The relationship of employees with superiors is a give and take thing. Regular employees provide managers and supervisors the tasks needed to achieve a certain company goal. On the other hand, superiors provide the employees career challenges and, well, their jobs. Since accomplishment of a certain project also lies in the hands of employees, it is important that appreciation is shown once they deliver a great performance.

How to show appreciation must be a question for you at this point - a tap on the back? A warm "good job"? I'm pretty sure you can come up with something much better than that. But just to help you get some ideas, here are a few creative ways of employee recognition awards:

Raffle program

Creating a raffle program in your office may not be a direct way of rewarding employees but it sure can boost the happy mood in your work environment and challenge staff as well. What you can do is come up with a set of criteria of who will be able to participate. For example, an employee who goes over a certain sales quota will be given one raffle ticket. Another qualification you can use is the number of overtime hours a worker renders. Schedule the grand raffle by the end of the month. This can be both rewarding and motivating.

Vacation leave

Another creative employee recognition idea is provision of vacation leave. A few extra days off will be very much appreciated by any employee you decide to give it to. When the candidate has really proven himself worthy of this reward, you can even provide a plane ticket to a nice relaxing city. You must be very careful when giving this type of reward, however. Make sure you would not suffer understaffing on those dates you provide.

Recognition awards

Most employees are not very materialistic, believe it or not. Sometimes, all it takes for them to feel appreciated is a little token and your sincerity in giving it. You can either start a best employee award contest every month to honor someone who's working really hard or surprise a loyal employee with nice engraved plaques, glass awards, or marble awards. Engraved clocks or picture plaques are also neat to give out.

System or Tools upgrade

Remember when I said employee-superior relationship is a give and take thing? Well, rewarding a subordinate with a system or tools upgrade is an example. You make the workload easier for your employee with better working tools while also making your company reach its goal faster and more accurate.

There are hundreds more ways of rewarding your employees. What's fun is that you can be as creative as you can.