Building partnerships through collaboration.
Recognizing Employee Excellence
Employee recognition is vital to creating a positive campus culture. Simple acts of recognition can significantly boost faculty and staff morale and engagement by making individuals feel valued and appreciated for their contributions. These efforts can lead to increased productivity, better retention rates and a more positive workplace culture.
Employee Recognition Efforts Can Benefit UB Through:
- Increasing engagement: Employees who are recognized regularly are more likely to be actively involved and invested in their work.
- Higher retention rates: Feeling valued through recognition can significantly reduce employee turnover.
- Improved performance: When faculty and staff know their efforts are acknowledged, they are more likely to strive for excellence and higher productivity.
- Cultivating a positive campus culture: A culture of recognition fosters a sense of camaraderie and belonging among team members.
Recognition Programs
UB offers many ways to recognize our faculty and staff colleagues.
Supervisor and Department Recognition Resources
Employee recognition is a key component of creating a positive workplace culture. Making employee appreciation a part of your regular departmental activities can be achieved through meaningful and intentional practices. By recognizing your employees effectively, you encourage and reinforce the very actions and behaviors that create a better working environment for everyone.
UB’s supervisors and leaders can contribute by cultivating a culture where informal and formal recognition become a part of the management philosophy so that it permeates across the entire campus.
Informal recognition can start with a simple Thank You. It consists of the often spontaneous simple thank you’s and expressions of appreciation for a job well done. The vast majority of an organization's recognition activity should be informal in nature.
Recognition extends to creating a culture of respect. Respect involves providing employees with the equipment, resources and training they need to do their job. It includes reaching out to employees and making them partners in the unit activities, fostering a spirit of collaboration across departments and creating a work environment that is safe and healthy. It means consistently appreciating good work and extra effort made at all levels of the organization. Respect means that work life balance is a practice, not a slogan.
When cultivating a culture of recognition, there are a few important aspects to remember:
- Specificity: Acknowledge specific achievements and contributions, not just general praise.
- Timeliness: Recognize achievements promptly to maximize impact.
- Authenticity: Ensure recognition feels genuine and sincere.
Variety of methods: Utilize different recognition channels like verbal praise, written notes, awards, public recognition or peer-to-peer recognition. But make sure that your method matches how each of your employees wishes to be recognized.
Here are a few suggestions on simple things you can do to show recognition:
- Recognize an employee and their accomplishments in a newsletter or at a staff meeting.
- Greet employees by name, stop by their areas regularly to check in, and get to know each of them and their personal interests.
- Encourage and grant release time for employees to participate in professional development opportunities and in campus activities and committees.
- Encourage and recognize staff that pursues continuing education.
- Acknowledge individual achievements by using employee’s names when preparing a status report.
- Give a handwritten thank you note.
- Establish a place to display memos, posters, photos and so on, recognizing progress towards goals and thanking individual employees for their help.
- Nominate an employee or a team for a University award program, like Cheers for Peers, Pillars of Pride or the Chancellor’s Awards and give them a copy of the nomination form. Recognize employees who actively serve the community.
- Request service pins from HR and present to employees who have reached their 10 and 20 year anniversaries at a staff meeting.
- Give employees an extra-long lunch break.
- When you hear a positive remark about someone, repeat it to that person as soon as possible (face-to-face is best, e-mail or voice mail are good in a pinch).
- Express an interest in employee’s career development goals.
- Support “flex-friendly” schedules.
- Encourage employees to participate in community and campus volunteer efforts and acknowledge those employees who actively serve their community outside the office
Thanks and congratulations should not only come from our leaders and supervisors. Foster a culture of appreciation by encouraging employees to express their words of appreciation with their colleagues as well, and consider implementing a process for employees to share words of thanks or congratulations with each other. For example, leave a stack of note cards near the mailbox area in your office and encourage employees to use them to jot a brief note of appreciation to colleagues for help with a problem, collaboration on a team project or a good idea shared, etc.
Creating a culture of recognition and appreciation takes regular effort and initiative. It is our day-to-day actions that cultivate a culture where faculty and staff feel like they belong and are appreciated.
