At a time when digital recognition is more common, the tangible impact of physical trophies and awards on employee morale is huge. While virtual accolades have their place, there's something uniquely powerful about a physical token of appreciation. These awards serve as lasting symbols of achievement, visibly demonstrating an organization's commitment to recognizing and rewarding hard work. By providing a tangible reminder of their accomplishments, physical trophies can significantly boost employee morale, fostering a sense of pride, motivation, and loyalty within the workplace. It can also serve as a display of achievement for other employees to work towards.
In this blog I am going to talk about a handful of different style of awards and how they can be used to rock your recognition for sales or overall employee achievement.
Creative Ideas
Awards come in all shapes, sizes and budgets but one thing that can improve the impact of your award is being thoughtful and creative in the design. The creative options can be at just about any price point, they just require some thought. At Ideation we have thousands of options to choose from including this beautiful lightbulb shaped award that will surely catch the attention of everyone that sees it.
Useful & Thoughtful
Sometimes the best award is one that will get used and have regular visibility. That is where vases and bowls make great awards. There are all shapes, sizes and materials to meet your specific needs. I had a client once that got a crystal bowl for a retirement gift and then filled it with shelled peanuts because the person just loved peanuts. Talk about a way to show that the bowl can serve a purpose and that you know and care about the person all with one award?
Sophistication
There are times when the award needs to really show prestige and sophistication. That might be some kind of Diamond Club or Presidents Club award that you want to feel really high end. But high end doesn't mean expensive. Check out a couple of these options that really show sophistication at various price points.
Multiple Materials
It is more modern to see various materials being used in awards. There are metal and glass, metal and wood, wood and glass and so many others. It may not be traditional but it will certainly be unique and attention grabbing.
Art Awards
One of my all time favorite award styles is artwork awards. They are something you would proudly display in your office or even other place of your house because it truly is beautiful artwork. You don't have to spend a fortune to get artwork awards for your team recognition because they start as low as about $20.00 each.
Playful and Useful
Let's hear it for....the words everyone wants to hear before their name when your company is giving out awards to employees. Well why not take that a step further and do an award that is a speaker. Yep, you read that right, we can do speakers that look and act like an award but have some truly awesome long term functionality. There are several speakers in our award showroom that I think would make amazing awards.
Fun and Themed
When you have a champion of the sales team or the entire team reached a big milestone sometimes a regular award just isn't going to cut it. That is why there are championship belts, championship rings and medals that can often time drive the achievement home. I mean who doesn't want a championship ring to have on display?
Rock Star Award
At Ideation we have a rock star theme that we play with a lot. Our mission is to make our clients look like rock stars and so we bring that back to recognize the rock stars in our company. We went as far as creating a fully custom guitar as an award last year. So far I have been the only recipient of this award as a "Legend" but we did do mini guitars for other recognition to team members to tie in with the theme. The sky is the limit and the team at Ideation would absolutely love to help you create an award that ROCKS!
Golf Awards Anyone?
A lot of the award I have mentioned so far can translate to golf outings but I wanted to talk about this briefly because it can be a category all on it's own. Many times you want to do awards for the foursome that won so you need a lot of awards and you might even want several sizes of the same award to recognize 1st, 2nd and 3rd place. There are hundreds of options we can do that for but I also encourage you to let us help you think outside the box and come up with something that will allow them to have visible bragging rights and bring exposure to your tournament.
Year After Year Awards & Other Perpetual Recognition
At times you need to have a way to recognize someone in a way that is visible to others. Other times you need to be able to recognize the same person multiple times but you don't want to just keep giving them another award...where oh where will they put them all? That is why perpetual awards are so fantastic. Some are very unique like these cinder block awards while others more classic like this crystal award.
The idea of coming up with unique awards for your team can be daunting but we have so many years of experience at Ideation that we can help make sense of it. We can provide solutions that offer drop shipping to recipients, all kinds of personalization and customization including 100% custom awards like this video award. Maybe this next award cycle is the time to rethink the awards are using and contact us to get creative!
