You came here for a form, so let's not make you scroll. Below is a complete employee recognition nomination form you can copy straight into a Google Form, Typeform, an intranet page, or a Slack workflow — in two sizes. The short version is four fields, built for high-volume peer nominations. The long version is for quarterly and annual awards where a committee has to compare candidates fairly. Then we explain why every question is worded the way it is, because the wording is the whole game: the difference between a pile of evidence and a pile of adjectives is about six words of phrasing.
Then the part most nomination form template posts leave out: the decay problem. Nomination forms spike after launch and die around month three, with impressive reliability. We'll cover why, what fixes it, and the honest caveat — for everyday recognition, a form is the wrong instrument entirely.
The Short Nomination Form (4 Fields)
Use this for rolling peer nominations — the monthly shout-out award, the spot-bonus queue, the wall of wins. It should take under two minutes. If it takes longer, people won't.
- Who are you nominating? (Name + team. Required.)
- What specifically did they do? (Required. Describe the actual action — what happened, when, and what your nominee did that someone else might not have. 2–4 sentences.)
- What difference did it make? (Required. Who benefited — a customer, a teammate, the company — and how would things have gone without them?)
- Which value does this best reflect? (Optional dropdown of your company values, plus "other".)
That's it. No "why do they deserve this award?", no star ratings, no "how long have you worked with the nominee?" Four fields, and the whole thing fits on one phone screen.
The Long Nomination Form (Quarterly and Annual Awards)
When a committee has to rank ten nominations and defend the result, you need more structure — enough to compare candidates, not so much that only the most motivated nominators finish. Aim for five to seven minutes:
Section 1 — The basics
- Nominee name and team
- Your name and team (and: "May we share your name with the nominee?" Yes / No)
- Award category (dropdown; one nomination per category)
- Time period this nomination covers (e.g. Q3, or "the migration project, June–August")
Section 2 — The evidence
- What specifically did they do? (Required, 100–300 words. Describe concrete actions and moments, not general qualities. If you can't name a specific week it happened, keep thinking.)
- What was the situation or constraint? (Required. What made this hard — a deadline, a broken system, an absent teammate, an angry customer?)
- What was the outcome? (Required. Numbers if you have them; a clear before-and-after if you don't.)
- Who else saw this happen? (Optional. Names the committee can ask — this is how you separate real impact from good writing.)
Section 3 — The fit
- Which value or award criterion does this demonstrate, and how? (Required, dropdown + one sentence.)
- Was this beyond their normal role? (Yes / No / Partly — plus one line of explanation. Prevents "did their job well" nominations from crowding out genuinely exceptional ones, while still letting excellent core work count.)
- Anything else the committee should know? (Optional, and genuinely optional — most people should skip it.)
Section 4 — Housekeeping
- One-line summary for the announcement (Optional but golden: "Rewrote the migration script at 9pm so the customer never saw downtime." If they win, you've written the citation for whoever reads it on stage.)
Why the Questions Are Worded That Way
Almost every bad nomination form makes the same mistake: it asks "Why do they deserve this award?" That question produces adjectives — "she's amazing," "a true team player" — sincere, useless, impossible to rank. Nobody's lying; the question invited an opinion, and an opinion is what came back.
"What specifically did they do?" invites a story instead. Stories contain dates, constraints, and consequences. A committee can compare two stories. It cannot compare two people's supplies of enthusiasm.
The other wording choices follow the same logic:
- "What difference did it make?" beats "What was the impact?" — business-speak invites more business-speak. Plain language gets plain answers.
- Asking for the constraint separately makes nominations comparable. Shipping on a calm week and shipping while the lead was out sick are not the same achievement — and if you don't ask, nobody volunteers it.
- "Who else saw this happen?" quietly corrects for writing ability. Otherwise your awards go to whoever has the most eloquent colleague, which is a real and very well-documented failure mode — see our guide to recognizing people without playing favorites.
- Word floors, not just ceilings. "100–300 words" tells people what good looks like. An open text box tells them nothing, and they'll write eleven words.
- Keep required fields to three or four. Every required field is a place to abandon the form. Optional fields cost you nothing and get filled by the people with the most to say.
