Engagement series: How to pick a recognition platform that delivers

Recognition is a powerful tool that connects managers to their teams and employees to each other. Being acknowledged and thanked for a job well done is a human need, making the recipient feel valued and motivated to keep performing well, for themselves and the organisation they belong to.

For organisations, employee recognition is key to achieving the full potential from their people. It makes the difference between happy and unhappy customers, productive or unproductive teams and outperforming competitors or peers.

Although nearly every good manager and leader understands how employee recognition can make a difference to commercial performance, most organisations don’t realise the gains that they could because employee recognition is inconsistent and haphazard. We caught up with the experts at Edenred to learn more.

A platform for employee performance

The key to unlocking employee performance through employee recognition is to put in place a platform which can bring consistency and visibility to employee recognition. To do achieve that, you need to ensure the platform that you choose will deliver for you in five key areas:

1. Aligned to your brand – Reflecting your corporate identity and style of communication is critical to employee buy-in to any recognition programme and ensures it is aligned to your wider employee value proposition. A good recognition platform will feel like it is part of your business and will fully reflect your brand identity.

2. Emphasises the values and behaviours that matter to you – Every business is unique so it is important that your platform allows you to acknowledge the actions and behaviours of your employees that will make a difference to your organisation. The right platform will ensure this happens consistently right across the organisation.

3. Easy to implement – The best way for HR teams to help their organisations make a different with employee recognition is by working with managers and employees to make sure the scheme works for them and their role in making it a success. A good recognition platform should be easy to implement leaving you time to do this, using real-time reporting to give you complete visibility of its effectiveness.

4. Makes recognition social – some traditional parts of the recognition mix like face-to-face feedback and team celebrations will always be important. But in today’s workplace where teams collaborate across different offices at different times, the ability to deliver social recognition is critical. A good platform will allow you to do this and for everyone – from managers to those on the front line – to be aware of the individuals and teams who are doing a good job.

5. Flexibility to adapt – Business priorities change quickly so your recognition platform must give you the flexibility to adapt and update it at the touch of a few buttons and at no extra cost. This allows you to remain agile and consistent in your approach, preventing your recognition programme from feeling haphazard and disjointed.

Making recognition work for you

Ultimately, a high impact employee recognition scheme relies on a platform which takes away the hassle and guesswork for managers and employees around how and when recognition should be given, and which shows that employee recognition is something that matters to the organisation.

Transforming a piecemeal approach to employee recognition to one with a clear strategic focus on business priorities, and the behaviours which will help achieve them, is one of the biggest opportunities available to organisations to motivate and improve employee performance.

Don’t miss the other part of our series here: 

Engagement Series: Does your employee recognition programme need a reboot?