The Impact of Employee Recognition and Rewards on Employee Turnover

What is employee recognition? 

Employee recognition is the timely, informal or formal acknowledgement of a person's behaviour, effort, or business result that supports the organization's goals and values, and exceeds his superior's normal expectations.

What is the connection between recognition and turnover?

BI WORLDWIDE (BIW) conducted a study on the correlation between employee turnover among employees that are recognized vs. employees who are not recognized.

Does recognition work?

The 2015/2016 study revealed that among employees that are not recognized, churn is as high as 43.9% compared to 26.2% among those that were recognized at least once throughout their eligible tenure. 

Note: Only employees active in a program prior to 2015 are included to identify a static audience count from which turnover is calculated. Employees must have AT LEAST 6 months of eligible program tenure to be included.

Does how often employees’ are recognized matter?

As discovered, there is a link between the number of times employees are recognized and turnover. Data from the survey shows turnover decreases as the frequency of recognitions increases. A 10% reduction in employee turnover was found between employees that are rarely recognized to those that are recognized often.

What are some examples of the effects of employee recognition and rewards?

Receiving rewards can also decrease employee turnover.

The BIW study uncovered that turnover is 4x higher among employees with low ‘recognitions with awards’ receiving rates compared to the highest rate of receiving recognition with rewards.

The most powerful rewards are ones that people can pick for themselves, it just makes sense. This is made possible by distributing points to employees that act as a currency, through recognition.

Employees want to know that they are appreciated for the hard work and effort they put in daily to benefit your company.

Recognition isn’t hard, but it is more than just saying “thank you” - among many other things, it needs to be meaningful and it needs to be sincere. Along with saying you appreciate their hard work, show them too; after all, action is better than talk.

Rewarding employees for their hard work will reinforce positive feelings about the company, their job and the great work they have done, inspiring them to continue to do great things.

Attract, engage and retain the best employees by recognizing awesome work, rewarding victories and celebrating anniversaries with our employee recognition program, DayMaker.