Starting a new long service award program?
Revamping something which has not been changed for ages?
Want great questions to kick-start an internal brainstorming session for long service awards?
Have many unanswered questions?
You are in the right place! For what follows will help you tremendously.
This is not an ordinary blog article. At Pinnacle Works, year after year, we ship out thousands of long service awards and we have been doing this since 2000. For sure we have learned a few pain areas (shared by your peers…) which are usually common across industry verticals.
Over 80% of our customers are based out of India but since a large share of our customers are the global companies, I am sure even if you are not from India these points will be relevant for you.
Consistency
Why is your 5-year award better than mine?
These are unnecessary conversations will continue if the award design is changed every year or even after 2-3 years.
Successful long service awards programs don’t change their award design and structure for years together for it sends a message of Consistency and Equality. Plus it is easy to manage and saves times at all levels.
Question:
Can your Recognition partner ensure that the award you select today will be available for the next 3 or 5 or 10 years?
In other words, you should not be forced to change the award just because you don’t have it in stock.
PS: This becomes even more important if you are working with a reseller who is just importing from another country and not a manufacturer. They usually don’t have control over design changes. You don’t want your Employee long service award to be different every year.
Customisation
They all look the same.
Successful long service awards most often have their own customized awards. It may be a small customization or a big one, but it is unique to them, their company or their product and that design are not used for any other award.
It’s a one–time effort and one which really pays in the long run.
Cost for a custom award is far lesser – all you need is the right award partner who will work with you to develop something exclusively for you instead of selling an off the shelf commonly available award.
Question:
Does your award partner have the experience and the bandwidth to design custom long service awards?
Long Service Award is a part of your company identity. Don’t dilute it by selecting commonly available awards with just your logo and award text on it.
Time Loss
What is the actual cost of the award?
Supplying 50 or 100 personalised awards for a specific event is one thing but personalizing hundreds or thousands of awards consistently over many years following your set guidelines, segregating them as per your distribution requirement and ensuring it reaches specific places year on year is altogether a different level.
It’s easy to forget to add the amount of time you or your team members put in to complete the work which should have been done by your award partner in the first place.
Questions:
How equipped is your award partner to record your specific requirement and deliver year on year without you and your team has to go over everything again and again?
How long have they been in the business themselves?
Do they have well documented internal processes?
RFQs
Don’t start with it. End with it.
Starting a selection process with the floating of RFQ’s is one of the biggest time wasting mistake companies can make. Many people across industries shared this feedback with us.
A good practice is to break the selection process and add a Pre-qualification round. Depending on the scale of your operations your requirements will be different. Listing out 4-5 criteria first and pre-qualifying vendors and award partners first saves hundreds of man-hours of collective time.
Often you may be limited by the already registered vendors that your procurement team has but long service awards is a serious business. So, if required, recommend new vendor empanelment for this is an annual requirement and not just a one-time requirement.
Have additional suggestions or best practices? Do write to us at connect@pinnacleworks.com.
