6 Ways employee recognition will boost your employer brand

Lorelei Bowman

Branding is a crucial part of your company. It secures recruitment, differentiates you from competitors and introduces your company to prospective customers and the wider industry on both a local and global level.

With the internet in full swing and new technology at our fingertips, anyone can create a brand – from a team of experienced marketing gurus, to an individual influencer with the right smartphone apps. While this democratisation of marketing doesn’t mean every brand is outstanding, it does mean that the brand pool is heavily diluted. Having a strongly-rooted employer brand has never been so important. In fact, research shows that employer branding will only become more important on a strategic level.

While traditional and digital marketing is central for building a robust brand and raising awareness, your employees offer a less obvious but equally powerful source of brand leverage: Recognition.

Control your internal branding imagery and messaging

Workplace technology is unique in its ability to empower you, as an employer, to control your internal branding – from colours and logo to company values and what copy is used for milestone recognitions. By personalising your recognition tool to match the organisation’s branding, your brand and messaging becomes ingrained in every aspect of the app (and thus the user experience) each time it’s opened.

Emphasises and shines a light on your company values

Values are an inherently powerful part of your employer brand and workplace culture, but it’s easy for them to get lost when employees aren’t interacting with them regularly. By including your own personal company values (including their image and description) you enable your people to organically engage with the values through recognising their colleagues against these. This daily presence and interaction with the values remind employees of their importance, and as a result your people will start to truly live and breathe the company values.

Make your brand synonymous with ease, praise and gratitude

Through harnessing control of internal branding and messaging, employers can align their brand with the positive effects of recognition. Employees will come to naturally associate recognition with your brand, simply from using the tools alongside your branding each day. This in turn will make your brand synonymous with the characteristics of ease, praise and gratitude that recognition represents; whether it’s when employees talk to each other, customers, friends or potential new hires and clients!

Align your brand with modern state-of-the-art technology

Recent studies have shown how highly employees value technology and smart workspaces when considering their career. What’s more, 93% of millennial employees (people currently aged between 22-37) put modern technology top of their workplace wishlist. When considering statistics like this, it’s vital for organisations to align themselves with modern technology. Not just to recruit and retain talent, but to attract customers and present yourselves as market-leaders. Because however innovative your products are, and however exceptional your service may be, if your technology lacks behind it will drag your reputation down with it – you wouldn’t want to join a cutting-edge tech start-up, only to find out they still use Windows XP!

Improves culture and introduces that culture as part of your brand

It’s no secret that saying ‘thank you’ makes people feel good. But our research shows just how much it makes a difference: people who are thanked for a favour are twice as likely to help someone in the future, and 66% of employees say lack of appreciation would encourage them to leave their job. By introducing a recognition app, you begin to embed the power of ‘thank you’ into your culture. Whether it’s a quick ‘thanks’ after someone makes you a cuppa, a milestone recognition or major reward for work on a tricky project – recognition provides an instant, and long-lasting, mood and motivation boost. ‘Recognition means gratitude’ becomes second nature, and appreciation culture grows as an integral element of your brand and workplace.

Boost recruitment (and thus retainment) through an employee value proposition

All of the above perks of recognition combine to create a positive culture and powerful employee value proposition. Employees want to work for employers who care about their people, who utilise technology at the forefront of innovation, and who have a strong culture they can be part of – with workplace recognition, you can offer all of these wrapped up in an unbeatable organisational opportunity.