When your people feel seen and valued, they perform at their best. An employee recognition strategy is vital to ensuring that motivation remains high, improving productivity, retention and morale across your workforce.
According to recent research, employee recognition boosts productivity by up to 21%. And yet, many companies still fail to make recognition a daily habit. Too often, they rely on outdated strategies that feel more performative than powerful.
Today, with more employees working in hybrid, remote or part-time roles, recognition needs to evolve. The traditional “employee of the month” no longer holds the same weight. Instead, modern organisations must create dynamic, frequent and meaningful moments of appreciation wherever their people work, whether at home, in the office or in a deskless environment.
In this ultimate guide to employee recognition, we will explore three important stages to help you understand and maximise your organisational potential through cutting-edge recognition strategies:
- Why Employee Recognition Matters
- How to Build Your Employee Recognition Strategy
- Making Employee Recognition Sustainable
This guide is designed to enable people leaders to recognise the impact that their employees’ relationship with their workplace has on business outcomes and retention rates. We will also explore ways to improve employee recognition, especially in digital spaces. We’ve seen companies that embrace employee recognition experience up to a 60% increase in employee retention and a significant lift in productivity and engagement scores.
If this guide raises any red flags or you would like support with bringing your people together for success, reach out to our team. We offer a free consultation where you can share your goals and challenges, and we’ll help you explore how better recognition could transform engagement in as little as six months.
Part 1: Why Employee Recognition Matters
Employee recognition encompasses anything that shows your team members that you value how hard they’ve been working, and includes strategies like staff awards, bonuses and peer-to-peer recognition.
Implementing the right kind of recognition strategy is crucial in giving your company a competitive edge over others. Recognition strategies are a powerful tool for improving employee engagement, reducing staff turnover, increasing productivity and building purpose when used correctly.
Although most recognition schemes operate in a top-down model, that isn’t the only way to help keep your employees motivated. Recognition from co-workers and peers can sometimes be even more effective at encouraging team members, creating an enthusiastic and supportive workplace.
Put simply, recognition is about prioritising the carrot, not the stick.
If your recent engagement surveys revealed a lack of appreciation, you’re not alone.. Staff often point to “a lack of recognition and appreciation” as a source of disappointment at work. Here’s a hard truth: the solution is a bit trickier than sending your employees a gift card once a year. But it’s probably easier than you may think.
First, we need to establish the connection between recognition and engagement, then define exactly what we mean by “recognition” in practice. Once we’ve understood the benefits of different types of recognition, we can sketch out an effective strategy template that encompasses daily, monthly and yearly recognition techniques, before breaking down how to make a recognition strategy effective within different industries.
The Link Between Recognition and Engagement
Recognition isn’t a side project. It’s one of the most effective ways to boost engagement and drive performance. When employees feel appreciated, they feel higher levels of motivation to succeed. If you combine this type of incentivisation with culture building strategies, you create a similarly powerful sense of accountability to the wider team. Harnessing motivation and accountability is the secret to improving productivity. And the fuel for both? Building a positive, recognition-rich culture.
But here’s the catch: recognition must be frequent. Gallup recommends recognising employees once a week for maximum impact.
Common Types of Recognition
While recognition strategies vary between sectors, there are some common types of appreciation that are universal. Here are six key examples of employee recognition that might be relevant to your workforce:
- Verbal praise: A simple “thank you” goes a long way. Be specific, timely and sincere.
- Written praise: Public posts on platforms like Mo ensure appreciation is seen and shared.
- Monetary rewards: Gift cards, points or bonuses can boost morale, but only when meaningful.
- Awards: Monthly or quarterly awards build shared pride.
- Peer recognition: Colleagues lift one another up with direct praise and spontaneous feedback.
- Social recognition: Public praise, usually during a meeting or conference of peers.
Mo’s employee recognition platform supports written praise, monetary rewards, awards, peer and social recognition. This combination is proven to improve attrition rates across industries like hospitality and childcare – we’ll look deeper at how to maximise recognition for deskless and desk-based industries in Part 3.
This guide is designed to outline a holistic strategy. If you’re looking for quick, actionable employee recognition ideas that you can implement in a matter of days, consider popular initiatives like “Summer Fridays” or taking an employee out for lunch.
