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Employee Recognition: Where Should it Come From?

Employee recognition is better when given by peers

Peers work together every day. They’re in the trenches, helping one another through emotional setbacks and difficult work scenarios, and showing one another new ways of doing tasks. They form a bond that can’t easily be replaced by an employer. Sure, it’s always nice to hear you’re doing a great job from your employer, but the relationship formed between peers makes hearing good job from the people you work with much more important. How is it important?

• It improves confidence and self-esteem
• It makes the team stronger
• It keeps employees engaged
• It increases productivity
• It saves you time

More confident employees

Let’s face it, most employers don’t have the day-to-day dealings with employees as their peers do. When an employer recognizes our hard work, it feels disingenuous to us and doesn’t really resonate.

When we hear it from our peers, however, it means more, and it makes us feel like we really did do a great job. It’s not uncommon for us to look down on ourselves and think the work we’re doing isn’t the best it could be, or that we’re failing and getting everything wrong. When we hear encouragement from peers we trust and look up to, it helps us feel like our work wasn’t as bad as we thought, and that we should take more pride in the projects we complete.

It doesn’t even take that much, simply thanking someone for the work they’ve completed shows them that we value what they’ve done and puts a spring in their step.

Teams excel

Peer recognition is more than a coworker giving a thumbs up; it helps each member of a team see the strengths and weaknesses in each member of your staff. When the time for group projects comes around, it allows rolls to be assigned based on each person’s strength.

This takes the confidence we talked about before and spreads it throughout the group. Each person knows what they’re responsible for, and they know that everyone else is more than capable of accomplishing their portion of the project. It decreases worry that one member of the team will fall behind or won’t perform well.

Engaged employees

There’s only one you to manage the number of employees you have. With employees liking regular feedback and recognition, peer recognition is the way to go.

It may not be possible to stop by everyone’s desk each day and lend a few words of encouragement, but it’s certainly possible for a peer to be someone’s cheerleader that day. While you may think this is one task you can skip, it’s not. Getting a pat on the back they want will help employees stay engaged with the work they do, which in turn decreases the chances of your employees leaving you.

Better productivity

When you take an employee who doesn’t think they compare to a star employee, and you have the more confident employee recognize them for a job well done, you’re going to see a more productive individual. You can expect this employee to start taking on tasks they hadn’t tried before, and you’ll see them do a better job at those tasks.

It’s easy to write off what an employer recognizes you for because we have this belief that employers don’t know us as well, but when someone we work with every day and look up to recognizes us, it changes our entire outlook.

No time spent on better work

There is probably an entire list of tasks you’d like to do as an employer, but you know that completing all of them in a given day is impossible. That’s why the word delegate exists.

We make to-do lists, and we sort them by importance, and sadly employee recognition often falls on the low end, even if we know it’s extremely important. Having peers recognize and congratulate their fellow employees checks one thing off your list and gives you a better functioning team. Without spending a single moment, you’ve just got your office on the right page and increased their work output.

We want to help you with peer recognition. It may sound like peer recognition is difficult to initiate and keep going, but when you utilize our programs to engage your employees, you’ll find the peer recognition service invaluable to keeping your staff on the right track almost effortlessly. What are you waiting for? Encourage your employees today for a better company tomorrow!