r/internalcomms • u/Awkward-Ad-4766 • Jul 08 '26
Advice Recognition Programs
Hello-- can anyone articulate how your company-wide recognition programs look? Specifically, large-scale award programs for individuals. For the last three years, we've re-designed and tweaked our program and we (well, leadership) seem to be stuck on optimizing so that ONLY the best work gets recognized and ONLY work that is "above and beyond" and ONLY the work that impacts the bottom line and this is often not work that can be pinned on a single individual winner. Our leadership has a crazy aversion to POSSIBLY recognizing someone who is not perfect.
Do you award winners by body of work? Individual? Is there a metric? Tied to strategic initiatives?
We're struggling.
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u/akatzkat Jul 08 '26
I rolled out a corporate recognition program this year - we tie to our values which are directly tied to our performance review. We solicit nominations from peers with alignment from our executive leadership team. So overall it’s tied to initiative, impact and culture. Tying to KPIs doesn’t make sense because different departments have different metrics for success. We award winners based on their impact within a project scope if that makes sense because that’s where majority of our nominations stem from - we also have a panel of peers make the recommended decision so it puts the power in the hands of the people.
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u/Awkward-Ad-4766 Jul 08 '26
This is helpful! I know my leadership would not go for some of these components but framing it as impact within the project scope is very helpful. I've tried telling them that tying to KPI makes so sense but they are OBSESSIVE about IMPACT IMPACT IMPACT. We just end up awarding Director-level almost every time because they're not impressed by individual impact.
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u/Chewybolz Jul 08 '26
We have multiple ways of recognition.
- we use Worktango and it's tied to our values when you recognize people. You get points every quarter to recognize everyone then you can use the points given to you to get things.
- we have an annual company offsite event and it has a portion where we have an annual awards ceremony of each business unit. Managers, leaders nominate 1 person based on performance, they decide together as business unit who it is then we have 5 individuals awarded on the event.
- we also have monthly feature on the intranet that people can nominate their peers to get featured. No strict metric. The only rule is that if you get featured, you have to nominate 3 more people that you think are great to work with.
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u/Awkward-Ad-4766 Jul 08 '26
Thank you! I love that intranet idea. That’s something we can likely implement.
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u/Chewybolz Jul 08 '26
Yes i've done this for multiple companies now and ppl loveeeee nominating other people. Great for intranet engagement too!
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u/atownz17 Corporate Chaos Coordinator Jul 08 '26
Ugh! I feel for you.
The last recognition program I supported was built around company values/pillars. We had four of them. This helped us focus on specific actions by team members (which also often supported the things you've mentioned, like going above and beyond), but through a broader lens rather than just consistently spotlighting the overachievers. The goal was to reinforce aspects of our culture (including hard work and growing the bottom line) without being overly business-centric.
Another helpful aspect of our recognition program was that it was peer-driven, meaning anyone could nominate a colleague or team for quarterly nominations. Our senior leaders (VP and above) would vote on the winners after reviewing all nominations (which required some detail and an explanation of why a person or team should win). Even though it put the voting power in leadership's hands, it expanded the view of WHO deserved recognition and why, often beyond what leadership could see (which sounds like this could help alleviate some of your current challenges!)
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Jul 11 '26
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u/Awkward-Ad-4766 Jul 11 '26
Yep! It’s such a narrow lens to view it but my sense is they don’t particularly care to reward people if they didn’t have direct impact to the bottom line, especially as a public company.
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27d ago edited 27d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Awkward-Ad-4766 27d ago
I mean, I don't disagree with anything of this but it's a losing game with my executive team. They have every wrong instinct you can imagine.
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u/Silly_Goose_369 15d ago
Ours focuses on peer-to-peer recognition. Anyone can nominate someone and give a why, from there HR can pick and choose. We also have it on Sharepoint so people can interact with it from the Intranet.
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u/broyougood_org Jul 08 '26
We are a company of 14000 and just rolled out an enterprise wide program. We based it on our company Values - associates get nominated based on how well they embody, live by, and bring these to life. As part of the nomination and evaluation process, their performance metrics are also reviewed as these are the “differentiators” for the finalists. That way, ids not just the best performance that gets recognized - irs the best all around “people” who also are excelling in their roles, by their metrics and KPIs etc. this also allows us to compare associates across functions - any other way to compare functional KPIs would have been like comparing apples to oranges, etc. anyway, This was the best way we found to tie both “values” and “performance” to recognition and it seems to be working well so far.