Are Employee Recognition Programs good or bad?

Many companies today use Employee Recognition Programs in order to motivate their employees into working their very best. According to brighthub.org, Employee Recognition Programs are not beneficial and can actually make a working environment worse. This is because when companies use these programs, the employee that was recognized will start to get a worse work record and will eventually become an inadequate employee. Reasons why this happens is because management selection of employees leads to allegations (or actual cases) of favoritism. An employee nomination system may lead to the creation of discord and factions within the workforce. Limiting recognition of an employee to only one occurrence per calendar year stifles the continued willingness of the worker to excel. A lack of funds makes an employee rewards program unproductive. For example, a worker who just invented a way to prevent thousands of dollars’ worth of warehouse shrinkage should get more than merely a computer-generated certificate and a mug with the corporate logo. Not having an employee reward program is better than keeping in place a poorly run or inadequately funded one.

Although Employee Recognition Programs have their downsides, I believe that these programs are beneficial to employees and can help better a company’s way of work. Some reasons why this is true are employee recognition systems reward workers who advance the business’ goals. This opens the door to rewards for hard work, creativity, loss prevention, and initiative by workers at all levels. An employee nomination process motivates other employees to work harder. Finally, leveled employee rewards offer recognition for various forms of worker excellence. People respond to changes in incentives in predictable ways. These workers are being given rewards (the incentive), such as a pay raise or a bonus, for working hard. These workers will respond to this change in the predictable way by working hard for these rewards, which follows this rule of human action. Because this concept of Employee Recognition Programs fit this rule of human action, it is shown that having these programs are beneficial to employees.