My Recommendation: Give a Commendation!
Awards and prizes are a lovely way to acknowledge good work being done in your workplace or community. Academia is full of prizes, some of these require self-nomination, others have open nomination or winners are selected by a committee.
These awards recognise good work, but they also act as a signal that this kind of work is valued by a particular group of people. Sometimes, these awards and prizes are created because the specific work being celebrated is not visible within established norms. I was involved in the establishment of the Australian Linguistic Society's Talkley award, which recognises good work being done to communicate about linguistics outside of academia. This kind of work is not easily recognised within formal workloads of academics, but if there's one thing universities love, it's when their academics win prizes.
One of my biggest critiques of awards is that people are not awarded commendations enough. It's great someone wins the main prize, but there are also usually many other very worthy people who should be given an honorable mention/runner-up/commendation. Even if you don't print them a certificate or give them a cash prize, it's still a great thing to do.
I love commendations! And they serve the whole ecosystem well:
Commendations functionally do not cost anything. You don't need to award a formal prize/trophy/cash. If there's work that you think honours the spirit of your award but isn't the winner this year, why not acknowledge that good work?
Commendations boost the aim you are trying to achieve. If your award is aimed at encouraging more of some behaviour, recognising more of that behaviour is good!
Commendations make the scope of your award clearer. Giving a couple of commendations helps people better triangulate what you think is good work. If your public engagement award only gives out prizes to people who write books, then the people making YouTube videos might give up nominating. If your commendations include a variety of genres, it affirms you believe they have value.
Commendations are useful and important currency in academia. Look, CV inflation is real and I hate it, but it's the game we're all playing, and there are many people who are doing lots of good work and have no external validation of this work to show for it. Commendations are straight-up academic currency and you can support the early career colleagues in your area by recognising the work they do, even if it doesn't meet the full prize standard. Giving awards and commendations is the closet you can get to straight up printing money for nothing in the world of academia.
Commendations do not detract from main award winners. You can still give your main prizewinner a trophy, a chance to collect an award at a ceremony, a bigger write up in the newsletter afterwards. Commendations do not dilute the value of the principle award, they demonstrate the highly engaged field in which the winner is seen as the best demonstration of the behaviour you're trying to encourage.
Shortlists (heck, even long lists!) also operate as preemptive commendations, especially if the awards in your professional world focus on books. Publishers know this, it's why you see books with stickers like "<book prize> shortlisted" on shelves.
Sometimes you might just not have exemplary work to commend. In such a case, I'd suggest you may have to get stuck in the trenches to build that capacity. I've taken to writing to awards bodies in my field, even when I'm not nominating someone, to encourage them to give more commendations. We've been giving out commendations since we started the LingComm Grants in 2020 and it's really affirmed my belief in the net benefit of the practice.
I also love the commendation-to-winner pipeline, I don't think a commendation should be a disincentive to apply in future years.
If your institution, organisation or academic society has a awards or prizes, make this year the year you also give out a commendation or three!
jacobvanloon
