Your Employee of the Month Program is a Waste of Time and Money!

If you’re running an Employee of the Month program, stop it, now! It doesn’t do a thing to motivate improved performance of the vast majority of your employees and might in fact just be de-motivational instead!

Ever walked into a business, any kind of business, and see those “people of the month” plaques hanging on the wall? Ever look at how many of them are out of date? I mean really out of date. Ever notice the same person appearing over and over again leading you to believe that there is only one good enough to be the best. Are the same people recognized over and over again? I’m sure that the folks who put those programs together mean well. Heck what can be bad about telling one employee a month that they’re the greatest? Well actually a lot of things can be bad.

1. Everyone should be the employee of the month, every month, not just one. You don’t want one; you want them all to be the employee of the month.

2. Most of these programs are always late in recognizing the individuals, you should recognize them as close to the performance as possible, not two months after the fact.

3. These programs naturally stack rank your employees and force you to look more positively at the ones on the top, and more negatively at the ones on the bottom. That may be ok for annual performance reviews but not for programs that are supposed to positively recognize performance.

4. Subjectivity and potentially favoritism often enter into these programs, it’s only natural that your employee base looks negatively at that possibility.

5. Employee of the month programs punish more than they recognize. Do you really want a program that punished the majority?

6. Ranking supports competition and you don’t want your employees competing with each other you want them competing with the companies you compete with.

Research was conducted on the subject by Douglas Johnson and Alyce Dickinson where they conducted experiments to test the effectiveness of an employee of the month system. The first experiment assessed how they felt when they received the award. In the second, the award was enhanced to include a financial bonus for the winner. The conclusions were that the programs did not sustain improved performance, but they had demotivation effects on performance and engagement.

Bottom line, get rid of that employee of the month program and instead reward team members in a more personal and immediate way.

Supporting blog posts:


Do you Really Only have one Employee of the month?