How to build a company values awards program that sets your culture apart

3. Create a nomination process for your core values awards.

Next, you’ll want to build out the nomination process. Ask: How should employees be nominated for a core value award? Are peer nominations preferred or should we rely on managers to nominate their direct reports? Your answers to those questions will shape your award’s nomination process.

There are two common approaches to values-based awards nominations: spot awards and rewards and company-wide core values recognition. 

For a spot rewards program, managers can recognize and reward their employees’ special contributions as they occur. For example, GoPro’s core values awards, called “The Legends Program,” is a spot recognition program that recognizes employees who exhibit their company core values: Obsessively Serve, Stay Agile, Be a Hero, Harness the Power of Wow, and Make Friends. 

GoPro uses Blueboard to deliver experiential awards and built a platform where managers can pull up a menu, select an award category and budget, write a brief description of the value the employee embodied and the action they performed, and then submit their nomination for approval. 

“It’s like an Instacart for experiences,” says Tim Betry, Vice-President of People + Places at GoPro. Hear more from Tim about how GoPro crafts a meaningful employee experience with values awards in this recent webinar:

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For a company-wide recognition program, the nomination process is often a little more formal. A committee picks award winners at regular intervals (e.g., once a quarter) with the company’s HR or leadership team overseeing the nomination process. Managers can submit nominations through an online survey, such as a Google Form, and the evaluation committee selects the winners. 

You could also have the best of both worlds and have a quarterly company-wide program and provide your managers with a supplemental budget for spot recognition. Up to you!

4. Set up your values awards evaluation process.

In setting up your nomination process, you'll also need to determine evaluation criteria. Who are the decision-makers? What should they be looking for as they evaluate award nominees? How will peer-to-peer recognition activity feed into your decision-making?

For a spot recognition program, the evaluation process is relatively simple: Usually, People managers submit a short nomination note detailing the employee’s achievement and reward value based on their observations. In some cases, this note acts as a request, which needs to be approved before the actual reward is sent. In other cases, managers can send rewards to employees for embodying one of their company core values without going through an approval process. 

In either case, you’ll want to be clear about how frequently managers should reward people and over what time period so that there is consistency across the entire company. 

For a company-wide program, the leadership team typically acts as the evaluation committee. You could also have a mix of both leadership and more junior-level employees on your committee, or have previous winners make up the panel. Peer to peer recognition insights can be particularly helpful for this type of committee, as they sift through different nominations.

5. Reward and celebrate your award winners.

And now for the fun part! After you pick your award recipients, publicly recognizing them is a critical part of the process. It helps the recipient feel seen, heard, and appreciated. It also reinforces your company culture by painting a clear picture for your other team members of what it looks like to live your values. 

Here at Blueboard, we reward our culture champions with one of our signature Blueboard experiences and celebrate them during all-hands meetings and with shout-outs on Slack. We also encourage all of our award recipients to report back to the team on how their experience went—and we urge our clients to do the same with their awards programs. For instance, GoPro created a space in their Workplace from Facebook hub where award winners can share stories, photos, and video memories about their experiences. 

Connecting over shared experiences is one of the many benefits of rewarding your employees with an experience compared to more transactional options like gift cards or cash. “[Your employees are] not going to remember a $250 gift card, but they will remember some sort of an experience,” says Tim. 

Compared to monetary gifts, an experience is something that your employees can look forward to and look back on for years to come. Plus, research shows that experiential gifts for employees often elicit more intense emotions than material gifts, which makes the gift all that more meaningful and memorable. 

Tim adds: “With our values and our corporate philosophy around unlocking opportunities for employees to really live the moment and live their best lives, it's really important to create these experiences that employees can embark upon that they might not have had otherwise.”

Values-based recognition programs: An antidote to employee disengagement.

With your employees likely spread out over multiple time zones and work schedules, it can be tough to make sure everybody’s on the same page. And no, we’re not talking about your daily touchbase calls or 1:1s. We’re talking about that strong sense of alignment, connection, and community that only comes from feeling locked into your company values.

This is the power of values-based recognition programs. Not only do they help your employees feel seen and appreciated for their efforts but—when you add Blueboard to the mix—core values awards can also help your employees bond over shared experiences. By encouraging your award winners to talk about the pottery class or surfing lesson they took, it creates those watercooler moments that help your employees get to know each other on a deeper level.

However, your program only works if you work it. It needs to be part of your employee onboarding experience from day one. When you’re onboarding new employees, tell them about your recognition program. Show them how it works and what type of values-based behaviors they should try to exemplify. Talking about your program from the get-go shows your employees that your values aren’t static ideas that live in a slide deck but are a genuine priority within your organization. 

You know your employees are worth more than the tasks they complete. But in our more distributed work climate, it can be challenging to let your team know they’re on the right track or show them their efforts are being noticed. Implementing a values-based recognition program is a great way to show your top performers that you care about them and want them to thrive, both inside and outside of your company. 

There’s also an element of inclusivity to core values awards that can be missing from other types of recognition. Anyone can demonstrate a value, and anyone can recognize a value; it’s more democratized recognition, which can be really empowering for your more junior employees who may feel left out of the running for other awards. 

If you’re interested in learning more about using experiential awards and gifts for your values-based recognition program or to help identify other programs to support your core business challenges, we’d love to connect. Schedule some time with our team, here.

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