Terryberry, Successories, O.C. Tanner, Bonusly, and Kudos easily made the list for best employee recognition programs honoring service milestones. These platforms stand out due to their peer recognition features, automated tracking, custom physical gifts, and eco-friendly fulfillment options.
Show love to everyone, from managers to top-performing interns, as they get public praise for hitting targets or exceeding goals. A customized physical gift or fun experience from these programs provides useful incentives for demonstrating company values like mentorship or teamwork.
How Can Awards for Service Milestones Help?
Serving an entire career at one company is no longer automatic. Therefore, when someone reaches certain milestones, such as 10 or 20 years with your team, it shows they’re loyal, committed, and have years of branded knowledge your company can continue to benefit from if you don’t waste it.
Show that years of dedication haven’t gone unnoticed, and don’t wait to award only one or a few people at the end of the year. The right employee recognition program can recognize several service milestones continuously and at scale.
The meaning of a milestone or achievement can change based on the company and structure, allowing gifts from customized keychains to vacation packages to honor time on the payroll or actions like community work. These employee reward programs don’t have to only come from the top down, as peers can acknowledge a job well done to boost morale, camaraderie, and innovation.
Best Customization: Successories
The Successories brand is the best option when you want the freedom to create employee gifts from scratch. Choose from among several existing products to customize with individual names, slogans, and reason for giving.
Skip the boring trophy for an artistic piece that symbolizes your business product, service type, or something special about the employee you’re honoring. Add a quote they said to a commemorative plaque or create ongoing experiences from their hobbies, like a custom BBQ Tool set.
Scale LEGO-compatible kits and branded wearables like keychains as part of bigger gift sets or small tokens for large teams.
You may have a vision that the Successories team can carry out, or let them develop something based on an upcoming achievement, like a 20th work anniversary or celebrating a major target like reducing the company’s deficit.
Choose arrangement, preferred materials, and custom presentation styles. A piece can look like art when the team combines glass, stone, metal, and other materials to create a multi-dimensional recognition piece.
The design team handles:
- Prototyping
- Sourcing
- Decoration
- Packaging
- Fulfillment
Design something for one person, small teams, or entire enterprise programs without losing quality.
Best Program: O.C. Tanner
The Culture Cloud platform O.C Tanner uses sets it apart as the best program structure for making employee giving easy. Over 75 major integrations help HR recognize someone’s upcoming birthday or acknowledge an intern who’s about to convert to a full-time employee.
Reports and dashboards provide ongoing visibility into current award participation and the progress towards various initiatives. From managers to human resources analysts, the right people have insights to ensure no one goes unacknowledged.
Tell a story with symbolic awards created by the in-house design team. Their researchers and consultants can help you hit retention or shareholder goals by designing a special program for your company, as they do for millions of users throughout 180 companies.
Best Peer Recognition: Bonusly
Bonusly is the best choice if you want to involve more people beyond managers and team leads. Acknowledging major service milestones in someone’s career with your company can mean more to them when peers and colleagues get in on the action.
Thanks to its social media-like platform, anyone can acknowledge a team member with a quick direct message in the moment. Highlight someone providing emergency coverage or sharing good ideas in a meeting the team plans to implement.
The group can send a video message wishing someone a happy retirement or cheers on passing their probationary period and becoming an official part of the team. Add a highlight reel of the person’s accomplishments for all to see.
Whatever the recognition is for, use Bonusly to back it up with redeemable points the honoree can use as they wish.
Best for Automated Recognition: Terryberry
If you’re looking for the best way to automate your recognition system, Terryberry is the platform for you. Its efficient platform handles all your tracking and administrative tasks regarding your reward system.
Take pride and relief knowing work milestones, anniversaries, and birthdays won’t be missed going forward, and avoid some workers feeling left out. You can have a fair recognition system across your organization that builds morale and team spirit.
Because it is automated, HR and team leads don’t have to spend manual time and labor sorting and tracking dates or finding appropriate gifts.
As your business expands, the platform can scale with it and customize your recognition program based on goals and adjustments after feedback.
Best Eco-friendly Award Program: Kudos
Kudos is the ideal platform for any company that wants to help the planet as much as it honors workers. The company shows its values by prioritizing local sourcing for all available store rewards. This commitment to green gifts helps reduce harmful carbon emissions rising in the atmosphere, adding to global warming and pollution.
Plus, every time someone gets a reward for a milestone, another tree is planted with the help of the brand’s association with Veritree. The program continues with tech-based direct monitoring to verify that reforestation projects are taking place.
Case studies from companies such as KidsPeace, Make-A-Wish, and CAAT show how these brands have made improvements in turnover rates and employee-led initiatives.
Make Service and Loyalty Recognition a Standard Procedure
Stop waiting until one stuffy annual ceremony to honor service milestones. Select a program and the milestones most important to you, whether you want to honor community service, mentoring new interns, or acknowledging birthdays and extended time with the company.
When workers feel appreciated by their peers and managers, they’re more likely to share their talents at your company. A bunch of happy workers helps lead to better retention and team morale that make your company more competitive.
