How to Fix Low Participation in Employee Recognition Programs in Under 30 Days

A number of things, at least one thing, take away from this session, one thing to do within 30 days, and we're going to give you a roadmap to do that, a lot of ideas, a lot of exciting material here.

And just a little bit about, me.

and who I am, and we'll get into who you are. My name is Alex, I'm the co-founder and CEO of Recognize, so I've helped hundreds of companies with their recognition programs, getting started with a software solution. They may have already had a recognition program, it could have been maybe manual, a bulletin board, but now they're multi-location.

Or maybe now they have Microsoft Teams or Slack, and they want to be able to,

improve the culture. Maybe they already have a great culture, they want to make it better. Sometimes I work with companies with bad cultures, disengaged cultures, and they want to elevate that.

So I'd love to hear a little bit about you. We only invited a suck group of people to this specific webinar. We do webinars about every week. Usually, we have one to 200 people that we invite that come into those sessions, but this one, we only invited people who actually have

connected with us, they're… you're part of our newsletter, you connected with us in some way, and so we wanted to be… make this very specific to recognition. So I'd love to hear in the chat, you know, where are you in the world?

what industry are you in? You know, because this is going to be more of an intimate conversation, which is… allows us to…

talking about our specific needs, and things that we're working on. So we're going to have a time where you can, you know, ask questions. If you have anything that comes up, and just on top of your head, please put in the chat

But I'd love to hear what people are. I'm here in Seattle, where I… where I grew up. Kind of one of those, you know, grew up in Seattle, moved to San Francisco, Austin, Texas, back in Seattle, but it's a nice rainy spring day here, my, near my home office here.

And it's nice when it does cool down. Here in Seattle, we always say the weather changes and gets better on July 4th. That's the day that the weather is consistently good. Nice to see people coming in from Florida.

Love that non-profit veteran service organization. So, you know, we work a lot with companies that are mission-driven, you know, mission-driven organizations like yours, Kristen.

are the companies that get recognition, they understand it. So, well, without further ado, let's just jump into it. So, you know, I know you're incredibly busy, so I promise to keep this session incredibly

practical. So, if you're here, you're likely experiencing one of the common frustrations with employer recognition. You… maybe you've decided to launch a program with a lot of excitement.

But then 6 months later, you feel the platform usage has fallen off, right? Or maybe you're tired of chasing managers to participate.

It feels like your existing engagement programs turn into just another administrative chore.

We're not gonna spend the time today talking about abstract concepts. We're going to get into some real things you can do. It's not going to be things like motivational posters. Instead, we're going to be looking at recognition through a very specific and somewhat different lens.

Where recognition is a system of organizational design and behavioral actions that you can take

To improve your programs. We're going to show you how to quickly diagnose what is actually happening, what is blocking participation.

And we're going to help you remove those barriers through our process, and all within under 30 days. Let's take a look at who else is joining in. I love that. We have, Ella from Virginia, nonprofit HR organization. That is awesome. I love the nonprofits. New Braunfels, I love that area.

As well, beautiful area. And,

Braunfels, yeah, I always mess it up. Awesome, I love all the people joining in.

keep it coming up. Alright, let's jump into it. So,

Here is our game plan. We're going to be together for about a little bit less than 40 minutes. We've broken this session down into 5 sections. First, we're going to flip the script and focus on measuring success first.

We'll define your HR, North Star metric, and we'll look at the actual math of engagement. And then second of all, we will diagnose any adoption barriers and help break down

to deconstruct why the program isn't working. And we'll focus on, overwhelmed managers, and how that can be a bottleneck, and why frontline, deskless employees matter, and how we can allow it so they don't get left behind.

Third, will be,

Looking at how to drive practical remedies. We're going to be looking at a big, huge shift in repositioning recognition from superficial kudos to structured career win-logging, as we call it.

We're also going to look at how gamifying the program for your admins can keep them motivated as well. We've got to be thinking about the HR team, we've got to be thinking about the communications team.

And how to help them be elevated in things like this for making these programs happen. And using gamification with your admins can be used not just only in recognition, but other programs, too, to then get the company to adopt the program.

And lastly, we want to show you how you can gain executive alignment by mobilizing your directors and utilizing manager portals within your recognition programs and beyond. And finally, we'll wrap up in a week-by-week, you know, summary of things you can do each week over the next four weeks.

But again, I want you to be able to take at least one thing away, from this and actually do it, because, you know, we don't need to do everything, but if we can do something, it can make a difference.

Before we get into software and metrics, I want to talk about why this matters to the bottom line. And yes, if you're curious, we will be sharing these slides afterwards, they'll be on our website as well.

