Recognition Q&A with Carrie Vick, Reflektive’s Director of Customer Success
With millions of people around the world now working remotely, employees are looking to stay better connected with their managers and teams. They want to align on key initiatives and projects, and stay informed on team wins. Here at Reflektive, we’re hearing a lot of appetite for more employee connection and communication. Companies around the world have been asking about our Recognition product, and the best ways to drive a culture of praise.
Check out our below Q&A with Carrie Vick, Director of Customer Success at Reflektive, to see answers to HR teams’ most popular recognition questions.
What topics are top-of-mind for Reflektive customers?
Since many companies are continuing to work remotely, they’re looking to Reflektive for best practices to keep employees engaged, happy, and productive. They’re also looking for ways to boost employee wellness – both physical and mental well-being.
Some customers are starting to think about how and when to return to the office. When they have locations in multiple jurisdictions, it makes planning more difficult given the different laws and regulations.
Reflektive customers also are thinking through what the new normal in the office will look like, with daycares closed and many employees now preferring to work remotely.
Why are customers so interested in employee recognition at this time?
Recognition has always been important to our customers, since it motivates employees and has meaningful downstream benefits. In our Performance and Engagement Survey, we found that people who receive meaningful recognition are 3.6X more likely to work hard, and 2.3X more likely to speak highly about their company’s products and services.
Now more than ever, we’ve seen interest in recognition from companies. With more employees working remotely, leaders and managers want to ensure that employee wins are visible and celebrated. They want to continue driving their company culture. And they want to reinforce best practices across their organization. That’s why recognition is so valuable — it can help in all of these different ways.
How can HR teams successfully launch a new recognition program and drive employee adoption?
If you’re launching a new recognition program, creating a plan and taking a strategic approach definitely helps. Identify what success looks like for your organization. Maybe your most important metric is the percentage of employees that provide recognition every month. Or maybe you’re looking to see an increase in recognition over a particular timeframe. Here at Reflektive, we recommend these metrics, as well as most used hashtags, the departments giving the most recognition, and kudos by gender. These data reports are all available in our People Intelligence solution.
We also recommend a framework to share with all employees on when and how to give recognition. Eliminating this ambiguity – and providing clear examples of when to provide praise – will help drive more adoption.
Finally, I’ve seen successful customers follow the below pre-launch steps to drive recognition adoption:
- Make it your own, by branding the program or incorporating your company values.
- Partner with leadership and managers to drive excitement across your workforce. When leaders provide recognition right after the launch, it sets the tone for the rest of the company. Managers can also role model this new behavior.
- Make recognition easy, so employees will provide it more frequently. At Reflektive, our recognition solution integrates with Gmail, Slack, MS Teams, and MS Office so employees can provide praise right in their favorite tools.
- Develop an integrated campaign plan to drive recognition adoption and make your program stickier. We’ve seen lots of success from companies that led recognition training sessions, had recognition best practices on their company’s intranet, and sent recognition emails.
Given its importance, how can HR teams get executive sponsorship for a recognition program?
It always helps to have a narrative – and data – on why change is needed. Can you point to downward trends in performance, productivity, engagement, or retention? Do you have data and comments from your recent engagement surveys that speaks to the need for a recognition culture? Armed with this information – and the aforementioned data points on the value of recognition – you can create a compelling narrative for the rest of the exec team.
Should HR teams incentivize recognition?
Here at Reflektive, we haven’t seen much evidence that monetary rewards help to build a long-term feedback culture. Many research studies have revealed that monetary incentives are short-lived, while intrinsic motivation has a much longer lifespan. We recommend that HR teams spend some time better understanding employee motivators with engagement surveys. With these insights, HR practitioners can develop the right performance programs for their unique workforce.
How have other companies built their recognition programs?
With Reflektive, customers can weave recognition into their other performance programs to amplify employee engagement and productivity. Some quick customer best practices are below:
- Brad’s Deals launched a “shout-outs” program at their company, and included employee shout-outs in their check-in forms. This additional information helps to eliminate recency bias, and “has been instrumental as we’re looking to enable the most robust performance conversations,” said Jessica Adams, Brad’s Deals’ VP of People.
- Cortland uses their public recognition wall, called “Rave”, to reinforce their core values. Their recognition program, combined with employee-centric check-ins and 360 reviews, have helped them improve retention by almost 10%.
- NextRoll launched their “Kudos” wall, which has been their most-used Reflektive tool to-date. It’s been popular among employees as it’s meeting them where they work; all kudos are given through our Slack and Gmail plug-ins. Managers receive real-time email notifications and monthly reports to track their teams’ kudos over time.
If you have more questions about recognition or other crucial performance programs, our team is here to help. Contact us here and we’ll get back to you shortly.