Are Years of Service Award Programs Passé?

The differences that various employee award vendors have in the way they view employee recognition programs and in particular employee years of service awards, can be startling. And the unsuspecting client is caught in the middle.

On one hand you have the major traditional years of service award companies who frankly have done very little to change their award selections in over 50 years. On the other hand we have the avant-garde new players in the incentive industry who have and will provide a wide range of diverse awards to satisfy the needs of a totally different type of diverse work force than we’ve ever seen.

In a recent review of the Ask the Experts section in Incentive Magazine I was bemused to see the answer to the question “Several recent articles say that service awards are from Henry Ford’s era and are no longer relevant. Are service awards passé?” As it should have been, it was answered by an expert in the industry, but one who runs a traditional years of service award company. The answer was purely from that perspective, and those traditional companies rarely offer awards that differ from what they’ve offered for decades Had it been a two part answer, one from the traditional companies and one from a new player in the industry, you would have been given a much broader perspective of the issues and be better armed to make a decision on the type of program you want to implement.

In reality are service awards passé? The easy answer is yes, and no. The ones that haven’t changed since our fathers and grandfathers time are, the ones that have tried to grow with the times are not as much, and the ones that have incorporated the wide variety of award options definitely are.

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