If you want to share these slides with your team. But the reality is that a recognition program drives business performance. A lack of recognition is the single biggest reason why people voluntarily leave their jobs.

Actually, around 66% of employees say that they'll… they'll leave if they don't feel appreciated. You know, this comes down to respect. Respect is so important to… to us, as workers, and as people in general. We want to feel like we value in this world.

On the flip side, when we look at organizations with high employee engagement, the business outcomes can be massive. The upside is really important here. We see a 23% increase in profitability.

18% jump in productivity, and voluntary turnover rates can… can, can drop by a third.

This isn't about making people feel warm and fuzzy, this is about protecting your talent.

Reducing quiet quitting and preventing burnout.

when employees feel that their hard work is actually being noticed, they simply are more motivated. And I'm going to talk more about, like I said, the idea of win-logging, where we're actually showing employees what winning looks like.

So, let's talk about the HR Northstar metric. We have another session on this, you can watch that if you're interested. So I'm not going to go into too much about that, just one slide, just mentioning that, the problem with HR, modern HR, is, you know, now it's not so much that we have, not enough data, we have too much data.

And there's a signal and noise issue that's occurring now, or starting to occur. You know, we have everything from engagement surveys, to pulse checks, to turnover data, to recognition data.

But when we measure more, sometimes we can feel like that we understand less. And… and so to cut through that noise, we need to establish a

single North Star metric, and this comes from a marketing term, right, or product. But here is the key difference to understand, is that we want to take those annual surveys, those poll surveys, and we need to start thinking of them as lagging indicators. They tell you how your employees felt 6 months ago.

And by the time you read those results, your top performers might be already feeling differently, or they might be interviewing other companies. So, we need to have also leading indicators to help us decide on that North Star metric.

Active real-time recognition data does actually provide you with that, of how people are feeling today, at any moment, by analyzing the data.

Now compared to the past.

It shows you which teams are collaborating, which values are being lived, and where morale is slipping. So recognition is one of those actionable cultural signals that you can take advantage of if you have a recognition program today.

If we monitor this behavior in real time, we can step in and prevent disengagement before it ever leads to a spike in turnover.

Now I'm going to look a little bit about recognition data specifically. Now, as far as recognition stats go.

When HR leaders look at program data, they often look at overall reach, which is great. You know, if you see a… if a recognition occurs, and 10% of your organization sees that recognition, 10% is understanding how to win.

They're seeing, hey, I want to be like that, me too. I also want to be…

crushing it, in my word. So, it's super vital to look at that reach, or views of the recognitions, and see how much impact per recognition occurs, really. There might be a couple comments, emojis, that doesn't tell the whole story about the meaning of that recognition.

But beyond the reach, we definitely need to look at what we call the RAS.

So, and what that does is it tells us how many people are actually recognizing or receiving or sending recognitions, right? So the recipient RES, so that's the recognition engagement score, how many people in your organization are being recognized.

who are receiving recognition.

So a recipient RIS tells us the program's reach as well. How many people have received at least one recognition per quarter? A healthy target is 80-100% of your company

has received a recognition in the last quarter. Sender RAS measures the actual active adoption of the program, how many unique employees have actually taken the time to send appreciation.

So that healthy score we typically see is 50-60%.

Here's the trap. If your RES, your recipient RES, is high, and your sender RES is low, this means you can do more. It can mean that your numbers are maybe, depending on your system, artificially inflated because of automated recognitions like birthday or work anniversary e-cards.

To find your true organic culture, you want to be able to separate that. See, Ashley has a question. How can you quantify RES reach when 60% of your headcount is, non-desk manufacturing roles? So…

There are ways to indicate, right, if someone… you know, in recognized, we send text messages to people who are, deskless, and also push notifications if they have the mobile app.

And then also an email, right, that can go to everybody. So we try to reach people where they are. We also have a TV mode that shows recognitions on a TV.

We cannot… we cannot tell you whether or not an employee looked at the TV. That's not something that we have today, right? We'd have to turn on a camera and, you know, that'd be wild.

But with text messaging, text messaging, emails, as well as push notifications, website views, these can all be viewed, measured and recorded to indicate if someone read a text message, or opened an email, or looked at the website, or opened

a push notification, and so that's how we… whether or not we can measure the RES reach.

For the desk list. Now, as far as the actual RES, sending and receiving recognition, again, we… we know who are deskless and who aren't because of the, you know, HRIS sync into our program.

So that we can then do… run reporting on, of those demographics, those cohorts, comparing, you know, your manufacturing roles, desk list of employees.

To, to your… to your desk employees.

