Why 'Employee of the Month' is the worst recognition program you can run
Singleton awards create losers by default. Here's what the research says — and what to do instead.
The Employee of the Month plaque is still hanging in a thousand break rooms. It's still the default "recognition program" a surprising number of companies roll out. And it's almost always making things worse.
Why singleton awards backfire
When you pick one person to recognize each month, you're implicitly telling everyone else they weren't good enough. The research on peer-recognition bears this out: teams with high-frequency peer-to-peer recognition outperform teams with manager-only recognition on every metric we measure.
What to do instead
- Run **Seasons**, not months. A 90-day Season has enough time for multiple recognition moments, milestones, and a story arc.
- Make recognition **peer-to-peer**, not top-down.
- Tie recognition to **values**, not vague superlatives.
- Make it **public** — the Feed, not a DM.
The cost of getting it wrong
Disengaged employees cost U.S. businesses an estimated $450–550 billion a year (Gallup). Poor recognition is one of the top two predictors of disengagement. Doing recognition wrong isn't just a nice-to-have miss — it's operational damage.
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