Employee recognition tools have many features to help build a strong company culture and employee engagement including:

• Peer-to-Peer Recognition: Allows employees to recognize each other’s contributions, creating a supportive and collaborative work environment. Nectar is, for example, one of the top employee reward and recognition program companies for peer recognition through personal employee awards and appreciation quotes.
• Manager-to-Employee Recognition: Gives managers the tools to recognize their team members’ achievements, reinforce positive behaviour and boost morale. Platforms like Reward Gateway and Bucketlist let managers offer timely and meaningful recognition with many options to choose from.
• Social Recognition: Publicly recognizing achievements helps form an appreciation culture. Motivosity’s social recognition, for instance, creates a community-focused environment where peers can view and engage with recognition.
• Customizable Rewards Catalog: This allows employees to choose the perks and rewards that mean something to them, from custom eCards to charitable donations. For example, Guusto offers extensive reward options, including company merchandise and experiences you can redeem at over 60,000 stores worldwide.
• Automated Milestone Celebrations: Automated milestone celebrations are a way to celebrate significant events like work anniversaries and birthdays. Nectar is one of the employee recognition vendors that make milestone celebrations easy with native automated service awards and birthday recognitions.
• Integration with Team Collaboration Tools: Recognition can be integrated into daily workflows through platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams. Matter serves as a perfect illustration—the employee recognition tool lets employees recognize others directly within Slack and Teams, so they can acknowledge them in real-time.‍
• Mobile Accessibility: Reward and recognition programs are accessible to remote or deskless workers through mobile-friendly platforms. Kudos is one of many vendors that have mobile-optimized apps for on-the-go recognition program participation.
• Reporting and Analytics: Gives you detailed insights into program performance so you can measure impact and adjust. For instance, Motivosity has real-time analytics and dashboards to see engagement and recognition trends, all of which combines to empower your rewards and recognition strategy.

Employee recognition tools have many features to help build a strong company culture and employee engagement including:

• Peer-to-Peer Recognition: Allows employees to recognize each other’s contributions, creating a supportive and collaborative work environment. Nectar is, for example, one of the top employee reward and recognition program companies for peer recognition through personal employee awards and appreciation quotes.
• Manager-to-Employee Recognition: Gives managers the tools to recognize their team members’ achievements, reinforce positive behaviour and boost morale. Platforms like Reward Gateway and Bucketlist let managers offer timely and meaningful recognition with many options to choose from.
• Social Recognition: Publicly recognizing achievements helps form an appreciation culture. Motivosity’s social recognition, for instance, creates a community-focused environment where peers can view and engage with recognition.
• Customizable Rewards Catalog: This allows employees to choose the perks and rewards that mean something to them, from custom eCards to charitable donations. For example, Guusto offers extensive reward options, including company merchandise and experiences you can redeem at over 60,000 stores worldwide.
• Automated Milestone Celebrations: Automated milestone celebrations are a way to celebrate significant events like work anniversaries and birthdays. Nectar is one of the employee recognition vendors that make milestone celebrations easy with native automated service awards and birthday recognitions.
• Integration with Team Collaboration Tools: Recognition can be integrated into daily workflows through platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams. Matter serves as a perfect illustration—the employee recognition tool lets employees recognize others directly within Slack and Teams, so they can acknowledge them in real-time.‍
• Mobile Accessibility: Reward and recognition programs are accessible to remote or deskless workers through mobile-friendly platforms. Kudos is one of many vendors that have mobile-optimized apps for on-the-go recognition program participation.
• Reporting and Analytics: Gives you detailed insights into program performance so you can measure impact and adjust. For instance, Motivosity has real-time analytics and dashboards to see engagement and recognition trends, all of which combines to empower your rewards and recognition strategy.

Having a recognition program in place is important to both your company’s human and financial capital. Recognition software can bring numerous benefits, including increased employee engagement, access to valuable data, and automated recognition processes.

• More Engaged Workforce: Employee recognition programs make it easier for employees to engage with each other in ways that align with your company’s values and work culture. Employee recognition statistics show that higher engagement is great for the bottom line, too: organizations with high employee engagement levels are 21% more profitable.
• Better Team Well-being: Regular recognition makes employees feel valued and appreciated, which reduces stress and improves mental health. A study found that 69% of employees believe their well-being would improve if they were thanked more often.
• Improved Employee Retention: Recognized employees are more likely to remain with their employer. Statistically, organizations with recognition programs experience 31% lower voluntary turnover compared to those without such programs.
• Attracting Top Talent: Unsurprisingly, a recognition culture makes an organization more attractive to future employees. And organizations that put employee recognition first are in a better position to attract top talent looking for a positive work environment.
• Actionable Employee Data: The best employee recognition platforms often come with engagement measurement capabilities (e.g., pulse surveys), which provide you with all sorts of useful metrics. This data will help you ensure that recognition plans are being executed within a specific budget and time frame and that rewards are fairly distributed.‍
• Streamlined Recognition Processes: Automatic reminders of work and personal anniversaries, competitions, and monthly awards not only bring consistent recognition across all levels of your business but also streamline the recognition operations for your HR employees.

Integrating the platform with the rest of your tech stack, frequently measuring the impacts of implemented recognition programs, automating workflows, and maximizing peer-to-peer recognition opportunities are all key best practices for HR specialists working with employee recognition programs. Of course, all this is made simpler if you also make an effort to secure management buy-in.

• HR Integration: Before buying a recognition platform, make sure you have the right HR software integrations. Onboarding one that doesn’t work well with your existing tech stack will only hamstring your business. At an absolute minimum, any platform you pick should integrate with your company’s Human Resource Information System (HRIS) as well as team communication tools.
• Regular Program Checkups: Not all employees respond to recognition in the same way, so it’s well worth spending time performing regular checkups to determine whether the current recognition program works and what types of recognition resonate with different employees to make necessary adjustments.
• Recognition Automation: Automating employee recognition where appropriate is another fantastic time saver and likely one of the most popular features of this type of software among HR pros. As mentioned above, even automating simple reminders like work or personal anniversaries frees up significant time.
• Peer-to-Peer Engagement: Peer-to-peer recognition is arguably the most important employee recognition type. Employees should have a say in the rewards and recognition that motivate them the most. Your employee recognition ROI will be levels higher if you encourage engagement throughout your organization rather than settling for a top-down tool that delivers information in one direction.‍
• Internal HR Tech Buy-in: Present a clear plan of action for integration, checkups and automation, and peer-to-peer engagement. Your organization’s decision-makers need to be able to easily understand the return on investment of your time and their money. Once that’s established, they’re more likely to give your HR team the freedom to implement these best practices as effectively as possible.