Can We Use an Employee communications App for Recognition & Reward?

Create a culture of gratitude, timely celebration, appropriate reward, affirmation from peers and a commitment to shared values.

Employee Recognition & Reward is a hot topic in virtually every discussion we have.  Everyone agrees that a culture of gratitude, timely celebration, appropriate reward, affirmation from peers and a commitment to shared values all have significant relational and performance benefits across an organisation.

However, whilst most of the organisations we work with already have some form of recognition system in place, there is often a general discontent with how effective the systems are at facilitating real gratitude, celebration and recognition in a timely fashion.  Often these systems are described as a "sledge hammer to crack a nut", "too corporate", "not authentic" and allow the "moment to pass" by the time the recognition is received.

Digging into this feedback it appears to stem from recognition being traditionally seen as a "top down" process providing the mechanism for managers to recognise good performance within their teams in some cases to feed an annual awards event. While this is an important characteristic of effective management, formal recognition systems that purely focus exclusively on feedback from management to staff can be one-dimensional or worse still completely skewed, particularly if the relationship between employees and their line manager is not a positive one, for whatever reason.

The traditional approach is also unlikely to encourage less formal recognition of what might seem like smaller day-to-day things, like staying a little later to help a colleague out - people are unlikely to want to fill a long form in for that, but yet wouldn't you want to know about and recognise colleagues that are consistently making a difference like this?

Working in this area now for a couple of years now, we have found blending together formal and informal recognition in a real-time instant app is a powerful enabler, especially when it encourages employees to live the values.  Indeed this plays a major role in translating organisational values from "words on the wall" into tangible day-to-day activities.

As an example of this watch this 2 minute video to understand AirFrance-KLM have incorporated Employee Recognition into their app to enable their people to say #CheersToYourPeers... (jump to 1min 10 secs in if you are in a rush!)

 

Thrive's (previously known as TheAppBuilder) unique feature enables each "thank you" to be accompanied with a message, photo and be aligned to your organisations values.  The thanks is published instantly within the app, the recipient gets a push notification of thanks and others can like and comment. You can export the data into existing recognition & reward programmes within your organisation.

The colleague being thanked receives a confidence boost, particularly when recognised by a peer. As the recognition is visible publicly in the app they also benefit from the social recognition of their work and in many cases the recognition is multiplied as other colleagues ‘like’ the post or indeed add their own congratulations by ‘Commenting’.

The wider community seeing the post, likes and comments benefit from the role model as well as the increased motivation to perform well as a result of the social benefits.

In summary an Employee Recognition & Reward element within an app can really help create a culture of open recognition, gratitude and celebration has benefits for the organisation that extend beyond encouraging good individual performance.

If this has struck a chord with you, we would be delighted to discuss how we could help your organisation further - click here to contact us.