Designing a Service Awards Program for your Organization

How do you go about designing a Service Awards program for your organization?

The 3 big factors you need to consider are:
1) Which anniversary milestones do you want to Recognize?
2) How should the employee be Recognized for each of those milestones?
3) What should be the Award and how much should you spend for each of the milestones?

The easy answers to the 3 questions are:
1) Which anniversary milestones do you want to Recognize?
a. Use 1, 3, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 & 30 years (and so on in multiples of 5) as the milestones for which an employee would be recognized and receive some sort of an award.
b. For the other anniversaries (2,4,6,7,8,9 and so on), you may want to introduce an automated anniversary advisor sent o the employee and/or the manager. So the recognition would come from the manager.

2) How should the employee be Recognized for each of those milestones?
a. For the minor milestones (upto say 10 years), the recognition could be at the team level, with the employee’s manager speaking a few words about the employee and handing over the award to the employee.
b. For the major milestones (10 and above), the recognition could be at a large organization wide event, with a member of the senior management handing out the award to the employee.
c. For the non-milestone anniversaries, the Recognition would come from the manager sharing a few words with the employee one-to-one and handing out a voucher if applicable.

What you define as “Major” and “Minor” milestones need to be based on what you can sustain from an budget/administration perspective, even 10-15 years later. So it is better to be conservative when you launch the program rather than pullback on the recognition at a later stage.

3) What should be the Award and how much should you spend for each of the milestones?
a. For the milestone awards, I would recommend an emblematic award of progressively increasing value alongwith a material gift/cash award/voucher, again of progressively increasing value. You can start with a budget as low as 250-500 bucks for the Year 1 anniversary and progressively increase the budget for each additional milestone year.
b. For the non-milestone anniversaries, you can send a voucher for say, 100-400 bucks for the manager to take the employee out for coffee/lunch. Even if your budget won’t allow for vouchers, I would still recommend that the manager atleast call the employee and wish him on the anniversary date.

For service Awards, I would strongly recommended forecasting a budget for 10-15 years and ensure that you don’t make changes for that period.

Like I mentioned, the answers above are the easy ones – you need to use them as a guide for creating something that will work within your organization and culture.