Gold Star Awards

Extend Learning Academies Network

What is the name of your intervention?

Gold Star Awards

Health and wellbeing category

All staff feel engaged and supported 

Why did you choose this area of focus for your staff? 

Being a government funded sector, incentives that are not driven by huge costs are key. It is important that staff feel valued, that their hard work and demonstration of the trusts values is recognised. 

Description of intervention

The gold star awards is a monthly award system which spans throughout the whole trust. Each month, any employee can log into the staff portal and nominate any colleague which they feel has done an excellent job at demonstrating the trust values. (Embracing individuality, doing the right thing and working together). At the end of the month, nominations are then redacted and passed over to the Head of HR and Business & Governance Lead for non-biased selecting of the nominations that stand out and deserve a gold star badge to wear on the employee’s lanyard. All nominations receive a certificate of recognition but only the select few get the gold star badge.  

How did you involve your staff in the intervention? 

Online participation, any employee can nominate at any time.  

How engaged were senior leaders in the intervention? 

Senior leaders are extremely engaged and often nominate various employees within their schools for recognition of good work. Employees also nominate their leaders for recognition which is great to see from ‘behind the scenes’. Senior leaders are involved in helping to plan and champion this intervention by ensuring the employees in their teams are aware of the deadline each month for nominating colleagues. They are also proactive in ensuring employees are motivated to really put effort into their nominations to ensure that their colleague receives a gold star badge to wear on their lanyard which tells others that they have done a good job, worked hard and are an asset to their school. Awards and certificates, once decided and written, are given to the head teachers of the relevant recipients at the Advisory Group meetings held once a week for senior leaders and the head teachers will present them to the winners within their schools.  

How did you promote and raise awareness of this intervention to staff

We promote this intervention monthly via the online staff portal. We post the nominations and winners on a news post and email this news post to all employees to show appreciation for their hard work. We also promote for the next month’s intake of nominations, encouraging employees to nominate a colleague and notify them of the cut-off date. No nominations are ever discarded, if the cut off is missed they are carried over into the next month’s batch of nominations.  

What has been the impact of this intervention for staff? 

The impact has been really positive for staff, it has proved that the incentive of being recognised and appreciated by the trust is valued by employees.  

We treat every nomination equally and fairly without discrimination. We do this by taking the nominations and putting them into a word document, they are allocated a number and then redacted, all names and places of work are removed so that the head of HR and business and governance lead can read through the nominations and choose the ones that deserve a badge without any bias what so ever.  

How do you plan to continue with this intervention in the future? 

We plan to continue with the consistency of the initiative. By doing this, employees often wait for the announcements and look forward to seeing the news post and even post about it themselves on their personal online accounts. The end of year lucky dip has been a recent development. We also updated the selection criteria for this academic year (2024-2025) to encompass our new trust behaviours (which we created to bring our values to life).  

What have you learned from developing this intervention? 

We have learned that many employees get multiple nominations repeatedly which really highlights to me who goes above and beyond because they have a passion for their job.  

Can you offer any advice to other organisations thinking about developing this kind of intervention? 

This intervention was a slow starter. It took some time for it to lift off the ground with receiving a good amount of nominations. It took a lot of promotion but we are now in a place where we receive 20+ nominations every month without promoting because employees love taking part in celebrating each other. We also had to get the formula just right, first, we initially chose different themes for nominations which did not work well, and then it was termly which didn’t work due to seeming lack of consistency and employee’s not seeing the promotion for it often. We now run it monthly, with a consistent ELAN values theme.