? We are doing this now and we are a department of 17 so doesn’t leave much room when it comes to ties. Any suggestions help.
I thought to leave the voting up all month but it doesn’t stop staff for voting for themselves anonymously multiple times.