An Expert Review of Nectar's Employee Recognition Tool - 2023

Nectar has a broad slate of features to allow management and employees to give each other reward points. Our favorite features are their analytics tools, which let you see how teams are engaging with a strong recognition culture.

Nectar is a 360° recognition & rewards platform, as it includes social recognition, awards, challenges, milestones, discounts, and other kinds of perks. We’ll go into more detail on what these mean, but first we must point out that Nectar also stands out for having a completely free version and being especially friendly for remote-first teams. 

Nectar's solution is built around a peer to peer recognition feed that aligns employee accomplishments with company core values. The feed itself is very much like a social network. You can mention a coworker, add a reason why you’re recognizing them in a public forum, add a certain number of points, and mention which of the operational core values (why you’d previously set) is tied to this commendation. 

As to rewards, each employee (including managers) gets a points balance each month which they can allocate to colleagues that go above and beyond. Those points don’t expire and are redeemable within the same platform. Nectar is also known to have an extensive reward selection—  Amazon products, gift cards, company swag, charities, and a whole lot more.

Then, an additional perk that sets Nectar apart is that companies can offer exclusive discounts to their employees. As of 2022, the companies that Nectar have partnered with for this offering include Airbnb, Six Flags, Papa Johns, Walt Disney World, Costco, and many more. 

Other recent features include their wellness component and their organizational network analysis tool. The latter gives HR insights into which teams recognize one another the most and is a part of their broader analytics module. 

As a final note, we’ll add that we’ve kept in constant contact with the guys at Nectar for years and have noticed that they tend to release new features and high-impact integrations with good frequency.

While they do offer volume discounts to companies with more than 500 employees, enterprise customers don’t really make the bulk of Nectar’s current customer base. Those looking for more of a white glove service and having more resources deployed for your account might not be the best fit for Nectar, as they’re a smaller team and definitely more on the SMB and remote-friendly end of both spectrums.

Heineken, Teachable, Major League Baseball, SHRM, Eightfold.ai

• Sizeable reward catalog: On demand company branded swag as rewards, plus a large variety of other rewards including gift cards, charities, etc. Amazon products are also available as rewards for millions of options plus quick shipping.
• Analytics: A reporting module shows you the most/least active employees, Leaderboards
• Organizational network analysis (ONA): Tied to reporting, this feature allows you to see which teams are supporting which other teams. 

Nectar also has capabilities for creating:  

• Step count and other fitness challenges
• Recognition for employee awards like President's club, employee of the month, etc.

• Single sign on (SSO)
• A variety of HRIS integrations: Bamboo, Rippling, Paycor, ADP, Namely and many more
• Slackbot that allows people to give/receive recognition via slack
• Microsoft Teams integration where you can use the entire product within Teams

Nectar offers a free tier that is unlimited and designed to help companies showcase the value of recognition to senior management.

Their Standard Plan is $2.50 per employee per month ($2.75 if billed monthly) and includes key features like manager to employee recognition, Slack/Teams integration, recognition automation for birthdays/anniversaries, and analytics.

Their Plus Plan is $3.75 per employee per month ($4.25 if billed monthly) and includes key features like customer branding, SSO, HRIS integrations, wellness challenges, and on demand company swag as a reward option.

Lastly, Nectar has volume discounts for organizations with 500+ users.

Organizations with 50-500~ employees who want a high engagement peer-to-peer employee rewards solution that is cost effective.

Since they have a free version, implementing Nectar at first is as easy as signing up and inviting your colleagues to join. You can start using the platform pretty much instantly. For one of the paid plans, you’d have to first book a demo so their customer success team can get a good sense of your needs and the program that you’d create within the platform. Implementation times will vary depending on the outcome of said demo and the scope of your team’s needs.

Companies on the Plus Plan get a dedicated account manager.

While many workforce engagement platforms are about peer-to-peer & manager-to-employee recognition, Nectar has always been about helping distributed teams stay connected. This philosophy has set them apart even since 2015, when remote work wasn’t as common as it is today.

Which is not to say that they can’t be a good fit for centralized companies too. It’s just that their features definitely revolve around being able to reward and recognize employees anytime and anywhere.

Now, although the philosophy behind Nectar has stayed steady over the years, the platform is constantly evolving, as we mentioned in the review and features sections of our deep dive. Working out of Orem, Utah and other parts of the US, it’s remarkable that a team of 30~ has been servicing companies like Heineken and the MLB quite successfully.