Why you should be entering HR awards

Without staff, a business is nothing. The people who you’ve chosen to come along on your journey - success and occasional bouts of chaos and all - are going to be one of the main reasons for your progress.

Managing your colleagues and the processes they work within is fundamental to keeping everyone happy. Of course, this starts with a great HR strategy. Options for flexible working, remote working, and benefits packages are going to help keep people engaged. When you’re doing this stuff well, shouldn’t you be shouting it from the office windows?

This is what HR awards can help you do: tell everyone that you’re a great company to work for and a leader in your sector. Not only can they help get you exposure, but they can also help you to network and share knowledge with other companies at the same stage in the business cycle.

What are the benefits of HR awards?

Working on getting your company off the ground and building the structures you need to futureproof your success is a daunting task on its own. It can feel like there’s a lot of work that goes into entering HR awards, but the benefits should pay you back many times over.

Social Media Coordinator at UK Employee Experience Awards, Katarina Miljkovic, points to five key benefits of entering their awards, namely:

• You can gain recognition and celebrate your hard work and achievements.
• Enhance your profile and promote your business to potential new customers.
• Boost your workplace morale and encourage further innovation.
• Grow your network and connect with other influential business leaders.
• Share your insight into best practice and learn from fellow professionals.
• Improve your business model with a benchmarked judge’s report.

Being able to add external branding and endorsements on your website, job listings, and other marketing can add a lot of value. Not only are potential applicants going to see your dedication to doing right by them, potential clients will understand the value you’re aiming to add to your operations.

Entering HR awards

The process for putting your organisation forward for a HR award varies from award to award. There are awards for things like:

• Project roll-out.
• Learning and development programmes.
• Employee satisfaction.
• Internal communications.
• Individual success.

It’s a good start to see if any of your industry competitors or the companies you aspire to emulate have entered HR awards to give you an idea of where others have seen value.

Forms need filling out, metrics needs to be met, some awards will come into your workplace for a hands-on assessment and others will want to speak direct to your employees.

The whole process can be effective in engaging with your staff. Even if the award isn’t won, they will see the pride you have in them and what they do.

What are the tangible takeaways from HR awards?

According to Noelle Nurse of the Best Workplace awards, winners of their awards see returns such as:

• An average of 40% more applications for open positions than industry peers.
• Lower levels of absenteeism, with 2.1 sick days compared to the national average of 5.9.
• High levels of brand advocacy - 93% of employees in winning companies advocate for their employers’ products.
• Better returns, with winners outperforming market growth by 2-3% per year.

It can be a challenge to bring people onboard into a startup, as lots of potential recruits are looking for long-term stability and there can be seeds of doubt in a newly established company. But by investing effort and money into proving your HR strategies you’re demonstrating your commitment to being a fantastic place to work.

Companies seeing success in HR awards

According to Nurse, the Best Workplaces scheme has:

“Seen a boom in the amount of small to medium sized organisations within the tech, public/non-profit industry who are looking to prioritise their overall employee experience and enter the Best Workplace Programme. We also have found that organisations are a lot more aware of the business impact a good employee experience can have.”

Milijkovic explains: “Each company that has entered the UK Employee Experience Awards has developed its own way of empowering staff with the skills needed to succeed. These companies have shown that in the end, ‘you grow, we grow’ is not a bad mantra for any organisation to embrace.”

Summing up

Doing great things with your company is rewarding, telling your peers as well as your staff how good you all are is always going to help things along.

A HR award will put your name into the same spotlight as other businesses that are striving for excellence, and let current staff and potential recruits know that you take their satisfaction seriously. Setting a member of your HR team on the task of finding the right HR award to go for is going to bring cultural as well as financial benefits to you.

It may seem like there’s plenty of other areas to focus on as you’re growing your business, but getting these things right at the beginning will form a foundation for you stack up more wins on.