20 December, 2022
4 Rewards and Recognition Ideas to Boost Employee Engagement over the Holiday Season
With the holiday season upon us, HR professionals across the globe are busy ideating their business goals for a brand new year and reflecting on their efforts over the past year. This encompasses various crucial people-centric elements of their organizations, including employee engagement, total rewards, and the overall employee experience. While this is rudimentary for organizational development, there is another responsibility on the HR’s plate- ensuring productivity and boosting morale over the holiday season.
A sure-fire way to keep your employees engaged during this phase is to deploy an intricately-designed R&R program. This blog discusses 4 ways in which HR can uplift the emotional quotient using a tasteful mix of holiday-themed R&R strategies!
Importance of Employee Recognition during the Holiday Season
Recognizing good work and appreciating your employees’ contributions should be a year-round activity, but its’ significance considerably ascends during the holiday season. It is worth mentioning that the last quarter of the year offers a golden opportunity for employers to end the year on a note of gratitude, motivation, and optimism.
One of the most important reasons why employee engagement should not be sidelined is because, the holidays are not the same for everyone. Personal situations, familial dependencies, and emotional upheavals are just a few of the factors that contribute to mixed feelings and disruptive idiosyncrasies among your employees. Hence, using R&R to bring a diverse workforce together and celebrate their achievements is the best way to make them feel included, secure, and cared for.
While employee appreciation may not be a permanent fix for organizational and personal discrepancies, it certainly makes a profound difference! As Gallup research states, “Recognition for good work releases dopamine in the brain, which creates feelings of pride and pleasure.”
Holiday-Themed Rewards and Recognition Ideas
Now that we’ve covered why employee recognition during the holidays is impactful, let’s take a look at a few creative R&R ideas that can up the ante for your year-end employee engagement strategy.
1. Host a Year-End Awards Ceremony
Awards are the best way to spruce up the holiday spirit and give the office atmosphere a flair. Organize an awards ceremony and consider including some light-hearted, fun-filled awards instead of the conventional dyed-in-the-wool titles. For instance, you can create awards such as “The Office DJ” for a music buff, “Energy Drink Award” for the most energetic team member, “Mission Impossible Award” for a colleague who achieved a phenomenal target, or “Foodie of the Year” for someone who is always snacking.
You can leverage the digital award nomination module of an R&R platform to streamline and fast-track the process for seamless awards delivery on the big day. Connect with us to explore our platform’s robust award nominations feature!
2. Conduct an Employee Appreciation Drive
“Appreciation can make a day, even change a life.”
Professing appreciation towards your colleagues may sound like an insignificant gesture, but it goes a long way in instilling a sense of belonging, pride, and purpose in one’s life. In the spirit of the new year, how about shining a spotlight on one new employee per day by recognizing them for a key skill or achievement?
Even better, you can conduct an org-wide employee appreciation drive through an R&R platform, where employees can recognize and reward their teammates on-the-go with the click of a button. Also, don’t forget to award the employees who give and receive the maximum number of recognitions!
3. Decorate to Celebrate!
If your employees are working from the office, why not leverage the physical space for a fun, collaborative activity? Consider conducting a decoration contest in which teams can deck up their respective locations, in groups or individually. They can also bring life to their own holiday traditions through their decorations and add their own touch to it. Teams can click pictures of their set-up and post them over the organization’s R&R platform with a relevant hashtag, as a virtual contest. The post that gets the maximum number of likes and comments wins!
Suffice to say, hoisting a Christmas tree coupled with other delightful trinkets and baubles can transform the office environment and drum up the excitement for the holidays!
4. Volunteer as a Team
Building a company culture of volunteerism pays valuable dividends in the form of employee morale and brand perception, according to a Deloitte study. Since the holidays are all about gratitude, generosity, and togetherness, why not make the most of this spirit by giving back to the community as a team?
You can administer a survey through an employee engagement platform to gauge your workforce’s preferences regarding CSR activities and decide upon a worthwhile cause that would appeal to everyone.
Happy Holidays, Indeed!
Use the above ideas to design your own, unique R&R program for an illustrious welcome into a fresh new year. Wondering how a digital R&R platform can help streamline these activities and reduce the manual HR effort? Schedule a demo of our cutting-edge solution to explore our digital employee recognition and employee engagement tools today!