Out with "Employee of the Month"

One of the emerging themes is a shift from traditional manager only nomination schemes. Businesses are doing away with initiatives that could be viewed forever as “favoritism” or talked about as “it’s your turn to get recognized this month.”

In order to address this organizations shifting away from processes that single out an individual, such as “Employee of the Month” and moving towards more open-ended programs that allow multiple employees to be recognized when goals are reached. The objectives is to insure that more team members are eligible for recognition and in order to be truly effective recognition needs to reach as many people as possible not just a select group of high achievers.

The results have been encouraging in building employee engagement. To add another level excitement consider offering a peer nomination process.