And we're going to talk about desk bus more, in a minute.

Let's see here… did I… Cool.

So, another major mistake is relying on company-wide averages. If your dashboard says you have an overall 60% participation rate, that sounds great, but you need to go look and see whether or not you may have departmental ghost towns. So the idea of maybe certain groups are just not utilizing it at all. And maybe they don't need to. But typically, when we want the whole

company involved. We want to record those wins.

So using a platform like Recognize, you can segment your RES by department, or location, or team, or manager.

And when you do this, you often find some disparities, and that can allow you to then interact with those managers that are directors of those departments, find out what's going on, either through a survey or a phone call, a meeting.

So yes, your corporate office may have, let's say, 90% active, participation, where, in Ashley's example, your manufacturing floor, or your retail stores, or frontline crew are close to zero.

So, you know, we want to pull that unrecognized report directly from your software or your… whatever you're doing, so you can instantly see which specific groups or employees have not received recognition over the last 90 days.

We send that report personally every week to managers. We tell them which of your direct reports have received recognition, which have not, so hopefully the manager will be incentivized to recognize those unsung heroes on your team, or use it as an indicator that this employee is underperforming.

And you can… and you can use that data, either whenever it needs to be. You know, maybe they need more recognition more, they're… they're being missed, falling through the cracks, or actually they are an underperformer, and we need to take other steps, as well.

Awesome, so I'm going to spend a little bit of time on this slide, going over these three major components.

So, you know, we have to think, like, why is this happening? Why is there a post-launch usage cliff, right, so to speak? It's a pattern we consistently see when you launch a new program, excitement is high, people are sending recognitions, and then 6 to 12 months later, there's a drop-off.

It's easy to look at this and assume, well, our employees don't really care about recognition.

That's almost never the case, though. It's really that low participation, is, really just simply a culture failure. It's almost always an infrastructure failure. During the launch, right, participation is fueled by novelty. HR marketing, right, number of emails are going out. Promoting the program.

But once that early momentum fades, the system has to stand on its own, ultimately, and we're sending recognitions that, require employees to log into an external website, have that tab up or remembered.

Have a separate password just for that software, have to, you know, go into your password management tool, or however you do that, and then have some kind of multi-form or complex process.

That mental and physical effort required to do such a habit, to build that habit, is going to get eventually ignored, especially, you know, especially if it sounds like it's going to take, you know, memory plus multiple clicks or taps.

If we want appreciation to last, we have to make sure that it's easy to send that recognition. Not too long ago, I onboarded a company onto our platform, and I was told that the HR… no, the IT team wasn't going to install the mobile app.

on everybody's work phones. And the IT person said, oh, that's just gonna be, you know, work for me to do. Well, this is the reason we bought the software, is to put it on the phones. So I think that's another good point, is even in the launch period, is to make sure that, that even…

early in the process, you have IT on board, you have that checklist of things that they'll be helping to do, because if you don't fully put it in front of them, on their phones, in their Microsoft Teams app, in their Slack.

Then, you're gonna immediately have an issue where the habit is difficult to be formed.

So the next thing to talk about is an overwhelmed manager. So, they can be your biggest bottleneck to a recognition program.

Middle managers, let's face it, they're under massive, pressure, and they often have… actually, they found that 75% of managers say that, HR leaders say that managers are completely overwhelmed by expanding daily responsibilities.

More than half of managers say that they don't even have the time or resources to help their team effectively.

So, when we ask managers to run separate culture programs and keep spreadsheets, or, you know, handle milestones, or hand out physical awards, manage, you know, record gift card usage.

We are creating, you know, just additional processes, additional friction for the managers. That's just too much for them to handle.

Furthermore, managers simply don't want to stand out in a lot of these types of programs. If they don't have to do it, they won't. You have to give them a reason to incorporate this, and we'll talk more about that more in a minute.

But, we just need to make it so that, again, it's in their outlook, they're getting the right nudges, it's being made to be as frictionless as possible for managers. So if you're working with a program, they're not talking about how they support managers.

Or if your program that you're doing now is not utilized by managers, we need to look at that. Super important. And we'll talk more about some ideas on how to support the managers.

And lastly, is that frontline desk isolation. So, you know, we need to address this, sooner than the better. In any industry, like retail, manufacturing, logistics, or healthcare, a huge portion of our teams are possibly not work… sitting at a desk.

You know, it's not just people who are made in manufacturing. You know, my friend Keely, who's a doctor, she's on her feet all day long. There's all types of people who are on their feet.