Employee Recognition Provides Clear Business Benefits
Before we can build a recognition strategy, it’s important to look at what business metrics are improved by appreciation and work backwards. Tick the areas you’d like to work on in your team:
- Turnover and retention
- Recruitment
- Productivity
- Company culture
- Absenteeism (quiet quitting)
Whether you ticked one option or all five, your team may benefit from a recognition strategy. With clarity on your problem areas, let’s explore the benefits of a holistic recognition strategy in the workplace.
Recognition Reduces Turnover and Lifts Retention
The cost of losing a skilled employee can run from 50% to 200% of their annual salary. Recognition plays a key role in keeping your top talent from walking out the door.
Over half of employees say they want more recognition from their direct manager, and when they don’t receive it, they’re more likely to leave. Consistent, inclusive appreciation can flip that script, reducing attrition and strengthening your employer brand.
A Talent Magnet for Candidates
Recognition doesn’t just retain talent. It attracts them. In a competitive hiring market, candidates are looking beyond pay and perks. They want a sense of belonging and purpose. Put simply, organisations with established appreciation programmes stand out. If you’re competing for top talent, make sure your recognition culture is visible. Word of mouth; Glassdoor. The next great hire may choose you because of your recognition strategy.
Boost Productivity and Satisfaction
Happy teams are productive teams. Research shows that employees who feel recognised are 13% more productive. And in companies like Google, investing in well-being and appreciation has driven a 37% increase in job satisfaction.
Recognition helps people feel like their work has meaning. When employees feel valued, motivation soars. A recent US study found that 75% of employees who felt recognised also felt their work was valuable. In today’s difficult market, these percentages can make all the difference for your business.
Recognition Improves Company Culture
Recognition is the heartbeat of a positive workplace culture. Without it, culture initiatives fall flat. Even the flashy ones. No ping-pong table or Friday drinks can replace genuine appreciation. By embedding recognition into your culture, you create a workplace where people want to show up, contribute and stay.
Reduced Absence Can Be Attributed to Appreciation
Recognition doesn’t just boost mood. It helps reduce absenteeism. Gallup reports that engaged employees have 41% fewer unplanned absences. When people feel appreciated, they’re more likely to turn up, even on the tough days.
Part 2: How to Build Your Employee Recognition Strategy
Recognition isn’t a one-time initiative; it’s an ongoing habit. When laying out a sustainable recognition strategy, it’s important to ask your employees what types of appreciation would resonate the most. Would they like to focus on recognition within their teams or company-wide? What sort of reward types would motivate them? Are they willing to buy-in to a new recognition platform?
Next, you need to set a budget for your recognition strategy. Our friendly team is on-hand to discuss this step with you. If your goals are to reduce attrition and absenteeism or boost productivity, making this investment will likely create financial benefits. Only commit to a budget your organisation can afford; taking recognition away from employees may have more detrimental effects than not having any strategy at all.
How to Create an Effective Recognition Strategy
What is the secret to a great recognition strategy? First, take a step back and look at the entire onboarding process. Do you have enough resources allocated? Next, champion the idea that recognition should be embedded in your company culture. Here’s a quick break down of what the onboarding process may look like:
Your Recognition Strategy: Step by Step
- Identify your challenges
- Gather data from your people
- Set a budget for recognition
- Choose a recognition software
- Select rewards cadences and values
- Get leadership buy-in
- Commence onboarding
- Encourage sharing via role modelling
- Monitor success and modify
- Establish consistency
When you work with Mo’s recognition software, our Customer Success team works with your people by processing your step-by-step recognition strategy together. With the help of an internal champion, we ensure that you make the transition as seamless and cost-effective as possible. Below, we’ve outlined some key considerations you should bring to your recognition strategy to help embed it in your workplace culture.
Make Recognition Part of Everyday Life
It shouldn’t be a big event every time. The most successful organisations normalise recognition as part of their culture; not only does appreciation help with retention, their reputations as positive workplaces help with future hiring.
