I would really appreciate some insight on what other organisations are doing in Formal Recognition:
1. How does your organisation approach formal recognition?
2. Do you offer any financial awards as part of your recognition strategy?
We previously used gift vouchers but have recently shifted away from that model. Our current focus is on public celebration and collective recognition rather than individual financial rewards.
We have a global platform (via workhuman) which allows our employees to recognize each other for demonstrating company values, driving goals, and contributing to success. You can do thankyou's via the platform and also award points which can then be redeemed for awards. The platform has an awards feed and so recognition can be viewed by others. As Gary says below, there are a large range of approaches and it will depend on your company what works best.
I imagine there'll be a huge array of approaches and my company is in the construction sector where we have a lot of people in operational roles that mean they're not working online most of the time. We have cards that managers can give to recognise someone for going 'above and beyond' and these have a code on them to allow redemption of points via a platform we run with Boostworks. We've found this works well as the card encourages the in the moment recognition but with some monetary value (£25). We see a lot of posts on our internal comms platform of people being presented with their cards. We are currently finalising a 'peer to peer' version that works in a similar way but enters people into a prize draw (so colleagues can give a card but we control costs) and also some form of 'employee of the month' award across the company for someone that's really done something exceptional - both will hopefully be launched in a couple of months time. We also have annual awards where we review nominations and invite people to a ceremony to be recognised by our leadership team. These are all the 'formal' elements but we do reinforce to managers that they should be giving appreciation to people day to day, even if that's just a thank you or acknowledgement in a team meeting etc...