Easily the most common and one of the oldest programs used to promote employee engagement is the service award program. These programs are traditionally designed to thank employees for their years of loyal service, typically recognized in five year intervals.

We have found that a traditional service award program will recognize only 9-12% of an organization’s workforce once every five years, which means that 40-55% of the workforce are never recognized! Yet organizations are dedicating significant amounts of resources to the program without reaping maximum benefits. While the goal to recognize employees for their loyal service is an excellent way to improve employee engagement, the implementation is outdated and has fallen short with employees.

In today’s business climate younger workers don’t value staying with one organization as much as generations in the past, making it more important that all organizations recognize service loyalty much sooner. This earlier service loyalty can be seen as the continuation of the on-boarding process. Depending on the rate of turnover in an organization, it could be as soon as 30 or 60 days, although one year works well. An employee should then be recognized every following anniversary year. The recognition does not need to be expensive, but does need to be meaningful and express appreciation for another year of loyalty. This way, more significant recognition at the five year milestones will mean more to an employee because the recognition has been consistent.

In addition, many programs fail to fully exploit the full potential of this recognition opportunity. This is an excellent time to tell the story of the organization to reinforce your history, vision, mission and values. Also by engaging more than just the individual employee, you can strengthen the bonds within the organization. Include the employee’s family or other employees within a department through the communication used to congratulate and notify the employee on their anniversary.

Lipic’s has worked with many organizations to review and revise their traditional service award programs into creative productive service loyalty programs that truly engage their employees. Through this process we are often able to utilize the same or smaller budget to engage more employees and realize better results.