And a lot of our staff of these types are… don't have corporate email addresses, or they don't have work laptops. You know, they don't log into the internet, or the intranet, rather, on a regular basis. If your recognition program is designed strictly for that desktop environment in your intranet, you're…

Isolating teams from your culture, and we want to create that all-for-one culture. That's super important.

And if you can really nail down all-pro and culture, that's going to help you with mergers and acquisitions as well.

So, this isolation fractures the employee experience. It creates an us-versus-them environment that I think a lot of us have seen, where the corporate office is celebrating and the field staff feels invisible.

So, to solve this, you need a recognition program that really meets employees where they work. You need robust mobile apps, SMS notifications, and other offline access that can make that culture continue to thrive.

And if you ever want to talk to us about how we do that, let's reach out to our team, we'll have a way to reach out at the end.

We can show you how we do award certificates and other things for frontline workers.

So, you know, as far as, recognition programs, you know, you really want one that is, again, integrated into your tools. I thought I could do quickly,

an example of what that can look like. I'm gonna show it in Microsoft Teams, but this can also show up in Slack, or other software as well. So, you want a program, again, that is posting recognitions around your values into the channels that you people are working in.

And if I go into the recognize icon within Microsoft Teams, you know, it shows me what values I've represented in the company.

If I click on this report, it can give me an AI summary of myself, or it can show me another employee that I may work with. It's a social feed all around the anniversaries, recognitions, and positive events happening across

your departments, and then you can be able to promote that through gamification, like the Hall of Fame, or the leaderboards, or then take your points that you earn and offer, and we'll talk a bit more about this.

you know, maybe company items, right? Like, like a parking spot or time off. But also, we provide things like live events, sporting, concerts, things like that. So, I don't want to keep going too much into the demo. If you'd like to see more, reach out to us.

But that was all living inside Microsoft Teams, and we can do something similar in Slack, where you, you know, in Slack, for instance, when you send a recognition, you have that slash command, that slash recognize command that Slack people are used to.

which then shows a native window that then allows you to choose your values that that person has exhibited, and you can recognize them with a quick note, right? And then it's posted within Slack.

This can be also true in Outlook and in SharePoint, things like that. And then achievement can then be posted immediately on those TVs, it can generate award certificates, that person can then go redeem points, and then people get a summary, you know, the wins of the week, right? And that's a win.

So, you know, it's really critical. I just had a, one of our employees have a four-year anniversary. Instead of trying to remember what happened in the last four years, I just ran a report and got a summary of recognize… of her recognitions for the last four years, and we remember things that we forgot about that happened literally four years ago, which was pretty cool.

Okay, so anyway, moving on, I want to talk about how we can reposition, recognize. I touched on this before. So, I think this is one of the most powerful shifts that we can make. Instead of positioning recognition as a superficial kudos, instead, you know, when peer recognition is often treated as a warm and fuzzy, kind of extra.

thing to do. You know, if a busy employee is… is… feels like it's too… they're too busy, they'll start… they'll stop participating, because they don't see the long-term professional value. So we need to reposition the platform, not as a tool, just to say thanks, but actually as a structured

Career Win Logging. Win logging.

We want to teach employees to use our custom badges that we can create within your programs to log specific daily professional wins. When someone solves a customer issue or optimizes a process, we aren't just saying thanks.

We're creating a permanent, objective ledger of that professional contribution.

And this completely changes the psychology of the platform, right? Instead of thinking as just a checkbox of things to do in your, you know, great place to work survey, it actually becomes a goldmine of professional capital that employees can easily recall and showcase in their one-on-ones.

In their career development check-ins, annual performance reviews, and you can use the data as a whole about the company.

I think that's a killer win there.

Let me make sure I cover everything there.

Oh, and I was gonna touch on,

We touched on the seamless workplace, but I want to, workspace, rather. I did want to touch on admin gamification, I think I have this, later as well. So, why not gamify not only the experience for the employees, but also for the admins?

So, the admins of your program, what we're starting to do with our customers is that if you can get, let's say, 80% of your company to join the program in the first 30 days of starting it, we will give you a bonus, or we'll put you in our newsletter, or highlight you on LinkedIn.

We have other strategies, other awards we're giving out to admins for, you know, getting that 80% of your RES for the quarter. 80% of your company has received recognitions in the first quarter. Things like that, you know, help, incentivize the managers, too, and the admins to have a great program.

Okay, so now let's look at the,

psychology of habit forming, right? Habit forming is really what we're talking about here, in the end of the day, that you're creating this culture of recognition, you're creating that habit. So think of it as a structured behavioral loop. And this loop has four steps. First, there's the trigger.

Like a simple push notification or a Teams prompt. Second is a low-friction action, sending a peer recognition in under 30 seconds, for instance.

