At Baudville, we encourage all of our customers to celebrate Employee Appreciation Day. Annually acknowledged on the first Friday in March (March 4 this year), Employee Appreciation Day reminds managers, bosses, and employers to appreciate the individuals who keep the company running.

Celebrating Employee Appreciation Day can be a simple celebration when you get the entire team involved. Peer recognition will make everyone feel appreciated on Employee Appreciation Day, and it can be continued long after the day has passed.

Ben over at UpstartHR is one of our friends in the HR industry (I told you about his ebook yesterday) who recently tried out Shout Outs at one of his facilities. Even before the program was officially launched, employees were using the notes to thank and encourage their teammates. He wrote his own blog entry about the program here.

Shout Outs in use.

To use a peer recognition program on Employee Appreciation Day:

 First thing in the morning on Employee Appreciation Day, clearly communicate how the program works.
 Make the tools accessible to everyone.
 Utilize the power of public recognition. Post the notes in a public location so everyone can read them.
 Talk about the recognition at the end of the day. Pull the team together and read some of the outstanding notes.
 To make your Employee Appreciation Day peer recognition activity even more exciting, create small awards and present them at the end of the day. For example, you could honor the most eloquently written shout out, best haiku shout out, and the individual who received the most accolades.

Read more about peer recognition in these blog posts:
Everything You Wanted to Know About Peer-to-Peer Recognition Programs
How to Boost your Recognition Program with Peer Shout Outs
Peer Recognition is Coming to your ‘Ville

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Cori is Baudville's in-house Recognitionista (she's officially a Certified Recognition Professional, too)  and a member of the Millennial generation. Get her employee recognition tips and special discounts by liking Baudville on Facebook.

Thank you for joining me at today's Recognition TV webisode to talk about peer-to-peer recognition programs! You can watch the complete recorded version on Baudville.com or Baudville’s Facebook page. Several of my tips, ideas and best practices are below, but I recommend you watch the entire video (it’s only about 15 minutes!) to catch everything.

What is peer-to-peer recognition?
At Baudville, we’ve defined peer-to-peer recognition as the genuine expressions of appreciation between co-workers. Peer-to-peer programs typically equip the entire staff with low-cost tools and give employees the ability to recognize one another without any manager approval.

Does Baudville have a peer-to-peer recognition program? How does it work?

Yes, we do. Our program is called Shout Outs, and we designed it to reinforce our brand, values and culture. Allison did a great job explaining  our program in a previous blog post, so visit her post for all the details.

We liked our Shout Outs program so much, that we made a version for our customers, too. It’s one of our most popular peer-to-peer recognition programs. We recommend posting the Shout Outs pads in multiple common areas, so employees have access to recognition everywhere, all the time. Because the program is so simple to use and straightforward, employees begin using it right away without much training.

What are some of the benefits of peer-to-peer recognition program?
There are many benefits of peer-to-peer recognition! Here’s a list of some of the primary benefits:

 Peer-to-peer recognition empowers employees to give recognition themselves
 It relieves some pressure off managers
 Employees have greater ownership in the program because they can give recognition without any manager approval
 Peer-to-peer recognition programs require little ongoing administrative work
 More employees receive recognition more frequently
 It can improve your culture
 Peer-to-peer recognition can impact loyalty and job satisfaction by increasing employees’ sense of attachment and closeness to the company
 It can foster camaraderie and build more positive relationships between co-workers
 Peer-to-peer recognition crosses department and position lines – everyone has the ability to recognize everyone else!

What advice would you give to our viewers who are interested in starting a peer-to-peer program at their organization?
It’s very important that the program reinforce your company brand, values and culture. Use a recognition theme that ties these different elements together or use one of our programs that’s a good fit. Shout Outs comes in 4 different themes, Thanks for All You Do, TEAM, Essential Piece and Exclamations.

It’s important to get buy-in early in the process. Make sure your organization’s leadership is excited about the program and supports it. When we created our program, we pulled several different people into a brief brainstorming meeting to talk about program design and execution.

