6 Ways to Recognize Your Remote Employees

Recognition is a meaningful act of demonstrating to employees that they feel seen, heard and understood. It means caring about their work and wellbeing, even when they’re not physically in the office. Recognition is an essential piece of the HR puzzle, strengthening manager-to-peer relationships, peer-to-peer relationships, and understanding its core values. 

For the past almost year now, companies with a high-volume of knowledge workers have been operating mostly remotely. What’s missing from this environment is sufficient human connection between peers and management. 

When employees don’t feel connected to their team or their organization, it can lead to a drop in productivity, performance, and collaboration. All of which people operations and executives are dependent on for a well-functioning, driven organization. 

So what’s the solution? Remote recognition to boost engagement, and it doesn’t need to be complicated or require reinventing the wheel. Connecting remotely needs to be personal and frequent to effectively foster a sense of appreciation to retain your top performers in the coming years. 

Send a remote care package

A care package is a pre-curated gift box filled with fun products, delicious treats or other wellness items to boost happiness while working from home. You can include a touch of personalization with a hand-written card, which we’ve included on this list to make sure the recognition message resonates. 

A physical gift box that shows up on their doorstep is a fantastic way to recognize your remote team, giving them something to enjoy beyond the unboxing experience with products they can continue to use. Care packages are also a great conversation starter between team members, virtually sharing photos, thank-yous and happy messages after receiving a care package. 

Celebrate personal milestones

A fantastic way to improve connection and communication among team members is for leadership to celebrate personal milestones like birthdays, work anniversaries, marriage, a child or other monumental life events meaningful to a person. 

Many organizations shy away from celebrating personal moments, keep business strictly business. However, humans are not robots, and we can’t just turn off our personal lives with the push of a button. These moments make us humans, and celebrating them with our coworkers with whom we spend 40 hours a week, is a great way to benefit peer relationships, understanding and boost empathy. 

A great way to never miss a milestone is with Chocolate Soup’s employee subscription box plans. Each employee will receive a personalized gift straight to their doorstep, celebrating the moments that matter. 

Highlight people during weekly, or all-hands meetings

Recognition is often given in secret, a conversation shared between two people, a manager and employee, in private one-on-one meetings virtual or not. While many employees may prefer to receive their recognition privately, it removes other employees' ability to acknowledge their team members for their hard work as well. 

The entire company benefits when recognition becomes public, which is a great way to highlight extraordinary accomplishments from teams, individuals or departments. Sharing significant milestones in weekly or monthly all-hands Zoom meetings helps boost employee morale and engagement. It allows the entire company to perpetuate the recognition, amplifying it, which will have a more profound and lasting impact on the person or group receiving it.

It could look as simple as a shoutout, and a virtual round-of-applause. We recommend saving public team recognition for monumental work moments like the launch of a new project, a promotion, an employee who has lived up to company values, to name a few examples. 

Cheers from peers - Allow employees to recognize one another!

Recognition from the top down will always be an essential part of a great employee engagement strategy. However, it's not the only way that recognition should and can be shared. Peer to peer recognition should also be a top priority for organizations who want to strengthen interpersonal relationships between employees. Team collaboration looks a lot different in a remote setting; communication and listening skills become even more critical in the virtual workplace. 

There are dozens of tools and Slack apps to help employees recognize one another for going above and beyond. Helping an employee without asking, living up to company values or shipping something great are examples of situations where a peer might want to give props. 

Gamifying it with an app like Kudos can be an excellent incentive for employees to take action; not only does the receiver deserve credit, but the giver highlights themselves as someone with the ability to recognize others' greatness, which is just as important for a connected team. 

Send a hand-written card

This recognition tip is one of our personal favourites; in fact, we include a hand-written note in every single one of our Chocolate Soup gift-boxes. A hand-written card is something that has been around the office for generations. In the remote-world, a thoughtful card circling the office, signed by everyone, can’t be replicated easily. 

It sounds easy enough, but not enough people realize how powerful a hand-written card or note can be. It’s a physical item that a person can hold onto and keep as a reminder that they are thought-of and essential to the company. 

Create a (virtual) wall of fame

Compared to 10 years ago, the number of remote workers has increased by 115%, with that number taking a steep increase during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Virgin Pulse, remote employees are more likely to be disengaged and quit, which is very problematic. Most of the knowledge workforce is shifting online with no end in sight.

Improving employee retention and loyalty should be front and center in terms of HR priorities heading into 2021. One great way to boost employee loyalty is to create a wall of fame for employees who have been on the team for longer than one year. 

Depending on your company's size, you might want to increase this number to five or more years, but we think keeping the bar low and easy to achieve is better for morale. For each employee who reaches the set milestone, send them a personalized gift and highlight their loyalty and commitment to the company's rest. You can even literally create a "wall of fame" by building it in your team's collaboration tool like Notion or Google Drive–include pictures, titles and a fun fact. Give new hires something to strive for by showing how much the company values long-term employees and their ongoing contributions. 

Final thoughts

Whether you were a remote-friendly workplace before COVID, or you’ve had to pivot due to the pandemic, if 2020 has made anything clear, it’s that keeping employees happy, engaged and recognized is essential for a healthy company culture within a scaling organization.