Motivosity Expert Review, Pricing, Alternatives - 2023

Unlike many vendors in the recognition space, Motivosity believes in an employee driven culture which manifests itself in a product focused on peer to peer recognition and engagement versus the top down nature of most incumbent players in this space.

Over 96% of employees use Motivosity’s system in a month.  To us, that stat really says it all.  Employee recognition solutions drive value when employees are actually engaged, and a 96% rate of engagement can only be achieved with a superior product.

The core workflow is that employees login, tag a colleague to be recognized, say why they are recognizing this person, connect it to a company value, choose how much they want to reward, and post.  Other employees can now see this recognition, add to the dollar total, like, and comment.  It’s simple, yet effective.

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There are many small details their product team has implemented to create a seamless experience.  For example, you can post comments to upcoming birthdays/work anniversaries and the comments don’t go live until the date of the celebration.  This means once a month you can give kudos to all upcoming birthdays, without having to login each day. See below for more detail on features and functionality within the product.

As mentioned, this company has the philosophy that engagement and recognition should come from the bottom up, not from management down.  This means the product is accessible to employees (they have a mobile app, slack/teams integrations, and it’s just simple to use with an interface that looks like a social network vs enterprise software).  It also means that employees get money to reward one another, it’s not only coming from managers.

There are several virtuous feedback loops in this product that make it so successful.  Each time an employee is recognized, they are encouraged to log in, see who recognized them, and then give their own recognition.  This of course inspires newly recognized employees to come back and repeat the cycle.

In addition, their rewards are easy to use.  They even launched a debit card recently (called the #Thanksmatters card) that allows employees to spend their rewards as cash wherever Visa is accepted.  When you use your rewards, it reinforces the good vibes with your employer, and also leads to more recognizing!  In fact, employees who have this debit card recognize colleagues at a 40% higher rate!

While Motivosity is a leader in the employee recognition and rewards space, it is also worth noting their other employee experience modules which have continued to grow as their product evolves.  They have 1:1 management, surveys, eNPS, coaching, succession planning, manager scorecards, and all the reporting you’d expect from a modern HR solution.

Lastly, it’s important to note that Motivosity’s solution isn’t a heavy lift for HR teams.  The average administrator spends just 43 minutes per month in this system.  For a tool that can do so much to help with employee engagement, that is a high ROI investment!

KPMG, Bosch, Toyota, cotopaxi, WGU

Motivosity’s product is changing every time we see it!  However, there are a few features that we feel help set it apart from other vendors:

• eNPS: Motivosity has a built in employee Net Promoter Score survey that goes out on the cadence you choose (we recommend quarterly).  Scores above 30% are great, and you can pay employees to incentivize completions (usually $2/employee).

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• Surveys: If you’re looking to do pulse surveys or generally understand employee engagement, you can do that through Motivosity.
• Lead: This tool has an entire suite for managers that includes 1:1 management, coaching, succession planning, manager scorecards and more.
• Org chart: You can visualize your organization within this tool.  This is especially useful for smaller companies that don’t have an HRIS with similar functionality.
• Employee profiles: Employees each have their own profiles that lists what they do in the company, outside of work, and even a personality score.  When you view another colleague’s profile, you immediately get a sense for who they are so that you can best collaborate with them.

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• #Thanksmatter card: They recently launched a debit card that allows employees to spend rewards much more freely.  As mentioned, employees who use this card recognize others at a 40% higher rate (when you use rewards, you are reminded to recognize!).
• Leaderboard: There is a leaderboard to show who is recognizing (not recognized) the most in the company.
• Analytics: There are many pre-built reports, our favorite is one that shows how different parts of the organization recognize one another.

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• Employee awards: You can create awards for just about anything: who did the most sales calls, who can eat the most hot wings, who won the company foosball tournament.‍
• Customizable rewards: In your rewards shop you can include a wide range of rewards including gift cards, experiences, and company branded swag.

• Slack
• BambooHR
• WorkDay
• Okta
• Namify
• SSO
• Sharepoint

They also have an Open API for vendors to build on top of, and are constantly launching new integrations.

Motivosity’s pricing works per module. “Connect” is included with every license of the other three. They do offer a free trial for each of them and the pricing is as follows: 

• Connect: Free
• Recognize: $4 per person per month
• Lead: $5 per person per month‍
• Listen: $2 per person per month

Movitosity’s employee recognition software has customers from 10 person startups to 10,000 employee large enterprises.  However, their sweet spot tends to be mid market (100-3,000 employee) companies that are looking to take their employee experience to a new level.

Implementation support is included for all customers, cost-free, in every plan. If you have an HRIS that integrates with their solution, it’s very simple to import data and keep your employee profiles updated.  If not, it’s a matter of uploading this data and keeping it up to date manually.

Projects usually start with a kickoff meeting between the team and Motivosity’s experts except for the smallest companies which onboard themselves. 

Afterwards, phone and email support are provided in order to walk customers through the launch. The time to launch depends a lot on your company size and can be as little as a few days to a few months.

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Key considerations here are to figure out how much you want to give in rewards (usually $3-5/employee/mo), if you want to setup custom rewards (company swag, local restaurants, value aligned rewards), and how you want to communicate the launch (soft launch, party, at ab offsite, etc).

• Premium support is included with every product 
• This includes self-help options such as help desk, help site, community site, and training videos that are constantly updated. 
• Motivosity also include quarterly QBRs with a dedicated Customer Success representative for large customers.

Motivosity was founded by serial entrepreneur Scott Johnson who had previously built WorkFront, another HR Tech company that was sold to Adobe for $1.5 Billion.

The mission of the business is to make employees happier at work.  You can see this in their product which is very much focused on employees vs administrators and managers (although it helps them too by having more engaged workforce!)

They definitely punch above their weight in terms of delivering a strong product that easily competes with the larger incumbents in this space like WorkHuman and OC Tanner.  In addition, their broad mission means we are pretty sure we’ll keep seeing new product releases outside of their core recognition module that broaden their scope, and help push innovation in the employee experience category.