- Never ask for a rating. "How would you rate this person's contribution, 1–5?" produces a wall of 5s and zero information.
Employee Recognition Nomination Examples: Weak vs. Strong
Here's the same nominee, written three ways. Put a comparison like this directly above your form — it's the highest-return thing you can do for nomination quality.
Weak (an adjective pile):
Priya is an amazing teammate and always goes above and beyond. She has a great attitude and everyone loves working with her. She really deserves this award!
Nothing here is checkable. A committee reading twenty of these ends up voting on name recognition — which is exactly how awards start going to the same three extroverts every year.
Better (specific, but no stakes):
Priya rewrote our onboarding docs in July. They're much clearer now and new hires have been using them.
Real action, real artifact — but no constraint and no outcome, so it loses to a well-written weak nomination. Unfair, and avoidable.
Strong (the one your form should produce):
In July, our two-person support team was covering an unplanned leave and onboarding kept eating their week. Priya volunteered to rewrite the onboarding docs — she sat in on three new-hire sessions, found the seven places people always got stuck, and rebuilt the guide around them. Ramp time for the next four hires dropped from about two weeks to five days, and support tickets from new hires basically stopped. This wasn't her job; she noticed a problem nobody had assigned to anyone.
Situation, action, outcome, and a note on scope — the four things the long form asks for, in one paragraph a committee can act on in thirty seconds.
The Decay Problem Nobody Warns You About
Now the honest part. Your nomination form will have a great first month. Announcement, enthusiasm, forty submissions. Month two: eleven. Month three: four, three of them from the same manager. This isn't bad luck; it's the standard arc, and it's the same arc we mapped in why recognition programs fail after 90 days.
The mechanism is simple. Filling out a form is a chore, and the payoff is delayed and uncertain — you write four thoughtful paragraphs, nothing visible happens for six weeks, and there's a good chance your nominee doesn't win at all. Nobody decides to stop nominating; the cost is immediate, the reward is abstract, and it quietly loses to whatever else is in the tab.
Three things measurably slow the decay:
- Lower the friction. Put the form where work happens — a pinned Slack link, a bookmark in the team channel, a monthly calendar hold with the link in it. Every extra click halves your submissions.
- Shorten the cycle. Quarterly awards mean a nominator waits up to 90 days for a signal. Monthly, or even a rolling "we announce three every two weeks," keeps the loop tight enough to feel real.
- Make the outcome visible. Publish the winning nomination text, not just the winner's name. It closes the loop for the nominator, teaches everyone else what a strong nomination looks like, and gives non-winners a reason to keep writing them. And track submissions per month as a real metric — our guide to measuring recognition program success covers what else to watch and when to intervene.
One more fix isn't about the form at all: pull from data you already have. If peer recognition flows continuously somewhere, the committee can look at who's actually been thanked all quarter, not just who had time to write. That also corrects the pattern where the same visible people get nominated over and over — see fixing recognition inequality.
Forms Are for Awards, Not for Thank-Yous
Be clear-eyed about this: a nomination form is a good instrument for a few high-stakes decisions and a terrible one for everyday appreciation. Nobody fills out a form to say "thanks for catching that bug before the demo." They say it in a channel in ten seconds, or they don't say it at all.
So run both layers. Use the forms above for your quarterly and annual programs — the categories, wording, and committee mechanics are covered in our guide to employee recognition awards. And for the other 355 days, use something with essentially zero friction, because the research is blunt about the cost of silence: employees who feel inadequately recognized are roughly twice as likely to say they'll quit within a year (Gallup/Workhuman), while strong recognition cultures see up to 31% lower voluntary turnover (Deloitte).
Full disclosure of bias — that continuous layer is what we built Propsly for. It lives in Slack: anyone types /props to send recognition points with a message and a hashtag, and it posts to a public feed. No form, no login, no delay. The free tier covers unlimited users, 200 props per person per month, leaderboards, and the feed. The part that matters at award season: after a quarter of it running, your committee has a real record of who's been recognized, by whom, and for what — which turns "who deserves this?" from a debate into a shortlist.
Copy the form. Fix the wording. Publish the winning nominations. And keep a low-friction thank-you channel running underneath it, so the award confirms something everyone already saw.