When your focus is building successful teams that work together as a seamless unit, it might feel counterintuitive to single out employees for their accomplishments. But to keep every part of your team moving, you need to address each of them individually.

Employee recognition is the act(s) of publicly and privately acknowledging individual achievements, and it’s critical to increasing your business’ bottom line. Here’s how.

Recognition and engagement are tied

Engagement is known to be an important element of culture, productivity, and ultimately bottom-line results for your business. How does recognition play into that?

Employees who feel their work is valued are more likely to be engaged in their work, according to SHRM’s employee recognition playbook. By making the effort to recognize individual employees’ achievements, you’ll make them feel like a more active, visible part of the organization and assign more value to their contributions.

Employee recognition inspires collaboration

According to employee recognition specialists Terryberry, managers who regularly recognize their employees’ achievements reduce competition between teammates. When employees don’t feel pressure to outshine or outdo each other for attention from higher-ups, they’re more willing to work together to achieve shared goals.

The collaboration specialists at Wrike associate increased collaboration with eleven business wins, including increased engagement, more productive meetings, and better innovation.

Recognized employees are more likely to stick around

Is employee recognition the key to job satisfaction?

Especially in these difficult times, where job satisfaction is being impacted by countless external factors, we can’t work hard enough to keep employees happy. Turns out employee recognition is a big part of that.

According to a study published by the International Journal of Business and Management, recognition is one of the top-five most important elements of company culture. Employees who reported feeling satisfied with the level of recognition they were receiving were much more likely to report high satisfaction scores.

Getting employee recognition right

Employee recognition goes way beyond saying, “hey, great job!”

To effectively recognize your employees, we recommend checking out these resources:


Shayna Hodkin

From Shayna Hodkin

Shayna lives in south Tel Aviv with two dogs and a lot of plants. She writes poems and reads tarot.