Empower Everyone to Participate
Recognition shouldn’t just come from the top. Give all employees the tools and encouragement to recognise each other. It builds belonging and promotes shared accountability.
Celebrate the Small Stuff
From anniversaries to project milestones to daily wins, every achievement matters. Small, frequent acknowledgements are just as important as big celebrations.
Track and Evolve Your Strategy
Use your data to inform where recognition is working and where it needs support. Is one team more engaged? Is one manager struggling to give feedback? Make sure to set up some sort of analytics dashboard to help you monitor engagement, track values alignment and ensure your strategy stays effective across departments. If you choose employee recognition software, it should come with some form of tracking hub.
Get Leadership Buy-In
Make sure to engage your key stakeholders early. Clearly outline the ROI of your recognition strategy and present evidence from a range of employees on the lack of appreciation they currently experience. If you have the data, make sure to include engagement survey results and turnover rates.
Key Elements of a Great Recognition Strategy
We’ve worked with dozens of leading organisations to implement effective and sustainable recognition systems, including OVO Energy and Axol Bioscience. Here’s what we’ve observed as the key tenets of a great recognition strategy:
1. It’s Authentic
Employees can spot insincerity a mile off. A vague “great job!” won’t cut it. Effective recognition is personal and specific — it names the action and highlights its impact. With Mo’s platform, every moment is an opportunity for authentic recognition. Employees are celebrated not just for what they did, but how they did it, directly tied to company values.
2. It’s Timely
Recognition loses its power when it’s delayed. Monthly awards may be convenient, but they miss the moment. Impactful appreciation happens in real time right after the behaviour you want to reinforce. Encourage managers to share appreciation as things happen. Even a quick post on an employee recognition platform can make a lasting impression.
3. It’s Public (when appropriate)
Public praise builds team cohesion and motivates others. It shows everyone what great looks like and builds a culture of encouragement. Use Mo to broadcast “Moments” of excellence, aka. social posts, across teams. Employees can react, comment and add their own words of support, creating a ripple effect of positivity.
4. It’s Inclusive and Fair
Recognition should be accessible to everyone — not just high performers or those in the spotlight. Peer-to-peer recognition is especially powerful, giving all team members a voice. When recognition feels exclusive or uneven, it lowers morale. A strong strategy celebrates a range of contributions from big wins to everyday effort.
5. It Reinforces Your Values
Recognition is one of the most effective ways to embed your organisational values. When appreciation is linked to behaviours like “One Team” or “Think Big”, those values move from words to actions. To reinforce what matters most in your culture, try tagging your recognition posts with a specific company value. Your employee recognition platform may have this feature as standard, but make sure to ask.
How to Measure Recognition Success
Once you have established an employee recognition strategy, your HR leaders and managers need an efficient way to measure the success of the initiative.
Recognition strategies can be expensive. While the investment is often worthwhile, it can be hard to get the mix of awards, peer-to-peer rewards and social recognition right the first time. A period of troubleshooting is completely normal. Here are seven ways to measure the success of your recognition strategy:
Participation Rate
How many of your people are engaging with your employee recognition initiative? Before starting your recognition strategy, agree on an achievable and sustainable participation rate amongst your managers. Building a recognition-rich culture requires effort from all levels of your organisation. Involving key stakeholders at an early stage will ensure enthusiasm.
Reaching a high participation rate is hard to achieve within the initial implementation stages. Your employee recognition strategy’s Customer Success team can support you during this process, helping you change behaviour across all of your teams.
Tracking Reward Budgets
When you invest in employee rewards, you want to know that the money is being spent fairly. Tracking budgets means that you can monitor ROI and make adjustments when needed. Regardless of your budget, knowing how this pot is being spent will ensure confidence in the wider team.
One of the features of an employee recognition platform is a reward budget to be shared by managers and between peers. Keeping track of how much of the overall monthly, quarterly, or yearly budget is used is an important measurement of your strategy’s success. For example, our analytics enable leaders to quickly detect favouritism and raise any red flags. Equally, you can use reward tracking to see increases in positive metrics, such as engagement.