And then third, there's a variable reward, earning a certain amount of points or receiving public praise in the social feed. And then lastly, the fourth, the investment, which builds the employee's reputation and connection to the team. So again, there's trigger.

Low friction action, variable reward, and then reputation investment.

And this cycle is incredibly powerful, because it is in itself

itself reinforcing, so it can continue to become a flywheel. But the secret ingredient here, and that what makes it scale, is the visibility and the peer social proof. When employees see respected, active colleagues consistently sharing recognitions.

and appreciation in that public feed, that social proof takes over. It signals to the rest of the company that recognition and recognizing wins is a normal, valued part of the culture. So look at not only who your leaders are, but people who have clout in your organization.

And ask them to be sending recognitions each week, and set up reminders for them, and have them commit to it.

Another idea that we're thinking about at Recognize, and I encourage you, if you can incorporate this with your key employees.

to drive engagement is streaks. If anyone's ever done Duolingo, everyone knows the power of streaks, in gamification, and that can really help. Hey, every week, you know, will you commit to sending a recognition as a leader every week for 3 months, right? And I can help you prompt that.

So, something to consider, is, is streaks, around key people in your team.

So this leads to our… this next point, which is leader-driven ownership and operations. You know, while that peer-level modeling is really important, getting those people with high… high clout within your organization to be part of the program, we also need to secure executive sponsorship to drive long-term alignment.

Directors and senior leaders shouldn't have to just sign off on a budget and let it go. They need to be active in the program after that, after they sign off on the program. They need to be visible champions of the program.

Leadership participation is one of the single strongest predictors of program success. So, you don't need to change software, you don't need to change your process. If the only thing you take away from this entire presentation

Is getting that leadership, sponsorship, and having them sending the reminder emails, quoting them in the newsletter that you put out.

to make this easy and impactful, you know, we recommend that, not only just the executives, but also directors, and that you equip them with a budget, right? You provide them with something that they are able to use, you assign nominations to them so that they can be… they're expected to nominate people within their organization.

So that they can help run those high-level corporate initiatives from their point of view.

And when senior leaders, you know, do things like likes or emojis or comments on existing recognitions on that feed, it provides that ultimate executive social proof, and it shows the entire team that tracking and celebrating these wins is a high priority for the leadership.

So let's talk a bit about managers. So, to empower your managers, again, we don't want to make them have to use more tools, we want to actually make their life even easier, and we do that by letting them know that, like, a tool like Recognize, all they have to do is click on their manager portal within Teams, or from their phone.

And they can see, you know, from SharePoint or whatever, and they can go to their manager portal to see who their direct reports are. If they're having a performance review, or they're having a one-on-one, go take a look at their recognition portal.

Right? That's going to give them information and arm them right off the bat of things to talk about in those sessions, because it provides them with real-time engagement analytics, it shows them the pending approvals of any recognition that they need to approve, if any, who they have recognized, who they haven't recognized, you know, who are they overlooking.

And then as I showed in the demo, I think it's a… what's a game changer is being able to use

AI to summarize recognition content. That's why data entry now, or structured data like Recognize, is so powerful. Instead of struggling to remember when last time a direct report did something awesome six months ago.

you can actually just click one button, and you can get that summary. So, that's the power of that leaning indicator data, as well as PASS as well.

So let's talk about rewards and the logistics of that. If your managers are purchasing gift cards, or you as an admin are handling swag or shipping items to remote workers, you know what? You don't have to anymore.

That's expensive, it's slow, it's admin heavy, right? So, with things like Recognize, you can have software that can automate the connection to Amazon Business, to gift cards, to experiences, to swag.

We have a bring-your-own-swag system, or work with something like Axamo, where now your employees can go buy something in the Axamo store, or they can take the points they've earned from recognitions, and also redeem items from the swag. And no matter where they are in the world, they can have it delivered without you having to handle it.

So basically, when employees earn points in something like Recognize, they can browse that back catalog, they can choose what to redeem with their anniversary points or recognition points.

And within a couple clicks from their phone, even in line at Starbucks, they can have a gift card for Starbucks by the time they get to the front of the line. And then you get the full reporting of how people are spending their discretionary gifting spent.

Right, and you get a full record of that. And we have guides on taxation for different countries, if you are an international team.

Hit me up, I can send you a link to a tool that we've developed to help international teams navigate tax, navigate cultural differences.

within gifting.

Okay, so, if you already have a program, you know, you probably know this, but I just want to let people know what typically people spend with recognition software. If you have thousands of employees, it can be even less than $2 per user. We often see in the industry that, it's a kind of, like,

It's a tiered pricing, where the more employees you have, the less you pay per user, so that it's not a linear expense.

