Running An Awards Ceremony For Your Promising Business

There are many ways to define and design a healthy and blossoming company culture. Of course, to start with, we must make sure that everyone is afforded the respect they deserve. This often means curating policies with absolutely zero tolerance for workplace bullying, harassment or mistreatment of any kind. Our HR department should also be there to prevent that from happening, and help those who may have been victimized.

After all, no company culture can thrive without getting the essentials right, and as unfortunate as it is that this needs to be addressed, every company can benefit from laying those principles as its fundamental grounding point.

But while it’s important to tackle the difficulties and misfortunes of running a team, it’s also a good idea to invest in the positive aspects of working at your firm. This can help a healthy company culture thrive. While this is worth doing for its own sake, being defined as a great employer and gaining many healthy employee reviews can only help you attract better talent to your firm, and market your positions with renewed confidence.

One of the best annual efforts geared towards this outcome is of running an awards show. This can be humble or offer great production value.

In this guide, we’ll discuss a few means for setting up and maintaining such an event:

Select A Venue

An awards ceremony with its own sense of place is more than worthwhile. Renting space in a venue, such as this best place for a corporate retreat, can make all the difference. This adds a sense of fun to your award ceremony, as well as giving staff the means to let their hair down and attend with a drink in hand, enjoying a celebration of the year just gone.

With a speaking podium, arranged tables to sit at, and a bar or food to enjoy, you can make sure that everyone together can socialize and feel like they’re a welcome part of your family. They are, after all.

On top of this, selecting the venue based on its table arrangement, safety precautions such as fire exits, and the means by which you can enjoy a private affair without being bothered by other hotel or venue guests is worthwhile. You may also be able to get something of a discount if you book a good number of rooms for such a retreat, so it’s always worth asking.

Allocating Awards

It’s good to think of a number of different categories you can use to define these awards. There are many services out there that will engrave and print names or titles on small awards, be that a nice little trophy, a badge, or a certificate.

Perhaps categories could involve a ‘best employee per department,’ or ‘shining customer support’ or an employee that has ‘gone above and beyond.’ It might be that ‘best new hire’ could be allocated to someone who joined in the last twelve months, or ‘best traveling agent’ could be applied to someone who has gone abroad to help your business connections.

You may also decide to throw a few fun ones in there to help the team laugh. If a staff member has been bringing in their oatmeal, fruit and stretching at their desk during lunchtimes, you may allocate a ‘most health-conscious employee’ award just for them. Of course, the benefit of an awards ceremony is that not everyone gets them, so don’t go overboard.

You can put the award categories up to an anonymous vote in your business, and then use actual metrics of performance and potential to decide on the winner. Larger businesses will potentially offer more awards, while small businesses may offer two or three.

Attach Awards To Prizes

Of course, an award does meaning something without a given prize, but it can be nice to offer rewards that actually mean something along with the gesture of winning something. For instance, the employee of the year award might be linked to a paid vacation at the expense of your company, including flights and lodgings for a week.

For others, it might be that you offer gift vouchers. For joke prizes that are tongue-in-cheek, such as the associated health prize mentioned above, you might offer a gift card for a yoga studio. This kind of approach can help the awards ceremony actually mean something more than a team-building event, incentivizing staff year-round to give their all and work on potentially being in with a shot.

Use The Event For An Annual Debrief

Of course, awards are fun, and the ceremony can be a real event that takes place, but it can also be worthwhile to tie an important message to that. For instance, this might be a good place to announce a new product or service you plan to launch, or the opening of a new office, or to perhaps just give your thanks for working so hard during the pandemic.

In some cases, it might be that running an awards ceremony after the end of a training retreat can help you cap off this hardworking effort with real potential. The more you can do this, often, the better off you’ll be.

Get Staff Feedback

Of course, running an event like this can be a complex affair, no matter how simple the actual process of awarding prizes and trophies may be. Getting staff feedback can help you make the next year’s affair that much better. It might be that this time, the awards ceremony lasted too long, or perhaps it would have been better to get a more skilled speaker on stage despite the best efforts of one of your managers.

This way, the yearly awards event can be a fun part of your corporate culture, not just a one-off that you do once and forget about for five years afterwards.

With this approach, we believe your awards ceremony is sure to be an utter success. Perhaps you could give yourself a little award for pulling it off so well.