That would be my other piece of advice – don’t do it alone! Involve some of your recognition enthusiasts to help get the program implemented. Even if you use one of our ready-to-go programs, you’ll need to have organization-wide communication and some training on how to use the program.

Our other popular peer-to-peer recognition program is Spot On, and our Sales team used this program for a while to encourage intra-departmental recognition. Spot is a truly versatile program because you can change the goal or the behavior that you want recognized by writing it on the dry erase part of the dog house. Visit Spot’s website for more information.

What are some of the key elements to keep in mind when creating a peer-to-peer recognition program?
One of the most important elements of peer-to-peer recognition is accessible tools. One option is to give everyone their own tools that they can keep at their desk. This way, they always have access to recognition. Otherwise, be sure to put the note cards or whatever tool you’re using in a public place because the tools serve as a visual reminder for employees to recognize. Look at your high traffic areas – a few suggestions may be near the printer, coffee station or break room.

Again, having buy-in from your leaders and management team is very important. Even though peer-to-peer recognition takes some of the responsibility off of managers, they still need to be active and use the program.

I also recommend some kind of measurement that allows you to track participation in the program. When you measure results, you have data to show that you’re meeting your participation goals and more employees are receiving recognition.

How do you maintain the momentum for a peer-to-peer program?
That’s a great question and certainly one of the ongoing challenges of recognition. At Baudville, we provide an incentive for meeting our 100% participation goal. If we have 100% participation – meaning everyone writes one Shout Out during the month – the entire company gets rewarded either with a special casual day or a snack/treat. We’ve also recognized the individuals who have written the most Shout Outs and some of the most creative Shout Outs as reminders to the company that they need to recognize.

For additional peer-to-peer recognition resources:
 Watch the entire peer-to-peer Recognition TV webisode.
 Download our Peer-to-Peer Recognition White Paper from our Recognition Resource Center.
 Read the past blog posts on Peer Recognition.
 Ask a question of all the recognition practitioners on our Facebook page.

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Cindy is the Human Resources Manager at Baudville and has over 14 years HR experience. In addition to her HR Generalist duties, she’s the center of positive mojo for the company and heads up many of our recognition initiatives, events and awards. In other words, she’s got it going on!

Peer-to-peer recognition is a growing trend in companies looking for ways to increase engagement and morale without over burdening managers. In WorldatWork’s 2008 survey, Trends in Employee Recognition, they discovered that 42% of the 554 companies that responded offer peer programs. Of those, 67 percent stated the program's impact on retention was moderate or high. Human Resource Executive also recently wrote an article on the Power of Peer-to-Peer.

Peer-to-peer recognition is popping up everywhere. Do you want to learn more about peer recognition programs and their potential impact on your organization?

Join me next week as I talk with Cori about the Peer-to-peer recognition program we have at Baudville. I’ll also provide guidelines and ideas for you to create your own peer recognition program!

Register for our Recognition TV Webisode taking place next week Thursday, October 21. The webisode is only 15 minutes, so it’s less like a webinar and more like a coffee break with a couple of friends! Our webisodes are live streaming video, and you have the opportunity to ask us questions in real time through a chat room, so bring all your peer-to-peer recognition questions with you!

You can also watch past Recognition TV Webisodes in our Recognition Resource Center for helpful tips on appreciation events, starting a recognition program and more.

I look forward to seeing you on Thursday!

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Cindy is the Human Resources Manager at Baudville and has over 14 years HR experience. In addition to her HR Generalist duties, she’s the center of positive mojo for the company and heads up many of our recognition initiatives, events and awards. In other words, she’s got it going on! 

Customer Service Week is coming up, and this is a fun time to celebrate your customer service team, their many accomplishments and their impact on the bottom line.

You can take some of the pressure off managers by giving employees the tools to recognize one another during Customer Service Week. Here are a couple ways to get the Positive Mojo flowing from peer-to-peer:

Pass Along Recognition. Give every customer service employee five Tokens of Appreciation in the new Service Super Hero theme. Instruct employees to give one of their tokens to a peer when they observe them giving great service to a customer, helping out a teammate, or making progress on a team goal. You can set the criteria! At the end of Customer Service Week, the Tokens should have passed hands many times. Have employees report the number of tokens they received, and give prizes to the employees with the most!

