4 ways to bring team recognition to your brokerage

Business success is directly connected to internal culture. Without a sense of support and camaraderie among your agents, your brokerage may fail to thrive.

Recognition within your business is a key initiative to increase organizational success and improve company culture. There are countless ways to recognize your agents, including positive feedback, awards, and recognition programs. Making your agents feel seen and heard is the goal and a sure way to boost morale.

Increased morale can lead to higher productivity and loyalty within your brokerage. The longer you can keep people around, the more you can grow your brokerage together. Celebrating your agents and team successes through recognition is a simple step that produces great rewards. Here are some ways to leverage agent recognition inside your organization to continue to grow your business.

Why does team recognition matter?

“The #1 reason most people leave a role is a lack of recognition.” – Gallup

In the real estate world, people move fast. Agents can quickly bounce from one brokerage to another, especially when they feel unappreciated. Loyalty doesn’t come easy, but you can make your brokerage a desirable place to stay by recognizing agents for their hard work and celebrating their successes. This can increase agents’ loyalty and influence them to stick with you for the long haul.

Celebrating the wins brings everyone together

Your business success is directly connected to your internal brokerage culture. Your team members are the first to notice how individual success is tightly linked to the overall success of the brokerage.

Help your agents learn and grow. Encourage newer agents to listen to advice from experienced voices as they develop their careers. Learning opportunities, coaching, and mentorship all play a role in helping agents thrive. At Weichert, we prioritize maintaining a family-style bond among our brokers and agents. Healthy relationships and cooperation create a company culture that people want to come back to.

Encourage collaboration, respect, and recognition. While agents run their own businesses, they really thrive when they have the support of their brokerage behind them. It all begins with trust, which means maintaining an environment of respect—not competition.

4 ways to bring recognition to your brokerage

Annual sales awards

Annual sales awards are an easy way to improve the internal culture of your brokerage. You can start by celebrating the previous years’ wins, such as sales production, or listing results in categories such as units, volume, or commissions. You can even break down the awards into different categories, such as individual agents, team successes, and new agents.

Find opportunities to recognize all your team members in a unique way for their achievements. Get creative, and choose awards based on the personality of your organization.

At Weichert, for example, each Spring, Awards Season rolls around with a flurry of regional award events around the country, where brokers and their agents get together to celebrate the prior year production achievements. Weichert has structured tiers of achievement and winners are acknowledged with trophies and plaques in front of their peers and fellow regional offices. It makes everyone feel good to celebrate individual achievements, office achievements and be part of something larger than themselves.

Consistent recognition for smaller achievements

Try using consistent recognition call-outs for a quick boost in company morale—acknowledge people for their skill sets or expertise, such as client management or most listing presentations given.  You can also focus on community-oriented items such as most volunteer hours. All agents want more recognition for what they accomplish, and these constant call-outs provide appreciation regularly.

Here are a few more categories to inspire your brokerage’s recognitions:

• Top listing agent
• Top closing agent
• Most homes shown
• Most open house traffic

Develop an agent incentive program

Agent incentive programs bring gamification to your office and encourage fun goal-getting mentalities across the organization. Recognition programs allow agents to win prizes, earn bonuses, and gain access to more significant listings among other benefits by achieving milestones in their daily work.

For example, offering cash bonuses, gift certificates or spending vouchers for notable achievements such as the top selling agents of the month or the highest yearly earners at your office are some very enticing incentives.

Gamification is proven to increase internal engagement. According to Talent LMS, 90% of team members surveyed said gamification at work makes them feel more productive.

Set a budget and a cadence—and make it accessible to all. Everyone needs to feel included. When an incentive program is put in place, agents should strive to earn these recognitions as part of their individual business goals.

Promote your people

Personalized awards and acknowledgments go a long way to making your agents feel appreciated. Weichert offers our brokers support to take agent recognition a step further.  Through PR services and social media templates, we help brokerages promote their award winners to their clients and the community. Because who wouldn’t want to work with a winner? Plus, agents are given opportunities to promote their biggest achievements on their business cards, agent website bio, agent brochure template, listing presentation and more.

“It’s a way to add to the culture of support that we are building as an organization,” said Michele Watson, Marketing Director for Weichert Real Estate Affiliates, Inc. “We believe it’s important to bring people together and give them ways to celebrate their achievements.”

The value of recognition is priceless. By utilizing these simple tips, you can achieve a cohesive company culture within your brokerage. Recognizing the successes of your team and agents not only builds their confidence but shows how grateful you are for their work. Start encouraging collaboration, celebrate success, and build a community founded on support.

For many independent brokers, awards and recognition can fall by the wayside because they simply don’t have the time or resources to incorporate it into their brokerage culture. But at Weichert, we’ve created a structured award system for our brokers to utilize—making it easy to build recognition into the way you work.

As you start to think about growing your brokerage and focus on your team’s morale and achievements, consider how partnering with us can help make the initiatives like team recognition turnkey and fun again.

Get in touch with us today to find out how we can help you grow your brokerage.