Intrinsic motivation outlasts and outperforms external compulsion in the workplace. But for many managers and organizations, knowing how to increase internal motivation is difficult. It’s more difficult to control because, like a garden, it can only be nurtured.
Creating an environment that fosters engaged employees comes naturally to some leaders, while others struggle with the hows. This article will cover how peers are a major source of internally-motivated, engaged employees, and how you can tap into the power of positive peer pressure.
Why Peer Recognition Sparks Employee Engagement
Employees become engaged at work when they feel like they have ownership over their performance, make an important contribution, and belong. Recognition, especially peer recognition, influences these outcomes greatly.
While peer recognition can’t fix negative managerial issues such as micromanaging, domineering, and demeaning habits that undermine a workplace, it does make a world of difference for employee engagement.
Peer Recognition Builds Unity, Friendships, and Mentoring
Peer recognition creates a sense of unity and team among coworkers. The habits, efforts, and actions that are recognized are the ones most likely to be repeated. Recognizing the right efforts builds greater purpose and outcomes.
Employees who receive positive feedback from their coworkers are more likely to feel safe. As a result, employees struggling with a problem are more likely to reach out for help and peer mentoring because they feel comfortable at work.
But that’s not all.
Employees who take the time to appreciate and recognize coworkers also feel better about their teams and contributions. It builds friendships at work.
This peer to peer recognition increases team unity and belonging. As peers recognize the extra efforts and activities of each other, employees are more likely to feel like they belong and that others are depending on them. The sacrifices, effort, and innovation they pour into their position becomes worthwhile when it makes a difference to others.
Studies have shown that the desire to not let down their team members is an incredibly strong motivator to employees. It increases diligence, care for the quality of work, and can even inspire an employee to stay at an employer longer.
Create a Culture of Recognition
While managers should be involved in providing recognition, no manager can witness all the ways employees put in extra effort. And managers are unable to always provide timely feedback. Peer recognition expands the number of people involved in recognition.
Feedback can happen instantly! And, it doesn’t feel staged.
While the “annual review” often includes positive feedback, many employees don’t feel like its real recognition. Peer feedback occurs instantly and feels more real, more organic, and more authentic than the annual review.
Peers are more likely to notice spectacular efforts of team members. Encouraging peer to peer recognition provides consistent and regular feedback. It also allows employees to see how their efforts make a difference and why they are important to their team.
Coworkers often understand personal struggles of coworkers better than managers and can recognize when an employee is striving to contribute despite other stresses. They can also provide one-on-one mentoring and encouragement in an organic and natural setting.
Aligns Employees To Corporate Goals and Ethics
Recognizing the qualities and efforts that align to your companies goals increases those qualities among employees and ingrains corporate values into daily work efforts. Employees who feel like their company makes a positive difference are usually more engaged, loyal, and stay longer than employees who don’t think their employer makes a positive difference in the community.
But, just because your company does make a difference, doesn’t mean all your employees see that. Peer recognition combined with a positive corporate culture merges individual employee contributions to the greater contributions of the company.
Encouraging peer to peer recognition fosters an environment where employees can give and receive. It empowers employees. Both providing recognition and receiving recognition helps employees feel good about their job and increases engagement.
This creates a reciprocal effect. Employees who give recognition feel better about their coworkers and their own job. In return, employees that receive recognition also feel better and are more likely to then recognize others doing a great job. As a result, more employees have become engaged and positive work-related feelings have increased.
Increases Productivity
Employees work harder for people they know, trust, and who appreciate them. By fostering greater relationships at work through peer-to-peer recognition, you are also increasing the productivity of your employees.
Productivity is similar, but not the exact thing as engagement. Engaged employees are more productive. Productivity is a measure of the effectiveness of an employee in their job. According to a survey by Gallup, productivity increases 22% with engaged employees.
Peer recognition increases productivity because employees care about their team.
10 Benefits of Peer Recognition Programs
- Creates a sense of teamwork
- Builds relationships, unity, and belonging at work
- Helps employees feel important and that their contribution is invaluable
- Expands the company’s scope of recognition
- Provides more regular and immediate feedback than managers can often deliver by themselves
- Increases engagement among employees
- Increases the positive feelings at work
- Builds corporate culture stronger
- Fosters Friendships
- Increases Loyalty
- Greater productivity
How To Successfully Implement Peer Recognition
A successful peer recognition program needs several tools to be effective and long-lasting. And, it needs to be part of an actual recognition program at the organization. Getting up twice a year, or in a monthly meeting and telling employees to recognize each other won’t create lasting change.
But, by providing the tools and resources for employees to recognize team members effortlessly, you can create a culture of gratitude and increase engagement.
Technology is an Important Part of Recognition
Recognition can and should include verbal “thank you’s,” handwritten notes and other non-technology aspects. But, not every employee has the time or personality that gravitates to these types of recognitions.
You don’t want recognition to be so burdensome or time consuming that it detracts from engagement and pulls the focus away from the tasks at work.
The right technology makes it easy and simple for busy employees to recognize their peers’ contributions.
Eliminate Hierarchy
Use peer recognition to eliminate the natural hierarchy of managers. Peer recognition allows managers to step out from behind the desk, email, or meetings and recognize teams. It takes recognition away from a top-down approach and creates a culture of recognition.
Managers can see the efforts of individual employees that may have been missed without peer recognition. This makes it possible for the quiet stars to shine as much as the charismatic ones.
Make Peer Recognition Available to All
While it may be tempting to reserve recognition rewards for only managers to hand out, allowing employees to hand out prizes and rewards makes peer recognition truly effective. It also helps to ensure that your recognition budget is getting the most mileage for every dollar spent.
Many companies spend a lot of money on programs that are less effective. Monthly rewards, tenured briefcases, and other awards often get shuffled to the back of employee’s desk drawers.
But, allowing employees to give and receive points that are redeemable ensures that every dollar goes to a reward the employee truly values.
Making recognition available for everyone to give encourages engagement across the board, no matter what the job title or function is. Anyone can participate.
Take Advantage of Social Recognition
Social recognition is important. Although family and friends can grasp the importance of a specific accomplishment at work, they often don’t truly understand all the intricacies to the same degree as coworkers.
As a result recognizing employees among their teams and with their peers creates intrinsic motivation to continue to perform well. Only those who have been in the trenches together can understand the obstacles that have been overcome and the sweetness of success.
Take advantage of this comodare by providing social recognition among peers. Build the unity of your team through the stories of success and challenges they have overcome.
Conclusion
While peer recognition requires managers to let go of the reins a little more, the advantages are major and often immediate. Cultivating peer recognition into your corporate culture reaps rewards far beyond the time and effort it takes to build the program.
About Thanks
Thanks is a leading provider of a recognition-based platform that increases communication, builds teamwork, and makes recognition a part of company culture. Fast, easy and simple Thanks makes it easy to bring data-driven employee recognition to your entire organization. O.C. Tanner purchased the Thanks platform in 2019 to fulfill the recognition needs of smaller businesses.
Thanks customers benefit from the same decades of research in employee motivation and company culture that O.C. Tanner enterprise clients enjoy, but in a product that is geared for fast, easy and simple deployment. Whether you’re starting a recognition program or improving and expanding on what you already have, Thanks has everything you need to engage your people with effective, scalable recognition. Thanks is a subsidiary of OC Tanner.