Lorelei Bowman
With 94% of executives increasing their focus on digital growth, it’s clear that employers are now recognising the frustration among employees in disjointed or outdated technology. One of the most common culprits is giving and receiving recognition or reward at work. Here, we’ll break down each of the most frequent frustrations we hear from employees, and how tools like OneHub | Reward and Recognition can not only solve these problems, but revolutionise recognition and reward in your workplace.
Rewards take too long to arrive
VS: Instantly redeemable rewards
When employees receive a reward for their hard work, there’s an instant buzz of pride and recognition. But, by the time this reward arrives (often several days later, in the post) that initial feeling has worn off. Physical rewards like vouchers can be forgotten; left on the side to expire, unopened in the pile of post or passed along to someone else. When the employee eventually spends their voucher, any gratification is no longer linked to their employer.
Instead, by using instantly redeemable in-app reward vouchers, employees can redeem their reward right away and spend it within a few minutes of the ‘well done’. This streamlined, instantaneous process ensures the gratification of the reward is intrinsically linked to the employer, resulting in positive associations towards their company. Not to mention, it can’t be forgotten and left behind at home, because it’s all housed inside one app!
Recognition is outdated and laborious
VS: State-of-the-art work-inspired technology
If you want to thank someone for their thoughtful birthday gift, how often do you write and post a physical ‘thank you’ letter? Today, you’re more likely to send a text or social media message. Not only is this quicker to do, but it can be done from anywhere, anytime. In fact, with the ease of technology, you’re more likely to say ‘thanks’ than you would have before!
While physical rewards still have their place, workplaces need to reflect this wider move to digital. And when it comes to reward and recognition, physical is outdated. Now, we don’t call, we text; we Instagram instead of photo album, we stream instead of download. These are immediate, instant and anytime – they don’t require waiting (possibly until the moment and feeling has passed) because they are in the moment – they are the moment. Your recognition scheme should be the same.
Infrequent milestone rewards and recognitions
VS: Real-time feedback and rewards whenever you like
In many workplaces, length-of-service awards come every few years, with a smattering of gift vouchers for achievements in-between. While these rewards have wonderful intentions, the positive impact behind them is getting lost. In the world of social media and instant gratification, employees want immediate and in-the-moment. And with the average tenure being 4.5 years, most of your employees wouldn’t even reach traditional milestone rewards.
The occasional large reward doesn’t produce the motivation and loyalty-inducing results that more frequent, smaller recognition does. Countless organisations (and their engagement statistics!) concur that a ‘little and often’ mentality for reward results in higher engagement and lower turnover than more infrequent appraisals. The beauty of technology-powered reward and recognition lies in its spontaneity and mobility – if you want to recognise someone, you don’t need to wait for the next round of emails ahead of the company update. You can do it there and then – whether that’s after a meeting, on a lunchbreak or while commuting!
Disparate, disconnected and disembodied culture
VS: Integrated values
One of an employer’s most powerful tools is their workplace culture – a set of values and energy that all employees are inducted into, and bring with them every day. But too often, values and culture can be lost after the interview and initial induction.
Recognition apps like OneHub | Reward and Recognition allow employers to input their own company values, enabling employees to recognise their colleagues against these cultural pillars. By increasing familiarity and interactivity with your values, this culture becomes ingrained in everyday work-life at your organisation – developing into part of the business that not only everyone knows, but everyone believes in.
Arduous log on and slow loading times
VS: Single sign-on and everything app
Many of the workplace’s frustrations can be put down to clunky, disjointed technology. Slow loading times, websites freezing and crashing, forgetting passwords no matter how many times you tick ‘remember me’…
Single sign-on (SSO) coupled with slick all-inclusive tech solves this in one fell swoop. No longer will you finish typing a heartfelt message, only for the app to quit before sending; no more asking IT to reset your password again; no more staying late just to say ‘thanks’ through laborious recognition processes. With apps like OneHub | Reward and Recognition, you can do everything on the move, on any device, right away.
No crashing, no loading, no waiting. Finally – recognition in the 21st century.
Isolated recognitions and disconnected departments
VS: ‘Recognition TV’ to share the newsfeed on any screen, anywhere
Too often, reward and recognition schemes miss out on a huge opportunity – recognition’s ability to connect an entire business.
While many programmes may be successful in recognising individuals, recognition offers a massively positive impact on everyone. Research shows that seeing others being recognised and thanked makes us happy, too – this is called ‘prosociality’. This is the concept behind the success of newsfeed functions throughout social media; and it’s why you should share reward and recognitions with all your employees, not just those involved.
The benefit of a public display showing the latest recognitions is two-fold: it reminds employees to recognise their colleagues, resulting in the positive effects described above, and it improves productivity, collaboration and motivation for the entire business.
OneHub | Reward and Recognition offers ‘Recognition TV’, an app function which connects to an external monitor to display real-time recognitions and messages. This can be filtered for individual teams, office locations or the entire business – so wherever your people go, they can feel the positive impact of recognition.
