Employee Recognition and Rewards – Mainstays in achieving strategic business objectives

Employee rewards and recognition programs should drive the achievement of business objectives and living of company values:

• Increased motivation and engagement: Employees who feel valued and appreciated for their contributions are more likely to be motivated and engaged in their work.
• Improved retention: Employees who feel appreciated are more likely to stay with their current employer, which means increased employee loyalty and retention of talent.
• Better performance: Motivated and engaged employees perform better. Employee recognition and rewards programs also provide clear goals and incentives for staff to strive towards, improving productivity.
• Positive workplace culture: A workplace that values and recognises its employees is more likely to have a supportive culture which feeds into better teamwork, communication, and collaboration among employees. A culture in which employees live the company values, consistently follow best practices and demonstrate positive behaviours.
• Align employee behaviour with strategic business objectives: Rewards and recognition should be tied into specific strategic business objectives and provide a clear path of how employees can support these objectives.
• Ownership and accountability: A recognition program creates a sense of ownership and accountability where employees feel responsible for achieving specific objectives and are recognised for doing so. When employees take ownership, they perform at a higher level.

Achievement Awards Group has developed an end-to-end solution that brings together strategy, tactics, technology, implementation and management in a cohesive process for the delivery of recognition programs that work. The mechanics are unpacked below…

The achieve program hinges off bountiXP, AAGroup’s proprietary technology platform that underpins and supports all its recognition programs. The core platform functionality brings together five key features:

• Employee recognition: Peer-to-peer and manager to staff. Appreciating, thanking and valuing staff for doing the right things.
• Ongoing social engagement: Continuous communication that establishes connections and strengthens the employee community.
• A world of rewards: Complete freedom of reward choice through a reloadable awardscard® (linked to Mastercard), virtual cards, digital vouchers, travel and experiential rewards.
• Real-time data: Advanced people and performance data available 24/7 to help manage, benchmark, boost and improve the program – plus the ability to enable advanced analytics delivering deep people insights for executives.
  Integrated e-learning: An ability to deliver digital content directly to the front line – and to assess understanding.

In developing its employee recognition programs, the bountiXP platform aligns two key fundamentals:

• Strategy: which focuses on performance-based recognition around metrics such as service, sales and quality relating to strategic aspects of business goals, objectives and tasks.
• Culture: which focuses on values-based recognition and refers to aspects of values, practices and behaviours and is centred around people, passion and performance.

“The alignment of culture to business strategy is critical – the best business strategy is unlikely to be achieved if the culture of the business is not right and the workforce not engaged.

The bountiXP alignment model recognises this key aspect, and hence the program drives both performance and values-based recognition, with equal measure. It’s about recognising and rewarding people for the right behaviour in terms of culture, values and practices, which ultimately feeds into the strategy side of the model, and rewarding and recognising people for achieving specific business goals, objectives, and tasks,” explains Skinner.

While tangible rewards and compensation benefits are a key part of any employee engagement strategy, recognition is equally important in the total rewards mix, if not foundational. But recognition in organisations is often not done well. When formulating an employee recognition strategy, there are seven key principles that need to be fulfilled in order to optimally drive behavioural change.

• Inclusivity: Recognition needs to be inclusive, reaching deep into the business and touching staff at every level.
• Frequency: Recognition needs to be done at the right frequency to ensure it lands and has sufficient impact. Once annually is not going to change behaviour.
• Visibility: People need to see and experience this recognition to be motivated to be part of the process. Frequency and visibility of recognition are key to driving a virtuous circle of recognition and performance.
• Immediacy: For maximum effect, recognition should be immediate with a clear line of sight between the performance and the recognition.
• Authenticity: Recognition needs to be genuine, meaningful and heartfelt – authentic recognition is immensely powerful.
• Autonomy: Give the participants in the program the freedom of choice around how they fulfil their rewards, with flexibility rather than assuming what people might want.
• Agility: Good programs are agile, bringing people on board, focusing on the important objectives and keeping pace with these as they shift and evolve.

A typical recognition and reward framework spans both informal and formal recognition, starting from social recognition which sits at the bottom of the reward pyramid and which drives company values and behaviours, then performance recognition and reward driving company values and business goals, to recognition celebrations and events which encompasses divisional recognition through to an annual pinnacle event with CEO recognition – with each stage of recognition increasing in its formality.

“The nine-box systems framework starts with getting the right people in place to manage and drive the program, setting the right goals for recognition and engagement, and then setting up the measurement framework. It then moves into the operational aspects of launching and onboarding people, the crucially important communication and ongoing sustainment of the program, and then training and equipping people to engage.

In terms of rewards, we have provided the flexibility that our people want, as well as the enabling technology that facilitates the entire program in a transparent, seamless and analytical manner. Finally, we have built in the feedback and measurement loops required to drive continuous improvement – this is the anatomy of a successful recognition program and how we’ve been able to achieve best practice in the programs we implement on behalf of our clients,” explains Skinner.

In terms of the achieve recognition program, the following results were achieved:

• 91% of employees approved of the achieve program with 62% rating it as excellent.
• 86% of employees proactively sent recognitions of team members, while 98% of employees received recognitions during the measurement period.
• In terms of feeling valued in the organisation, prior to the launch of the program this figure was at 53%. Some months into the program this had increased to 72%.
• Staff turnover in the call centre dropped to below 10%, less than one third of the industry norm of around 30% per annum.
• Overall agent quality scores in the contact centre improved by 8% within two months of implementing the program.

“In making recognition and rewards a mainstream pillar of your business strategy, make sure your program addresses the aspects of awareness, strategic alignment to business objectives, leadership support, consistent implementation and communication, resources and feedback,” concludes Skinner.

The folks at our technology partner, bountiXP, are thought leaders in employee recognition and rewards.
They’ve created a comprehensive 10-step guide, providing resources to help you create a top notch recognition program so you can start recognising and rewarding your employees to foster a culture of appreciation and achieve optimal employee engagement levels within your organisation.