Does Your Boss Make You Feel Valued?
From 2010 to 2019, Colliers—a business actual property firm that employs 2,500 workers in Canada alone—held its annual Colliers Service Excellence Awards.
A panel of judges rewarded choose workers for his or her excellent work throughout the advertising and marketing, analysis, IT, HR, finance and accounting departments with a financial perk (money or credit score in the direction of trip time), firm recognition, and bragging rights. It was so aggressive that some workers known as it the “Colliers Oscars.”
But after its near-decade run, the Toronto-based firm wished to refresh its worker recognition program. Amy Clark, Colliers’s senior vice chairman of individuals providers for North America, says the awards began to “feel outdated and stale.”
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Feedback from Colliers’s worker engagement survey steered there wasn’t sufficient transparency when it got here to how folks had been nominated for awards, or what behaviour was recognition-worthy. And, whereas this system was targeted on service excellence, Clark says it wasn’t tied to the corporate’s larger core values of be enterprising, collaborate, put money into relationships, be specialists, and do what’s proper.
The HR group went to work updating this system, retaining in thoughts the corporate’s progress and diversification over the previous 10 years. They brainstormed new awards that would come with extra folks and groups.
Creating a brand new worker recognition program
In 2020, the brand new recognition program, the Spirit of Colliers, launched. Value awards had been created to acknowledge workers who embody the group’s core values, whereas different rewards have fun management, innovation, rising stars, and employees who embrace range, fairness and inclusion efforts.
Crucially, the corporate switched to see nominations so everybody might become involved. “Your peers can nominate you, your leader can nominate you, or you can nominate your leader,” Clark says.
The HR group put out a name for nominations over a interval of some weeks. The course of was simple and admittedly low-tech: HR created a SharePoint microsite with details about the awards and a video message from the president and CEO. Staff stuffed out a nomination kind, outlining in a single remark why they felt the nominee deserved the award and the way they went above and past their function to satisfy the standards.
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The new program resonated with workers. In 2021, there have been 700 nominations Canada-wide; the following yr, 1,200 nominations got here in. Each January, submissions are reviewed by a 15-person committee made up of senior leaders who choose winners based mostly on their alignment with the classes. Up to 27 particular person awards and three group awards are given. Winners obtain as much as $1,500 for every award, and likewise take house a plaque. So far, Colliers’s president and CEO has introduced the winners by way of pre-recorded video, however the firm is aiming for an in-person or dwell digital ceremony subsequent yr.
Employee recognition advantages workplaces
In an more and more aggressive hiring panorama, worker recognition severely issues. Research from Gallup discovered that it helps have interaction and develop employees—and makes them extra prone to stick round. Keeping tabs on workers’ wants is paramount: If employers are out of contact, the corporate could lag behind opponents and lose expertise. A 2022 survey from Achievers Workforce Institute discovered that greater than half of workers say feeling acknowledged would scale back the chance they might take a name from a headhunter.
But it’s not simply the winners at Colliers who get recognition; the clear course of means when somebody is nominated, they discover out straight away. An electronic mail pops up of their inbox with the nomination class, and their supervisor is cc’d. “So even if you didn’t win the award, you still feel good you were nominated,” says Clark.
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For Colliers, peer recognition is the key sauce to creating all workers really feel appreciated and celebrated. Clark explains that individuals who could also be working behind the scenes aren’t all the time as seen as a number of the frontline workers. “Those who maybe weren’t being recognized before now have more profile,” she says.
Recently, Colliers has been successful a couple of awards of its personal: In March, the corporate landed on The Globe and Mail’s Report on Business Women Lead Here listing, and in 2022, Forbes named Colliers one of many world’s high women-friendly firms. Clark says these awards began rolling in as soon as they began paying extra consideration to workers recognition. “I’m attributing all of that back to us really listening to our employees—putting our arms around programs to show them that we care.”
