When recognizing someone’s years of service, getting the wrong gift isn’t actually the biggest mistake companies make. In our experience, what matters most is recognizing people, in the right way, for the right things-rather than reducing service anniversaries to a generic “hey, thanks for sticking around for 3 years!” gesture. That means connecting years of service milestones to an employee’s personal contributions and achievements.
So when someone reaches their third year of service, the moment is about thanking them for consistently motivating their team or going above and beyond in their work. These meaningful recognition initiatives are directly linked to improved employee engagement and retention.
In fact, if retention and engagement are your core objectives, don’t limit yourself to just tracking people’s contributions and achievements. Employee listening can help you uncover the underlying sentiments-positive and negative-affecting retention in your organization.
For example, does your marketing department have the highest average tenure because of great leaders? Are finance hires less likely to reach five years of service because they don’t feel integrated into your company culture?
Understanding these sentiments can help you take action to increase overall retention.
In this guide, we explain:
Terryberry‘s rewards platform offers custom awards, a customizable Premium Rewards catalog, and the largest selection of rewards via Amazon Business. Make service anniversaries special with tailored rewards, offer Prime-like delivery, and ensure you never miss important achievements or milestones. With Terryberry, you can design and launch tailored recognition, wellness, and employee listening programs to improve retention.
When choosing years of service awards for your program, the main considerations are:
Most service awards programs use custom awards, such as plaques, trophies, and jewelry. Not only can you tailor these awards to the recipient (e.g., name, role, design options), but they can also reflect the year of service as well. For example, you might use different-sized trophies, plaques made of different materials, or different style and color options.
Amteck, a family-owned construction company, partnered with us for a service awards program that used custom jewelry. We manufactured different styles of rings with embedded gemstones. The stones’ colors indicate the employee’s tenure.
Here’s a closer look at the different types of years of service awards available in our catalog:
Custom awards aren’t your only option for service programs. Many businesses also include rewards and gifts in their service anniversary programs, such as:
Experiential gifts
Luxury and lifestyle rewards
Self-care and fitness gifts
Company swag
For example, here’s how you could tailor the awards in your years of service program:
Alternatively, you could:
Most growing businesses use a rewards system to scale their programs because these platforms:
If you’re interested in using a rewards system for your program, here’s why over 40,000 businesses chose ours.
Terryberry is one of the few rewards platforms that also manufactures and fulfills custom awards. We’ve been manufacturing custom jewelry since 1918, and other types of custom awards (trophies, plaques, etc.) for decades.
Thanks to our partnership with Amazon Business, we also offer the largest selection of rewards in the market. You can also create custom shopping portals via Terryberry’s Premium Rewards catalog by selecting specific categories, such as merchandise from top brands, electronics, travel and lifestyle rewards, charitable donations, and once-in-a-lifetime experiences.
If you’re based in the U.S.:
If you’re shipping internationally:
With Terryberry, you can launch and tailor different types of employee engagement programs, including employee listening, recognition, and wellness. With our rewards system automating the manual work involved in giving rewards, your HR team and managers are free to prioritize more strategic tasks. They can focus on collecting feedback about your programs, make changes to improve performance, and explore additional programs.
To improve retention with your services awards program, it’s crucial to:
In this section, we show you how to:
An employee listening program can help you:
Smaller companies may get by with an informal listening program, where someone from HR collects information from managers and employees about their peers. They might also ask people to self-evaluate and highlight their own achievements.
But informal programs don’t scale well, so growing companies inevitably need a formal system. A formal program can involve any (or all) of the following:
You can use service milestones to help measure your overall retention strategy’s success. If a healthy percentage of employees are progressing from their first year to their third, and then to their fifth and tenth, you’ll know your strategy’s working.
If you’re planning to improve retention across the company, your strategy can’t end at celebrating people’s achievements. Various factors, beyond feeling valued, impact people’s decisions to stay. For example, someone might leave after their fifth anniversary because they feel there’s no room left to grow. Maybe others leave after their second year because they struggled to connect with their peers.
Successful retention strategies track people’s sentiments towards their jobs, peers, managers, and workplace culture to address any gaps proactively. Some companies use various surveys with disparate data to understand these sentiments, including:
While these surveys offer a broad understanding of your workforce’s sentiments, they don’t specifically help you predict retention. For example:
To really understand why some people choose to stay or leave, companies must measure the impact of their culture. People’s relationships with their peers and managers, the opportunities they have in your organization, and their alignment with your goals-these factors all shape your culture.
We set out to understand people’s underlying motivations for staying or leaving by developing a culture model in collaboration with three independent PhD researchers. The culture model identifies six factors that shape your company’s culture and directly impact employee engagement and retention. Known as engagement indicators, these factors are:
By monitoring and quantifying these factors, you’ll know what’s motivating employees to stay and what may push them to leave. For example, maybe a specific cohort-let’s say employees aged 24-35-lack a strong sense of equity, but they have strong sentiments of belonging, well-being, and leadership. Here, equity is negatively impacting engagement, while the other three factors are encouraging it.
We realize that “strong” is a vague term, and quantifying the impact of each factor is important. That’s why our engagement baseline survey-which assesses employees across these six indicators-assigns Likert scores (which can be positive or negative) to each indicator. For example, maybe your workforce scores +10 in leadership overall, but -3 in belonging, indicating that people have positive feelings about the company’s leadership but don’t feel connected to its culture.
