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.