Ask Employees for Feedback
Talking to your team is a simple yet effective way to measure the success of your recognition strategy. By soliciting your employees’ feedback, you can gain a better insight into their views and opinions. Find out what is going well, what could be improved, and any additional feedback your teams wish to share about the strategy or software used.
Employee Satisfaction
If you see an increase in employee satisfaction levels, you can be certain that your recognition efforts drive a positive impact. But not every initiative will be immediately successful. By asking for feedback at the time of the satisfaction survey, you will understand where things are slipping up and where you can make improvements.
Employee Retention
Recognition strategies can help organisations improve turnover rates, and analysing changes in employee turnover helps measure the success of recognition strategy. One of our customers reduced turnover by 8% within their first year of using Mo.
One thing to remember when looking at retention is that there can be many other factors causing high employee turnover, like toxic workplace cultures or lack of growth opportunities, something that recognition strategies alone can’t fix.
Assessing Employee Behaviour Changes
Although this may seem an intangible way of measuring the performance or success of your employee recognition efforts, carefully assessing the known behaviour patterns of your employees can help you understand the effectiveness of your recognition strategy.
If employees are more willing to contribute to organisational growth, work better as a team, are more productive or display a more satisfied and happier attitude at work, you can attribute this to successful recognition efforts.
Additionally, if you are planning on monitoring and assessing behavioural changes, be sure to do it over a specified period so you can ensure it is relevant to the recognition strategy.
Top Performers
By using a rewards and recognition platform like Mo, you will get an idea of who uses the system most. Which managers share the most recognition posts? Is there a strong culture of peer-to-peer recognition? Are non-managers sharing the most appreciation? These metrics matter and should be rewarded.
Part 3: Making Employee Recognition Sustainable
After investing time and money in an employee recognition strategy, the key to success is to focus on the long term sustainability of the initiative.
If your goals are to reduce turnover or drive productivity, you will already be monitoring these metrics internally. How do you connect KPIs to your recognition strategy?
Simple. Start by tweaking the questions in your employee feedback surveys to include detailed references to your recognition strategy.
Next, monitor instances of shared recognition across different departments and cross-reference them against their results. Consider holding meetings with your managers and stakeholders to specifically discuss how recognition can be leveraged for their departmental goals, and consider adjusting their budgets (if you are using rewards) accordingly.
Set clear expectations for your recognition strategy. Targets aren’t just about focusing on the larger goal. You’re far more likely to hit an ambitious target if you set out smaller ones first. Here are some examples:
- Managers expected to give recognition 3x per week
- Employees encouraged to appreciate peers 2x per month
- Leadership expected to share positive updates 1x per quarter
- New starts are initiated in the platform in first week
- Welcome, birthday, anniversary and departure messages are mandatory
While imposing a set of targets may seem counterintuitive when building a positive culture of recognition, there are clear benefits to getting your whole team to “buy-in” from day one.
Troubleshooting Your Recognition Strategy
While everyone’s recognition strategy will differ, there are some common issues that arise during the teething phase. Here are some common challenges and how to overcome them:
“People aren’t sharing enough”
As a leader, it is essential to role model recognition. If you aren’t posting, it’s unlikely your team will. Consider moving key communications regarding your company culture from your team messaging service to your recognition platform. This switch will encourage your employees to check the app and engage with the content more frequently.
If you use rewards, consider lowering the minimum amount that someone can send to a peer. For example, if every employee has a £10 budget, reducing the minimum from £5 to £2 may increase the frequency of their recognition.
“One person is getting all the recognition”
While top performers will always emerge, it’s important for managers to share recognition fairly across their team. Ultimately, recognition isn’t just about rewarding excellence, it’s about bringing up team motivation as a whole.
“Our people miss Employee of the Month”
Regular recognition isn’t a direct replacement for awards like Employee of the Month. Instead, daily or weekly recognition should be complimentary. There are different levels of recognition: daily, quarterly and yearly. You can also break these down by impact: steady, medium and high.
We made a cheat sheet to help you visualise how different types of recognition function in your organisation.
Rather than scrap awards, incorporate them into your overall recognition strategy. Mo facilitates all three levels of awards and recognition on one platform, making it easy for managers and HR leaders to distribute appreciation fairly and timely.