After you’ve conducted the survey, you can use your survey tool’s filters to analyze trends specific to different cohorts, such as age, department, gender, and tenure. You can identify gaps specific to people’s years of service using the “tenure” filter. Look for trends across different milestones, such as 3, 5, 10, and 15 years.
For example, are equity scores lower for people with 3 years of service than those with 5 and 10 years of tenure? What’s the difference in the average eNPS of employees with 3 and 10 years of service?
Your employee listening program should reveal the insights you need to: (1) transform years of service anniversaries into meaningful celebrations of people’s contributions and achievements, and (2) decide which employee engagement programs and initiatives to launch to improve retention across your organization.
To achieve these goals, there are three main courses of action to consider:
Regardless of the type of engagement program you launch, there are four key considerations for making sure it drives results:
When developing engagement programs, make sure you have a clear plan for how they’ll drive cultural change. For example, let’s say your years of service program:
When leaders actively participate in engagement programs, it signals to the entire workforce that these efforts matter. But symbolic involvement or behind-the-scenes admin work isn’t enough-programs succeed when leaders are visible and hands-on.
For most engagement programs, such as wellness, learning and development, or year-round recognition programs, you can maximize participation by:
For service awards programs, there’s a slight difference in how you approach participation. The most critical attendees are the recipients of the awards, so you’d want to aim for 100% of them to attend. The best way to encourage attendance is by celebrating people’s contributions and rewarding their hard work.
We discuss how to measure your program’s impact on retention and identify any gaps in the next section.
Service awards programs are a type of “milestone” recognition program. As the name suggests, they celebrate people for achieving specific milestones, such as years of service, project completions, promotions, or meeting specific performance goals. But there are also “always-on” recognition programs, namely:
In our experience helping more than 40,000 companies launch employee engagement programs, organizations observe the best results when they use different, complementary programs. For example, some companies might start with social recognition and eventually introduce a years-of-service awards program later. Or vice versa.
Here’s how one bank with over 200 employees and multiple locations cultivated a shared sense of purpose and belonging with a social recognition program rooted in core values.
Chelsea Groton Bank is the largest mutual bank in Eastern Connecticut, operating across 15 locations with over 200 employees. When the bank reached out to our team, they already had a successful milestone awards program and a strong workplace community.
But Chelsea Groton’s leadership wanted to celebrate people’s day-to-day contributions and shape the organization’s culture by promoting its seven core values: being innovative, collaborative, trustworthy, professional, knowledgeable, versatile, and positive. They wanted a social recognition program that made employees across locations feel connected to each other’s achievements and contributions.
With Terryberry’s help, Chelsea Groton Bank launched the “Acorn Rewards” program. The program:
Chelsea Groton used Terryberry’s Recognition analytics to measure monthly participation. They were pleased to discover that participation in their Acorn Rewards program is more than double the industry average for financial organizations.
While recognition programs are powerful tools for boosting employee engagement and retention, they don’t cover every front. Your listening program might reveal some gaps that are better addressed by other programs, for example:
Unless the gaps revealed by your employee listening program impact your entire workforce, you don’t necessarily have to roll out organization-wide engagement programs. Many companies achieve their employee engagement and retention goals by supporting one or two core, organization-wide programs-such as years of service and social recognition-with smaller, tailored initiatives.
For example, if your employee listening program reveals that equity scores are low only for employees with three to five years of service, then your L&D program might only need to address that group. Maybe your drill-down surveys reveal that equity scores are low for this group specifically because their managers haven’t designed relevant career pathways.
Similarly, let’s say you’re six months into a manager recognition program and discover that the “belonging” scores of your most recognized employees are dropping, indicating burnout. You can launch a small, tailored well-being program to specifically address their needs.
Develop a comprehensive, end-to-end employee retention strategy using our actionable framework for reducing employee turnover.
Once your programs are live, how do you know if they’re working? Are they positively impacting the specific engagement indicators you aimed to improve? Is employee retention improving overall? Can you justify the ROI of these programs to leadership?
You can best answer these questions using three sets of data:
Combining participation insights with employee listening data can help you capture specific insights such as:
Don’t be alarmed to discover gaps in your employee engagement programs-no single program addresses all the factors impacting retention. Chelsea Groton Bank’s milestone program was a success, but they still launched the Acorn Rewards social recognition program to cultivate their core values. Measuring each program’s performance tells you which fronts are now covered so that you can address any remaining gaps with supporting, tailored programs.
You can use Terryberry’s integrated employee engagement platform to uncover the factors impacting employee retention, launch tailored employee engagement programs, and measure their impact.
Whether you’re launching a service awards or a wellness program, Terryberry makes it easy to design programs around strategic goals, integrate your preferred rewards, and keep leaders and employees engaged.
Launch ready-made surveys from Terryberry’s survey library to measure employee engagement, satisfaction, and retention. Uncover people’s sentiments towards specific programs, policies, and peers. Capture deeper insights with drill-down surveys, use AI to rapidly launch surveys for niche scenarios, and automate follow-ups with Terryberry’s employee listening tool.
Develop, launch, and scale tailored rewards, recognition, and wellness programs that drive your strategic objectives. Cultivate core values, bring distributed teams together, and ensure your workforce is connected to your company’s leadership and goals.
Measure each engagement program’s performance with detailed participation analytics. Prove your program’s impact on employee engagement and retention by combining these insights with employee listening data in a single, integrated platform.
Ready to boost retention with tailored engagement programs? Schedule a demo with our team today.