Acknowledging your staff’s work is part of good business management. Tying that recognition to your CoreVals™ is one more way to bring them front and center, and to show how integral they are to daily operations. If you show your gratitude for demonstrating a value that defines your group, based on company history that everyone knows, you’ve got context. You’ve got Aha! moments. You are also tapping emotions, making people feel connected and, of course, having fun.

We’re not just talking about a free coffee at Starbucks. If you hand out a $5 gift card to your top salesperson once a month, people will just yawn and go back to their desks. Make it something that people really want and will appreciate. One way to do this is to ask your team what their interests are and what would make them feel special. Show that you’ve made an effort to make the prize personal to the individual. Before you know it, you’ve got people doing their best to be next in line for that prize.

How will you create a means of recognition that ties your values to the company image? If you’ve given your CoreVals™ personas, you have all kinds of creative outlets. If not, delve deeper for ideas from the stories that generated your work, as well as those your work generated. Customer testimonials are gold mines of positive evidence. If you don’t have those and your products or services are reviewed by the public—maybe on Amazon or such ratings websites as Yelp or TripAdvisor— you can read through the reviews for ideas. What do people like or think is unique about your organization? When you know what is already memorable, you can capitalize on that.

Leaders who value culture recognize and reward employees who act in accordance with the CoreVals™. Take a look at some stellar examples of these programs that have come out of companies I have had the pleasure to work with:

Pepper Group: Marketing agency Pepper Group exemplifies this with their “kick-ass awards,” a peer-to-peer recognition program. Colleagues nominate each other for stand-out behavior, and all submissions are read out loud every Monday morning at the company-wide meeting.

“We don’t really have definitions for what a kick-ass behavior is, because I think it’s personal,” Pepper Group Founder and CEO, Tim Padgett, explained on the Culture Czars podcast. “Whoever thinks someone kicked-ass, that’s good enough for us, and we don’t measure [employees] against each other.”

Employees really like to start the week on this note. Even though they’re just a team of seventeen, Tim says there are around 15-30 submissions each week. There’s no financial reward for these — just an aptly named trophy. The public recognition and reinforcement are enough incentive as evidenced by the ongoing enthusiastic participation.

SABRE: Employees nominate their coworkers who best live up to one of the company’s CoreVals™ for their monthly “228 Award”. Everyone gets together in the warehouse and one member of the leadership team announces the winner of the “228 Award.” Stories are told, values are reinforced, and one person from each department goes home with a $250 gift certificate. The sum is rounded up from $228—the amount of money that Larry Nance initially invested to found SABRE in 1975. Do you think any member of SABRE has forgotten about the roots of their business? Not a chance. Where the company came from is an important part of its current identity. It’s one of the things in which people take pride. Reminding the staff of this every month keeps that particular value alive. At these gatherings, it is important not to just name the winner, but to tell the story behind the nomination and the CoreVal for which the employee was nominated. To show that culture extends beyond the internal organization, even I was awarded SABRE’s Empowered Award for helping the corporation “evolve and solve” its cultural challenges.

Vircom: Mike Petsalis, CEO of Vircom, hands out statuettes of the Star Trek characters to everyone in the company who is “caught committing a core value” that month. These are vintage models found on Ebay. He has resisted handing out financial rewards, not because of budget, but because the statuettes are so highly valued by his team. One month, he didn’t bother handing out the statuettes and the winners came to his office in protest. These seemingly simple things can take on great importance at little cost.

Instead of always pointing to those who fail to live up to company values, we can recognize people who consistently do, or who show instances of going above and beyond to do so. SABRE CEO, David Nance, points out, “It’s easier to be critical of someone than to commend them for a great job. That’s just human nature. It goes a long way when you acknowledge people for doing good things. It makes them want to repeat them and they feel integral to the team—more invested.” This level of engagement reached by regular acknowledgement builds the trust you need to delegate your responsibilities and the trust your team needs to work together.

Have you experienced or witnessed any employee recognition programs that have resonated with you? We would love to hear about them! If you are interested in working to create an impactful recognition award for your company, you can sign up for exclusive access to our Culture Czars™ Workbooks at https://www.cultureczars.com/resources.

Recognition and Rewards Systems for CoreVals