Using Technology to Empower Employees to Recognize and Be Recognized

The most successful organizations recognize the value of engaged employees and understand that engagement is driven to a large degree by recognition and rewards — not just from managers, but from peers, customers, and others. However, the challenge companies face is that the more they grow, the more challenging it becomes to recognize employees consistently and appropriately for the contributions they make. Employing the right employee engagement strategies can make a big difference.

In the current economic environment, employers face another challenge: the challenge of attracting and retaining top-notch employees who, increasingly, have a wide range of other options for employment.

With competition for talent being so fierce, and the emergence of an increasingly hybrid work environment, the need for digital tools that can be accessed by anyone from any place has intensified. In our 2023 Trends and Forecast Report, we cited streamlining operations and communications with platform consolidation as a best practice that is trending, as organizations recognize how automation can help free up employees to focus on the tasks that really matter. Doing so in an environment that also encourages and supports team and peer-to-peer recognition can reap big rewards.

Big Impacts From Self-Service Technology

Using self-service technology to enable employees to recognize and be recognized has a positive impact on the community, empowerment, motivation, engagement, and inspiration. For instance:

Community

Regardless of the division, department, or role they represent, all employees are working together toward a common shared goal — to help their organizations achieve their objectives. Employees don’t always feel that strong sense of community though. When they have a central location where they can interact, collaborate, celebrate each other, learn new things, and stay up to date, their sense of community and team culture is strengthened. These employee engagement activities can result in a better overall employee experience and build a cohesive, consistent, and shared sense of purpose.

Empowerment

Today’s employees, more than ever before, have the need to be flexible and empowered to get their work done and to interact effectively with others. In a hybrid or remote work environment, this is even more the case. Employers can help maintain that sense of empowerment and strengthen the connections between staff members by giving them fun, easy-to-use tools that they can use to interact with, engage, and recognize each other. Feedback and support from managers are important. However peer-to-peer feedback and recognition can be even more powerful. Giving employees an easy, seamless, and convenient way to recognize each other can drive a number of positive business outcomes, including the support of a strong team culture.

Motivation

Engagement leads to motivation, which drives productivity. It’s not enough for employees to be simply “happy” at work, but they also must be engaged. A Heartbeat study shows as of January 2020, only 41% of employees globally are engaged. That means 59% all employees are disengaged. That’s a dismal number that all organizations should be concerned about. Think about the competitive edge your organization could have if you could drive even a slight increase in that percentage. As Jack Welch has said: “An organization’s ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.”

Rewards and recognition motivate! The easier it is for your managers and employees to recognize and reward each other, the higher your levels of motivation—and productivity—will be.

Engagement

Engagement is the holy grail when it comes to driving employee satisfaction, commitment, and productivity. Gallup research indicates that highly engaged business units and teams have 10% higher customer loyalty and engagement, 18% higher productivity as measured by sales, and 14% higher productivity as measured by production records. In addition, they are 23% more profitable, have 66% higher well-being among employees, and 13% greater organizational citizenship as measured by employee participation.

Negative outcomes are also impacted. Highly engaged teams have 81% less absenteeism, 18-43% less turnover, 64% fewer safety incidents, and 41% fewer quality defects. Those are all metrics that drive straight to the bottom line. Engaged employees make a difference.

Inspiration

Engaged employees can inspire disengaged employees through their own enthusiasm, drive, and positive reinforcement. Seeing others achieve accomplishments and milestones can also inspire employees to do better themselves. That’s the power of rewards and recognition.

By building a strategic rewards and recognition program focused on the business outcomes you hope to achieve, you can drive these results while building a workforce that is engaged and high-performing. Whether your goals are focused on driving diversity and inclusion, building stronger leaders, achieving high performance, improving safety, health, and wellbeing — or something else entirely — an easily accessible, well-designed rewards and recognition program using a technology platform like Connects can help you achieve the results you’re looking for.

The desire to belong is an emotion shared by every human. Inspirus taps into this powerful motivator with technology-enabled solutions that connect employees to their colleagues, leaders, and company culture. Learn how your organization can reap the rewards of a culture that leverages automation to drive engagement and high performance.