And… but then, if you have a reward system, we also have, rewards calculators on our website, check it out. It's under the resources section on RecognizeApp.com. You can, you can put in all your details of what you possibly would spend in the anniversary program.

Or a recognition program. But typically, with the platform plus the rewards, people spend around $30 to $80 per employee per year.

I talked to a customer recently, or a prospect, actually, looking at Recognize. They have an annual, revenue of $4 billion.

And I did some estimates that they probably spend about a billion dollars on payroll. So if you're able to retain even just a few percentage points, or even just one percentage point at that scale of your high performers, which means that you'll continue to be

productive, right? Leaders often say, I care a lot about productivity. What that ultimately means is retaining your top performers. That's a great way to be productive, is by not losing your top performers to your competitors down the street, who are messaging them on LinkedIn, saying, hey, we can pay a little bit more. You know, they're going to ask themselves, am I feeling heard and seen?

And so, yeah, we, usually people spend around $30 to $8 per employee, and so it's easy then to do the math, take how many employees you have, times it by $30 to $8, and that can give you an idea of the cost of a program like this.

But you can utilize Recognize, and other recognition programs, of course, I hope, by turning off points and turning off rewards, or however you want to do it. You could just do leaderboards, you could just do gamification, or social proof.

You don't need to always, use rewards, things like Amazon or gifting.

It will increase motivation, extrinsic motivation, of course, and people love to see a result to the recognition program. It puts, skin in the game, as they say.

Awesome. So we're almost at the 40-minute mark. I think we're rounding out here. So what can you do in the next 30 days? So, first week.

Don't need to jump into any decisions. One of the most important things you need to do, and it's so easy to want to jump to solutions, is to step back and audit the experience. Look at your program, look at disengaged departments, look at how you're doing your gamification, what is working, what is not working.

So analyze. Don't do anything yet. Week two, meet with managers, or possibly develop a training with managers, right, that simply reframes recognition as an attaboy to a win-logging, right, that can be utilized in upcoming performance reviews and in one-on-ones.

Next week, the third week, is setting up a 5-minute Friday reminder, right? Some kind of habit forming that's really easy. 30, you know, we're gonna talk more about another idea around, like, Teamwork Tuesdays that's coming up.

And then the last thing you can do

is then evaluate, right? So, I think this is a good pattern, where it's like, whatever you do, first week of a month, you have, like, a quarter is three months, right? So, let's say you have a goal of the quarter.

We'll come up with 3 things you can look at, and 3 hypotheses, right, for each month. First week, diagnose.

Second week and third week, learn and do.

And then the fourth week, evaluate and review. So that's a good structure for really any kind of project that you're doing.

In your work.

So finally, how do we keep this momentum alive for the long term, right? That's a great question.

So, do we do it by building shared ownership?

And I think the answer is yes, right? So the idea is, instead of just leaving it all to HR, we can do it by building ownership across different departments. So…

And we do this by creating a culture committee. If you don't have a culture committee already, I highly recommend one. If you have one, let's see, you know, put a thumbs up in the… in Zoom, or one in the chat. Culture committees are really cool, because they comprise of volunteer brand ambassadors across multiple shifts.

locations, departments, and these peer ambassadors serve as boots on the ground. They're advocates who can gather feedback from their groups, and then they can also then model that positive recognition culture daily.

Most importantly, these committees can help to make decisions around

things like recognition, or wellness, or, you know, smoking campaigns, right? So, it's really important. And I think then, also, you can come together, and it's not just about stats, it's about telling real stories.

So when teamwork, I'm sorry, when team members, rather, do something incredible, right, they're working as a team, they're doing something as an individual, you know, maybe a frontline worker has gone above and beyond. We want to share those, stories in the committee, gather them together so that the executives can share them in the town halls, in the newsletter, in those central intranet feeds, on those bulletin boards.

words.

Across your communication strategy. We want to share authentic, real, human testimonials of your recognition program that will drive the social proof.

Right? A stat is so cold. 80% of our company is engaged. Great, let's… let's… let's have… use that on our team.

to keep track of where we're at each week in our scorecard around our initiatives. And that's great to tell, you know, in a town hall, 80% of their team has recognized somebody. But it's more meaningful to say, we've seen 10,000 positive recordings, 10,000 wins been recorded.

And of those recordings.

100% of our team have looked at them, and here are exact stories of those recognitions, and even have certain people read them off, right? They're so impactful, so amazing, and you can use AI to pull out the most meaningful ones as well.

