Do employee awards add any value to the company?

What you need to know:

Employee awards ideally, are initiatives adopted by employers to motivate the desired behaviour of the rewarded employees to be repeated but also to elicit similar behaviour from others

What values do employee awards add to the company and the employee? I feel employee award are just an opportunity to reward supervisor loyalists, only people who are friends with bosses get them. Are they of any value?
Dave

Dear Dave,
Employee awards ideally, are initiatives adopted by employers to motivate the desired behaviour of the rewarded employees to be repeated but also to elicit/drive similar behaviour from the rest of the employees.
Organisations ideally reward employee excellence in the areas the employer has decided on and communicated prior to all employees, to strive and achieve in a given period of time.
Going by the definition above, the value derived from rewarding excelling employees is immense to both the employee and the organisation. The employee feels motivated and recognised as a valued person and the organisation reaps the benefits of excellence exhibited by the employees across the board.
Employee excellence in organisations results in improved customer care and this inevitably leads to healthy financials for the organisation and benefits to both the employer and the employee. Talented employees always seek to work for financially stable companies, which build successful brands that attract customers to associate with their products.
It is, therefore, unfortunate when employee award initiatives are abused by the implementers who decide to reward undeserving but blindly loyal people.
The abuse of the initiative ends up demotivating deserving employees in addition to denying the organisation the benefits of employee excellence mentioned above.