Rewarding tenured staff - what have you seen?

[enzati]

I'm cross-posting this from the nursing management board for more replies.

I'm a clinical leader in a busy pediatric hospital. Lately we've realized that we do very little to reward or recognize our more tenured staff. We want to be able to let these people know that we really do appreciate all their hard work, willingness to precept, be a resource, serve as charge RN, etc. Monetary rewards are really tough for us to do, but we're willing to consider anything. What has worked for you, or what have you seen/received that really made you feel good? Thanks for your time!! - Jaime

[TiffyRN, BSN, PhD]

Where I work there is a program with the rewards being pretty much schedule related. It takes no money from the budget but I think it's pretty clever.

There is a list of the employees (one for days, one for nights) with the nurses with most seniority starting at #1 down to 20 or so, one has to have a minimum number of years to get on the list (3 or 5, not sure). Then there is a list of rewards, with some that are really great, like a) Christmas off, b) Christmas Eve off, c)Summer holiday off, d) No Sunday requirement, e) no on-call requirement. Then they have a distribution day when they set up a schedule to call everyone in order and let them pick from the list, obviously the most desirable rewards get given out first to the most senior staff. Since there is a variety of options, whether one celebrates certain holidays is not really relevant, just choose another reward.

There is an official hospital-wide recognition program that lets you choose rewards from a catalog, not all the rewards are horrible, they get pretty nice at the 10+ year range.

I would say the schedule rewards are appreciated, we all of course wish there was a financial reward, but that wasn't happening and at least with this program, there is some recognition.