Another thing I, is, is contests. Contests are so powerful. Instead of, you know, let's say with rewards, right? Everybody has a budget of, let's say, $50 a year, for, you know, it can add up, right, for rewards. But if you can do contests instead.

So every time you send a recognition, you're entered into a raffle, right? And we're gonna pull 2 or 3 winners each month, and they're gonna get

mentioned, they're going to be given a gift card. Maybe they are put into another raffle, they're put into the final end-of-year raffle.

And if there's 3 per month, and there's about 30 people, 36 people, you could possibly win. Pretty good odds, right? So you can do these things that can create motivation, not just simply just giving people more money.

Right? So again, you can do this through leaderboards, and you can have certain types of challenges. So, Teamwork Tuesday, that's a fun idea. If teamwork is one of your values, and maybe it's not being utilized as much as you'd like it to be.

let everyone know, on Tuesday, recognize somebody, and then we're going to pull out one of those recognitions from Teamwork Tuesday, and we're going to highlight that person.

I love contests.

So I just like this slide, because I think it's just a nice, holistic view of what we can be doing. A great recognition program is one that it takes under 30 seconds from wherever I am. So if I'm on my phone, or in Teams, or Slack, or on the browser, within 30 seconds, I can send a recognition.

I should be able to do it without having to log into additional systems. Maybe I need to click sign in with Microsoft, and it just automatically logs me in. Or click log in with Google. You shouldn't have to do anything more than that. Next, it should be integrated, so it should be in the systems you're already using. It's not going to work otherwise, let's just be honest.

We want some of it to be automated, and… and the recognition program that's automated, needs to,

be around the data. So it's only as good as the data you have. So if you can't get the milestone data or the anniversary birthday data, then it's going to end up being manual. So, look at that and try to automate as much as you can. And lastly, we want to be inclusive. We want to incorporate those desk bus employees. Awesome, we have a recognized customer here as a question.

We've gotten some feedback from a few of our tenured older employees who say they don't use Recognizers because they don't like social media. Any suggestions to try and meet them where they're at, so that they see the value for their teams, despite their own personal

references. Right, and I think, that's interesting. That's something I've been thinking about, in the last 48 hours, because I've been reading this book on positioning.

on product positioning, and I think, again, it's all about, you know, like, that example where… that experiment where they gave one group of people a white… a white coat, right, to wear, a white coat, long coat, and they said, this is a jander's jacket, a cleaner's jacket.

Right? And then they had them do math. And then they gave another group of people the same coat, and they said, this is a scientist's lab coat. And they had them do the same math. And the people who thought of themselves as scientists, guess what? They did better than math. And so it's like, if we… if we position recognition as a social… as social media.

Yes, there's comments, there's emojis, and that does create that, you know, obviously that is a component of social media. But there's a lot of things that have emojis and comments that's not social media, like ticket tracking.

Or, development tracking, right? A lot of things have emojis and comments that aren't a social media.

Right? So I think it's… it's… it's… when we frame it as social media, then… then the tenured employees can be turned off. That's why we're trying to reframe it as when logging. With Recognize, you can send recognitions privately, right? You can send it just to them, it's not social.

So, encourage those tenured employees, hey, this is not, just to be social media, this is to record the wins of the company, and the wins of people that are doing good work. So, please recognize someone that does something awesome, so that goes to their manager, because when you send a private recognition.

then it goes to, the manager, but not to the main feed. You know, you could even have fun with it maybe a little bit, have a badge that is always private. You can make certain badges and recognize always be private, right? So, maybe,

you know, you kind of have some fun with the naming of this badge that really is meant for your, your maybe tenured employees. This is for them to send. Maybe, you know, only the people who have been around the company for so many years are allowed to give it.

And it's always private. And you frame it not as a social media recognition, but as, again, as a record of winning.

So,

So, yeah, try that. Let me know how it goes. Email me, email your customer success manager or our support. It's just support at recognizeapp.com.

Very interesting. Yeah, we do see companies who have this kind of interesting culture right now, where they have

Half their employees are… been there for a year, and they're 22 years old, and then the other half of the employees

are in their, you know, 50s, and they've been there for 30 years. And that can be… that can be a challenge to… to cross that bridge. That's why, some things may not be for everybody, and… and we want to… but have something for everybody, and we want to position it for them.

In some way, and it takes a little bit of thought. The best thing to do is get out of the office, talk to people, hear what people have to say, do those interviews. And the amazing thing is, now that we have Zoom transcripts, we have Teams transcripts.

We can pipe those transcripts into AI to help tease out things we missed, those diamonds in the rough. I'll have calls with customers or prospects, and then I'll take my own notes, and I think my notes are great. But then I read the transcript, and how the transcript is ran through an AI analyzer, and it shows all the stuff I missed.

