Celebrate your Rock Stars

Every business has a few rock stars on staff, whether they’re your craftiest coder, most accurate accountant, or best baker. We all know performance reviews don’t really deliver performance, so how do you find ways to inspire them? Hint: it’s not an Employee of the Month plaque on the wall.

If you’re Intel, you make them into rock stars.

How can the rest of us promote our best without access to million dollar ad budgets? Here’s a few tips:

• Outsource to the Pros: I Love Rewards, a fellow Toronto-based startup, is all about rewarding your people. Their web-based app is all about employee and sales incentives. Check out their video demo for more information.
• Be an equal opportunity rewarder: make sure that everyone on your team is eligible to be recognized and that you’re not singling people out before you’ve even started. Also make sure that everyone who meets your criteria gets the prize, not just the first person across the line. Competition is good, but being fair will earn you more loyalty in the long run.
• Be timely: this applies to recognition as well as it does to feedback. We’re big fans of giving people feedback as close to the event as possible, and recognition works the same way. Keep a bunch of $20 movie theater gift certificates on hand and pass them out whenever someone does something over and above the call.
• Be appropriately public: most people like to have a chunk of the limelight from time to time, but really don’t like being awkwardly thrust into it. Be sensitive to people’s personalities when you’re choosing how to reward them; some people love standing up in front of their colleagues and accepting a reward, shy-er folks would rather be mentioned in an employee newsletter, and the wallflowers in your crowd shrink away from the very idea that anyone knows who they are. Make sure that people who want peer recognition get it, but don’t force it on everyone.