Peer Recognition Reinforced Online to Boost Productivity & Morale
Written by Martie Carpenter
HR Consultant, HRBOOST® LLC.
With appreciation trumping recognition in building brand ambassadors these days, I’d like to share some important insights from my experience that may help your company as you look forward.
I have been working with a retained client for four years. This client had an internal peer recognition program already in place. While once embraced and effective, it had become less so over the past few years. Some of the problems included:
- Resistance to the constraints of recognizing peers only within a few predefined categories
- Challenges in fair/equivalent rewards across multiple locations and for remote-based employees
- The administrative burden of tallying physical ‘Star Cards’ given to fellow employees in a manual form
- Burnout of leaders responsible to keep their cross-functional teams engaged and motivated to use the program vs. peers holding one another up
- Disappointment with some of the rewards being overpriced and others outdated
To address these issues, HRBOOST® recommended an online-based system which would be mobile-user friendly, more visible, and easier to adapt to the company’s communications platforms. Initially, there was a lack of understanding of how it would play out at the company, so the CEO invited a team of beta testers to use the system for several weeks. We provided the features and benefits comparison chart listing half a dozen popular options, with pricing information and links to demos. Making an informed decision is something we pride ourselves in at HRBOOST®. Tools are only as good as they are adopted and utilized. Having this team review and test the options resulted in high enthusiasm, excellent questions, and a momentum towards adoption. Increased collaboration and shared creation brought us to the buy-in in selection and implementation. As an added plus: we have a pool of early adapters who will act as a resource for their co-workers learning the new system. In the end, they selected the same system in use at HRBOOST® for our own team!
The new recognition system involves the company awarding a certain ‘bank’ of bonus points monthly to each employee. Those employees are encouraged to award them to co-workers based on great work, a great attitude, teamwork, or other positive attributes. Ideally, these will be tied to core values that the employees are invited to live. The points are redeemable for awards selected by the recipient, such as gift cards, company swag, time off, or PayPal cash. The reward is completely the employee’s choice, though we create some custom awards at HRBOOST®. For example, take the team out on us! There is a plan to periodically recognize those who GIVE the most awards to further encourage buy-in. That is also something we live at HRBOOST®.
At the end, the testing group and the Controller were brought into contact with the rewards company representative. Since then, the CEO has approved the subscription and initial roll-out is set for June 1, 2019. We plan to have a monitor scrolling with the current peer recognition comments, gifs, and emojis to stream at each location, creating greater positive buzz and company-wide camaraderie, celebrating one another’s strengths. It is hoped that the rewards points and items will further enhance the value of this peer recognition tool. A big plus for the HR and Finance team is that the analytics and tabulations are automated; much less work on the back-end for this win-win solution.
This is an example of HRBOOST® hearing the pain points of the current situation, providing research and insight, while inviting the internal contributors to have a say in crafting the best solution for that specific company. SCORE! Culture by design with one of our most committed clients!
