It’s important to recognize employees when they do great work – especially when that work advances the company’s objectives. Some organizations have formal recognition programs; others keep take a less structured approach. Formal programs keep things consistent, and repeatable; it also means recognition and review doesn’t get relegated to the back burner when the business gets busy. That said, the most memorable forms of recognition for team members can be those they don’t expect.
Whether through a formal or informal program, we can acknowledge people’s excellence in a number of ways – gift cards, paid time off, bonuses, paid training. These ‘rewards’ come and go; one way to make the acknowledgement stick is by creating certificates to accompany them.
And like any process, Way We Do has a way to help you develop certificates that will be a permanent memento of how much you appreciate what your team do.
Types of employee recognition certificates
Certificates are used within workplaces for a multitude of reasons. The most common ones are for training attendance, completing work experience, and recognizing employee performance and behaviors.
Training certificates
When employees complete on-the-job training, you can give them certificates to establish their expertise within the business and demonstrate their up-to-date knowledge. Certificates also help to motivate teams to complete their training by a due date and boost employee engagement in the workplace. Certificates are the type of tool that attract top talent as they demonstrate the business’s commitment to its employees’ ongoing development.
You can set up a trigger point in Way We Do so that when a staff member completes a training course, they’re automatically sent a Certificate of Completion or Attendance, with a copy saved to their personnel file. Automating this saves time, and ensures all records are kept up to date.
Certificates of employment
As an employer, you’re likely to ask prospective candidates for certificates of employment as evidence supporting the positions they’ve listed on their resumes. Similarly, you’ll no doubt produce these certificates for your own staff who are striking out into new roles elsewhere.
Again, you can automate these types of certificates for your own team using Way We Do, either a certain step or on completion of an Activated Checklist process.
Employee recognition awards
EDCO, a trophy designer and manufacturer, suggests giving your award a name – like the Rising Star Award, the Growth Driver Award, or Outstanding Service Record Award. They also have some great ideas for appreciation award wording. There are all types of recognition awards. Here are some of our own ideas…
- Performance awards – for achieving milestones and targets set by the employee’s manager.
- Behavior and value awards – for demonstrating behavior that aligns with company values, teamwork, mentorship, and excellent customer service.
- Service or tenure awards – for continuous employment over 5, 10 or 20 years.
A networking group called BNI also gives certificates to members on a monthly cadence in recognition of their commitment to growing their group. The certificates align with the behaviors BNI advocate for chapters to achieve results, such as the highest number of referrals, meetings held with other members, visitors invited, and closed business.
An example of how you could manage this in Way We Do would be to create an Activated Checklist to manage monthly performance and recognition. You could then integrate this with certificate templates to automatically generate certificates to award at regular meetings or events.
Certificate generation process
The process for creating and generating certificates includes:
- Design the certificate in Microsoft Word or Google Docs.
- Source the data for the person or people you’re awarding the certificate(s) to and why (i.e. the certificate wording).
- Set up an Activated Checklist Way We Do, and Way We Do’s third-party connector.
- Automate using Microsoft Power Automate or Zapier.
Generating certificates from Activated Checklist instances using third-party integration tools
Using third-party integration tools means you can automate the process of creating certificates from your established templates. Way We Do’s connectors on Zapier and Power Automate let you run document creation automations for as many certificates as you like.
Before using the connectors, make sure you’ve prepared your certificate templates, on applications like Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Whichever document creation tool you use, make sure it also has connectors on Zapier or Power Automate. Google Docs, Microsoft Word and Canva already have certificate templates you can use, so you don’t need to design one from scratch.
Once you’ve created your certificate templates, create your Zaps or Flows to connect both Way We Do’s Activated Checklist and your template, and make sure they’re switched on. You’ll only need to do this for the specific template. Then, simply sit back and watch as your certificates are automatically generated.
To test this out, we create a sample Zap that creates a Certificate of Completion for when any member of our team completes their Health & Safety training in Way We Do. The same certificate then gets saved automatically to a Google Drive folder named for the team member.
Our certificate template has three text fields that need to be updated when the employee’s supervisor confirms they’ve successfully completed the training.
- The employee’s name.
- The training they’ve completed.
- The date they completed the training.
If you’d like to know more about out the example Zap above, get in touch with us via support@waywedo.com.
Other ways to automate
If you’re keen to learn about other automation tools that can boost your business’s productivity through Way We Do, our Automation Basics webinars are a great place to start. To find out more and register for our next event, just visit www.waywedo.com/webinars.