So, you know, it's funny to think that AI is helping me be more empathetic, but it's true.

Okay, so just summarizing, what you can do, from this session, so 6 things you can do, take a look at both the sender and the recipient RES, and also the reach.

We're not showing the reach, actually, the number of views in Recognize today, but we are looking… this is something that's come up this week, is actually showing the impact per recognition, and that's something that we're going to be adding, over the next number of months in our roadmap. A lot of exciting things in our roadmap.

We're making the user experience friendlier, we have a lot of exciting AI features in the works, around basically storytelling around winning.

So, look for that in the future. So, again, framing it as wind logging. It should be integrated if you're using something like Recognize or, another software solution.

Definitely have it within your Outlook, your SharePoint, your Teams.

Right? Your phone,

everywhere you work, it makes it so much more accessible, and have contests on people activating, getting in there. We find once someone gets in there, they're… 98% of people are doing some kind of action. They're liking, they're sending a recognition.

Right? So just getting them in there is so critical, and having it in their tools they're already using is critical. To do that.

Talk to your managers, communicate to them why it's important to them, first talk to them, learn what their needs are, how to frame it in their wording.

And then use AI to summarize those conversations, and then use their language to communicate how this is important, and make it… and show them with social proof from executives how easy it is to access that manager portal.

Gamify the admin, help them win.

have a fun program that's internal in the HR team, if they are successful in that, you know, basically internal product marketing of programs like Recognition, and get many people involved. Don't do all the hard work yourself on the HR team. Get directors involved. I bet they have initiatives. I bet your directors have things that they're trying to promote.

Well, a great way to promote them is by showing people doing it.

Other people want to copy… be copycats. People want to be me too. So, they want to be involved, they want to be doing that.

So, find out from the directors what their core KPIs are, what they're trying to move, what their headaches are, what keeps them up at night, and say, hey, we can create a recognition badge strategy around positive reinforcement on those just for your group, using the role system within Recognize. So, look at that as well.

And rounding it out, so, I just love this summary again, just the first week, review, second week, third week,

learn and engage, do something, make an action, and then by the fourth week, measure. Sometimes it takes more than a month. Some things that we do on our team, when we do A-B testing, with different customers or different ideas.

it can take multiple months to get enough data. So, 30 days might be quick. 30 days, we want you to do something, but it may take up to a whole quarter to know if something moved the needle. But, you know.

That's a great thing about also A-B testing across different departments. Maybe you did something differently just with one department, and then compare that to the rest of the company, or another department. If you go to your leaders and show actual A-B test data, they'll be much more convinced than just speculation and hearsay.

Well, thanks so much for coming to this session, everybody. It's been a great 50 minutes together. I care a lot about this idea of keeping programs going for the long haul.

And, and I think we have a poll, to see how we did. So, if, if, Jess, you can pull up that… that one final poll, if that's possible. If not, it's okay.

Just to see how we did, in the, in the session here, but please come to our next webinar. We actually have a guest, next time, which is, I think, yeah, on, yeah, June 18th, so on Thursday, we're really excited to, to do that, so,

Please come to that. That's just in… just next week. And Kate McKinnon is awesome. She's a cheap people officer. We're gonna have a conversation… candid conversation, excuse me.

on culture, leadership, and performance. So please join us for that fireside chat.

in just one week. It's free to come to, it doesn't cost anything, and if you aren't already a customer of Recognize, and you're curious to learn more, you don't have to just come to a one-on-one demo, which can maybe be a little intense, right? Instead, just come to a group one.

And the amazing thing is we actually give $100 away to someone on that session. It's like, I'm…

like, hey, do we have to be doing that? That's a lot of money every time we do this. But… and while we do it, you should take advantage of it. So come to one of those sessions before the raffle goes away, because sometimes we have just, like, 30 people.

And as I touched on, you know, last time, the last time I mentioned this, if you get a scratch ticket and it says 1 in 30 people win $100, I mean, I would be getting one of those scratch tickets every week, or maybe every day.

So, you know, usually it's, like, 1 in, like, 200 million people or whatever.

So, and also, one thing that's cool is if you do sign up as a customer with us through those sessions, we do give $1,000 award credit, reward credit. So we're really pushing these new, kind of, group sessions we're doing. That's why we're doing so much of this, of this bonus, basically, for it. We may not do this forever, so come while you can, take advantage of those promotions.

But you can learn more about, how we do recognition, with Recognize, and how we promote culture. So, thank you so much for coming, everybody. This has been really fun!