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24 Aug 2021

How to plan a successful employee recognition platform

Leaders of high-performing companies have known for a long time that employee recognition is important to their people and productivity strategies. That importance has recently been heightened by the pandemic. According to one of our recent surveys, 21% of employees now want more recognition for doing good work. Another 17% are worried their performance will be invisible to their manager when they work remotely.

 

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This begs a question. How do you make sure you implement a recognition programme that will meet today’s short-term needs, satisfy employees’ new demands, but also help you achieve long-term positive outcomes?

Prepare to succeed

Creating an employee recognition scheme that has lasting value hasn’t always been easy for some organisations. Many have experienced problems with delivering schemes because of poor communication, lack of leadership involvement, inconsistent recognition and ultimately a lack of engagement from employees.

It doesn’t have to be that way though. These challenges are easily surmountable, just so long as you are prepared to put in the right level of preparation.

This is one of the key topics in our new buyer’s guide to employee recognition, which outlines the groundwork needed to create a programme that will help meet your needs now, and for many years to come. Here’s a brief outline of an action plan:

1. Identify a business lead for recognition

The first thing to do is to identify one person who will lead and own the implementation of your scheme. You need to outline their responsibilities, outcomes they need to achieve, and when and to whom they will report. This is key to creating a line of communication to leadership and garnering high-level support.

2. Do a recognition audit

There’s no point repeating the mistakes of the past, so you also need to fully understand what those mistakes might have been. Establish how you are using recognition currently, what you are doing well and what needs to change. It’s also a good idea to look at what competitors are doing.

3. Involve your employees

Communication with your most important audience – employees – is critical, so you also need to set up a team which represents different employee groups from across the business. Explain what your plans are to them and listen to their feedback. Their ideas will be key to the success of your scheme, and will help you to avoid it being seen as a management initiative simply designed to make them work harder with no increase in salary.

4. Create a vision for your recognition strategy

It’s also critical to clarify what you want to achieve, what business outcomes will be delivered, and how this aligns to your existing values and behaviours. As part of your vision you should also set success measures and outline the specific return on investment you expect to achieve, aligned to specific business targets. Again, this will help you to get critical buy-in from leadership.

5. Agree a target budget

Recognition budgets can vary significantly from company to company depending on culture, size and revenue, so you also need to think about how you’re going to price your scheme. While there’s no right answer to how much budget you should allocate, there are two common approaches. First you can calculate budget as a percentage of company payroll. We recommend 1% to cover all costs including licence fees, reward budget, communications and reward events. Or alternatively, you can set a fixed value per employee per year, then deduct platform set-up and licence fee costs from this amount. The remainder is your annual reward budget.

Once you have completed this preparation, you will be in a perfect position to define your brief, start talking to potential partners and implement your scheme. You can find out all about this and more – including how to manage your scheme post-launch – in our full buyer’s guide to employee recognition on the REBA Reports page.

This article is provided by Edenred.

In partnership with Edenred

We help you build stronger connections with your employees to drive higher engagement&performance.

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