Selecting Award Recipients: Best Practices, Examples
Consistent and fair recognition is a crucial aspect of a healthy workplace culture, but how do you go about selecting who to recognize? Celebrating award recipients is a wonderful moment. However, a lot must happen before the commemoration. Most importantly, you must select who to honor.
The Cristaux International team designs and manufactures awards, trophies, and gifts. Unfortunately, we can’t choose your awardees for you. However, we can offer best practices, ideas, and examples to guide you in developing your recognition program.
How to Select Award Recipients
How you select award recipients relies on the format of your program. Considering how different programs can be, selection processes widely vary. We’ve simplified the general selection process to help your efforts.
- Identify the purpose of your award program. What or who are you celebrating? For instance, a years of service award program may look quite different, when compared to an annual award event.
- Review the goals of your program to decide honorees. An award celebrates a specific skill or achievement. Oftentimes, selecting who to honor is as easy as seeing who completed or helped achieve the respective accomplishment.
- Collect recipient information to personalize the custom awards. Once you’ve decided who to reward, it’s important to create meaningful and special awards for them.
Best Practices
There are various tools and tips to help you create trustworthy recognition programs. You can be reliable and serve as a role model for others.
- Use quantitative evidence to guide your choice of recipients. This will reduce personal bias and reflect fair recognition efforts.
- Share the award criteria and goals with your team members or pool of recipients. You can inspire them to achieve more with a specific task in mind.
- For recurring programs, select award recipients on a regular basis. Employee-of-the-month programs are so popular because of their consistency. This helps you build traditions and routines for your organization.
Types of Award Programs And Examples
Each recognition program and trophy are unique. However, you can find valuable inspiration by seeing what others have done. Check out this blog post for award statue design ideas.
Years of Service
One of the easiest recognition programs to implement is a years of service award program. You can celebrate employees on notable work anniversaries. To select recipients for this kind of program, you need to track employee start dates. Two or three months before an upcoming anniversary, you can order, personalize, and ship an award or work anniversary gift for the special honoree.
Examples include:
Sales Recognition
To incentivize achievement within your sales team, you can use specific and measurable goals to inspire employees. Additionally, a President’s Club award and trip could serve as an exceptional reward. There are many ways you can decide who to honor with an award or sales trophy.
- Celebrate those who accomplish certain goals
- Induct a specific percentage of top performers into your President’s Club
- Devise team-wide goals to give each employee a chance at being recognized
Exemplary sales awards include:
- Sprint’s Circle of Achievement
- President’s Club awards for i3 Verticals
- Monthly sales awards for Travis Roofing Supply
Employee Recognition
Employee recognition programs come in all shapes and sizes. The best fit for your organization is often determined by your company culture and recognition goals. For example, if you want to build camaraderie between your staff members, then you can create an Employee’s Choice award. Each person has one vote for who they think most deserves recognition.
Other examples include:
- Product replicas for iRobot to celebrate a new product design
- Safety cone awards to encourage safety at work
- Employee of the Month pieces for DMA
Annual Award Shows
Event awards serve as the centerpiece for award shows. The selection process for nominees and winners is often thorough and complex. There are many factors to consider, but it’s important to always remember your organization’s values, mission, and vision.
Examples of event awards include:
Deal Toys
A deal toy, or financial tombstone, celebrates a company’s noteworthy milestone. Everyone involved in the deal is often rewarded with a custom award or gift. Recipients may include investors, advisors, employees, and clients.
Examples of custom deal toys include:
Competitions and Sporting Events
Sporting showdowns and other competitions are incomplete without high-quality trophies. Awards are given to the victors at the event. Whether hosting a golf tournament or an e-sports championship, a custom trophy is essential for the recipients’ experience.
Exemplary trophies include:
Milestone Awards
Milestone awards can commemorate a wide array of achievements. It’s up to you and your program details to decide who to honor. You can celebrate business anniversaries, major distinctions, and more.
Examples of milestone awards include:
- 20th anniversary awards for Viking River Cruises
- Retirement gift for Granite
- James Beard Foundation Awards
Celebrate Deserving Award Recipients
There are countless people out there, deserving of recognition and appreciation. Once you’ve decided who your award recipients will be, you get to start designing your recognition pieces. Our team is ready and eager to help you bring your vision to life.
Contact Cristaux to start creating your awards today.