Best practices for recognition will always include a variety of appreciation types. Some employee recognition ideas include end-of-year celebrations, long service awards, an end-of-quarter bonus, or frequent peer-to-peer recognition.
Understanding Recognition in Your Industry
We’ve worked with teams from a wide range of sectors; you can find a full list in our use cases. In this section, we’ve outlined key considerations for five different types of organisations and given examples of how they can effectively use recognition to bring their teams together. We’ve also included some real life examples, if you’re seeking additional inspiration.
Desk-based (aka. offices or remote workplaces)
Desk-based teams, particularly in digital, professional services or hybrid organisations, often cite lack of recognition as a major reason for disengagement. Mo helps these organisations embed praise and feedback into the everyday workflow — without adding more meetings or admin.
Axol Bioscience, a fast-growing biotech company, uses a recognition strategy to bring appreciation into focus across their desk-based teams. As a high-performance, science-led company, Axol needed a solution that encouraged regular feedback without disrupting deep work.
A recognition strategy has also helped Axol support hybrid collaboration, with Moments ensuring that contributions from remote staff are just as visible and appreciated as those in-office. Since adopting a recognition strategy, Axol has seen stronger team morale, more regular peer feedback and a lift in engagement.
Key Takeaways:
- Reward high performance
- Share constructive feedback
- Use recognition to build morale
Deskless (aka. casual, physical or client facing)
For deskless teams — whether in retail, care, logistics or facilities — traditional recognition channels like email or intranet often miss the mark. An recognition platform with a built-in app solves this by providing a mobile-first, values-based recognition platform designed for people on the move.
Hotel Indigo, part of the IHG group, leverages their recognition strategy to ensure that their on-site teams are consistently recognised. Whether it’s a cleaner receiving praise for a presentation, or a maintenance worker responding quickly to an urgent repair, posts shared through their recognition app make frontline workers feel seen.
Recognition is no longer dependent on physical proximity or formal channels. Team leaders can post in the app straight after a shift, thanking someone for staying late, managing a guest complaint, or keeping cool under pressure.
A central feed allows every employee (even those without a company email) to access and engage with praise across teams. Managers also use automated posts to prompt regular recognition, and rewards can be issued digitally, such as coffee shop vouchers or bonus points.
Hotel Indigo credits recognition with improving shift morale, reducing friction between departments, and creating a shared sense of achievement across their operational teams — all without relying on a central office or HR-led rollout.
Key Takeaways:
- Use a recognition app to bring teams together
- Make sure casual staff feel visible
- Ensure managers are sharing regular posts
Thinking About a Recognition Strategy?
You’ve reached the end of our Ultimate Guide to Employee Recognition. By now, you may be intrigued by the possibilities presented by a recognition strategy. So what is the next step?
Write down a list of your “must have” features in an employee recognition strategy. Next, speak to your stakeholders about your budget considerations and how much time you’d like to allocate to the initiative. Finally, compare the options. It’s important to select a platform with a dedicated Customer Success team – and make sure they’re GDPR compliant, too.
Mo Helps You Build a Culture of Recognition
Mo is the award-winning recognition platform that makes appreciation habitual, not optional. It’s designed to support busy managers and people teams in creating meaningful moments of appreciation without adding complexity.
With Mo, you can:
- Celebrate wins in real time
- Reinforce company values with every Moment
- Empower peer-to-peer appreciation
- Track engagement and recognition trends
Mo works across industries and team types, whether you’re managing shift workers, remote teams or hybrid operations. We support your people where they are, helping you build belonging and boost performance.
Trusted by Axol Bioscience, Hotel Indigo, OVO Energy and more, Mo makes recognition a powerful part of your culture.
Transform your culture with Mo
Book a free demo to learn how Mo can help you:
- 🤝 Improve employee engagement scores
- 🚀 Reduce employee churn
- 😍 Build a collaborative culture
Ready to Build a Culture of Recognition?
A meaningful recognition platform doesn’t just make employees feel good. Appreciation drives retention, productivity and satisfaction.
Want to turn appreciation into your competitive edge? Book a demo with our team and discover how Mo can help you create a culture your people love to be part of.
