Recognizing and rewarding employee teamwork

We’ve told you previously about the best (and worst) ways to reward employees, young and old. But, what if those employees are working collaboratively in groups to achieve a common goal? What’s the best way to go about recognizing and rewarding employee teamwork?

Yesterday, I read a post on Incentive Intelligence devoted to team-based recognition. The authors explain how employees in the corporate world depend on teamwork to complete tasks and use it to learn from coworkers. Statistics reveal that many employees would rather work together than work alone, especially with younger generations.

The ‘Intelligent’ ones reviewed recent statistics on work collaboration from the April 28 edition of BusinessWeek. Here are some highlights:

• 82% of white-collar workers partner with coworkers
• 46% of white-collar workers say learning from others is their motivation to collaborate
• More women (51%) than men (40%) prefer to work together because they can learn from others
• Gen Y employees (ages 18-24) like collaborative work the best (60%), as compared to 44% of 25-64 year olds and only 28% of 65 and older workers

“Given the tendencies these statistics indicate, it might be counterproductive to conduct individual programs in many situations,” according to the author at Incentive intelligence.

Remember that teamwork requires team recognition. This is not to say that individual recognition should be thrown out the door, but you should carefully look at the team effort first.

Like one of our past posts, the best way to know how to recognize and reward employees is by simply asking. The ‘Intelligent’ advisors are on the same page - “Gather some folks together, tell them you think teamwork is the driving force behind success (I think they will agree) and ask them for the best way to measure team effort and team success.”