A showcase cabinet, full of glittering awards provides a great first impression of your organisation, but with proper planning, awards are so much more than ‘nice-to-have’ trophies. Here’s why entering HR awards should be a core component of your EVP (Employee Value Proposition) strategy in 2024.

5 advantages of entering (and winning) HR awards

1. The process of entering an award provides an invaluable learning opportunity. Best practice organisations use it to benchmark against competitors and evaluate their own approach. Whether you are in the early stages of planning an employee reward, recognition or benefits strategy or reviewing an existing offer, the award entry can be used to help guide your objectives and assessment criteria.
2. It’s a great motivating force for the business and HR to coalesce around the ambition to be ‘award winning’. It sets the tone, helps to secure stakeholder buy-in, and keeps energy focused through the more mundane parts of the project.
3. Awards help to build your employee value proposition. In a tight recruitment market, award-winning schemes that support employee wellbeing, financial health or engagement are critical to retain and attract talent.
4. Related to the previous point, awards are another way for HR to build and promote its internal brand and accomplishments to internal stakeholders. Every business is busy side-eyeing the competition. There’s nothing like being shortlisted or winning an award to demonstrate the competitive value of the organisation’s offer to senior leaders.
5. Finally, it’s great to receive peer kudos and celebrate all your teams’ hard efforts at an awards evening.  The event provides you with a delightful story to tell and photos to use throughout the year to support employee engagement comms. Added to which, winning an award never hurt anyone’s career!
   
   

Award entry know-how

Tempted to enter? Here are our top tips to increase your chances of submitting a successful entry.

Once you have identified the best award and award category to enter, read the judging criteria carefully. Then draw up a plan with deadlines to gather all the information and insight you will need to write the entry.

Typically, the structure of an award entry follows a similar pattern. Define the challenge, then explain your solution. How did you implement and overcome any obstacles? What was the impact and lessons learned?

To gather this information, you will typically need to interview key stakeholders, project sponsors and members of the implementation team. Access and analyse relevant impact data. If the project included a brand or design element, speak to the creative team to understand their design objectives, and obtain digital examples of artwork and images. Consult with your internal comms team to agree the review and sign off process for entry submission.

While all these elements are important, the strength of your entry will rest on the robustness of your data. Verbatims and testimonials from happy stakeholders are great but not award winning. It is critical to use hard data to stand any assertions you make about impact. To evidence before and after or year-on-year improvements. If you do not have hard data, put your award entry on hold until next year and set up a meeting with relevant project sponsors to agree what data you need to collect over the following year.

Let Edenred do the heaving lifting 

Busy HR teams can struggle to find the time and resource required to coordinate and write an award-winning entry. It’s worth knowing that every year, we enter a small number of awards on behalf of clients that have strong data to support a compelling story. We produce the award entry and simply ask you to set up relevant interviews and supply the data. Please discuss with your account director if they haven’t already raised it with you.

Awards 2024

Below is a list of the awards we typically consider entering clients for:

• CIPD People Management Awards
• Personnel Today Awards
• HR Excellence Awards
• Employee Benefits Awards
• Workplace Savings and Benefits Awards
• The Rewards

Congrats to our 2023 winners

Finally, congratulations to clients that won or were shortlisted for awards we entered this year. We thoroughly enjoyed celebrating with each and every one of you! 

Employee Benefits Awards

E.ON shortlisted for Best Alignment of Benefits to Business Strategy 

DfT shortlisted for Best Benefits Communications (Highly Commended)

Personnel Today Awards

Target Group shortlisted for Reward, Recognition and Benefits Award