You can do the same program with Service Super Hero Buttons, and employees can wear their recognition!

Shout Outs.  Have employees give each other public praise during Customer Service Week with Shout Outs. One of the great benefits of Shout Outs is it’s ability to be used short term! Set the goal of using all 25 Shout Out cards over the course of the week. On Friday, you can tally all the Shout Outs. Give a small treat to everyone if you meet your goal. You can give prizes to the employees who sent and received the most praise.

Spot On. If you’re using the Spot On Peer Recognition Program, add a goal for Customer Service Week. You can include Spot in your other Customer Service Week activities by taking pictures of him joining in on an activity, enjoying lunch, or receiving a gift. Post the pictures internally for everyone to enjoy!

Department Recognition. Get other departments involved in Customer Service Week, too. Hand out note cards to managers and employees in other departments that work with customer service. Ask each individual to write a note describing how much they appreciate the work customer service does or share their gratitude for help with a specific task or issue. Your team will be blown away by the sincere appreciation from their co-workers!

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Cori is Baudville's in-house Recognitionista (she's officially a Certified Recognition Professional, too)  and a member of the Millennial generation. Get her employee recognition tips and special discounts by liking Baudville on Facebook.

Peer recognition programs are very popular in organizations today. Peer recognition increases the quantity and frequency recognition is given, and it takes pressure off managers who are typically responsible for top-down recognition. We published a peer recognition white paper that explains the benefits of this type of recognition program– including improved culture, loyalty, job satisfaction and camaraderie.

Creating a peer recognition program is very easy thanks to existing, ready-to-use programs. We currently offer three peer recognition programs, and I’m going to give a brief how-to for two of them today.

Our Shout Outs Peer Recognition Program  (Allison wrote a great writeup of the program last January) is one of our most popular and certainly deserves to be included in our How-to Recognition series.

Shout Outs are simple to use, and you start it by posting the Shout Outs pad in a public location. It can hang on a hook, be displayed on a bulletin board or stand on its own. Whenever an employee wants to recognize a co-worker, she tears a sheet off the pad, writes her personal thank you note, and posts it in a public location. That way, everyone can witness the recognition. 

Here’s how one of our customers described the program:

“I was looking for a tool that I could use to motivate my employees and build a team atmosphere among them. I was already using ePraise, Making a Difference and Thank You note/pin cards as a morale booster coming from me.

When I first explained the Shout Out recognition tool, I noticed some hesitancy on some of my employee's faces. It took about 4 days before the first Shout Out was posted, and after that many more were posted very quickly. I had someone from another department post a Shout Out for one my employees.

When employees read the nice words that someone had written about them and it was posted in a public area, their demeanor changed. They were very proud of the job well done that they were recognized for by their peers. This is an awesome and powerful tool. I would recommend this tool to anyone implementing an employee recognition program. It works!”

If you're looking for a peer recognition program that ties behaviors directly to goals, take a look at our Spot On Peer Recognition Program. You get everything you need in one box, including Spot the dog who serves as both a traveling trophy and mascot.

In the Spot On program, every employee is encouraged to deliver personal thank you notes to their peers. Each note has a receipt that is deposited in the dog house and tracked by the manager. The employee who received the most notes wins Spot. Other prizes are also available, and some organizations choose to include a save and redeem element, too.

Spot has a robust free recognition downloads section with additional tools and resources that make implementing and maintaining the Spot On Peer Recognition Program easy. We recently added new resources, so be sure to stop by for more free Spot On recognition downloads.

Peer recognition programs  empower employees to be responsible for recognition and increase the amount of recognition that takes place. And with so many simple and affordable program options, not having a peer recognition program is sure to put you in the dog house!

Watch how-to videos on both Shout Outs and Spot On on Baudville’s video page.

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Cori is Baudville's in-house Recognitionista (she's officially a Certified Recognition Professional, too)  and a member of the Millennial generation. Get her employee recognition tips and special discounts by liking Baudville on Facebook.