How Can The Right Software Enhance Your Employee Recognition System?

We've established that an employee recognition system is essential for your organisation to improve retention, performance, productivity, satisfaction, and overall employee engagement. In fact, according to research, teams who score in the top 20% of engagement demonstrate almost 60% less turnover and a 41% reduction in absenteeism.

But is there a way that you can further increase the success of your employee recognition system by utilising software to enhance your program? And if software can help, how do you even begin to start your search for the best employee recognition software partner to suit your organisation?

What is Employee Recognition System Software?

Employee recognition software supports or enhances your employee recognition program and can be supplied by various providers. It allows your organisation to reward or recognise your people systematically, and the software available will contain different functions to reward and recognise.

Not all organisations use software as part of their employee recognition system. If you decide to use software in your organisation, it will need to suit your recognition program objectives, budget, and organisational culture and size.

How it Benefits Remote or Hybrid Working

With 26% of British employees saying that they planned to continue to work from home permanently or occasionally after lockdown, it’s a work pattern that organisations will continue to experience. Therefore, recognition programs need to consider these workplace changes and ensure that the recognition culture extends to remote or hybrid workers. Again, this is an area where the right employee recognition software will really prove its benefit and reach.

What Should You Look For?

When you're researching employee recognition software, some factors are essential for your employee recognition program and some features that may be more suited to smaller, larger, more technologically advanced organisations, etc.

Here are some of the essential features of employee recognition system software:

Links to organisational values – all your employee recognition programs should link back to your organisational values, and your recognition software is no exception. So if your organisational culture aligns with your values, you also need your software to do the same.

Accessible – one of the most significant benefits of using employee recognition software is that your people can use it regardless of their location. If individuals can access the software wherever they are, it makes it inclusive and ensures that everybody has access to give or receive recognition wherever they physically work.

For example, if colleagues or a manager and employee are away on a business trip together, why wait until they get back to the workplace to acknowledge or reward someone? The right software should allow them to do it on the spot.

Easy to use – with different technology programs forming an integral function of many employees’ roles, if you're going to introduce another system, make sure it's easy to use. If it's not intuitive and quick to use, then you may not have the participation rates you want to create your recognition culture. In addition, if users have to seek help to understand the system or are limited in its functions, they may give up entirely.

Secure – it goes without saying that all software containing personal employee information should be highly secure so that information is confidential. This is something to review when looking at software options to ensure security and communicate this to all employees so they are comfortable using the employee recognition system or software.

Instant recognition – one of the key benefits of employee recognition software is that it can offer your people instant recognition, as effective recognition does need to be timely. For example, if you give recognition or feedback to an individual weeks or months after they've done something particularly well, it may not be impactful recognition. In fact, they may have spent time feeling like they weren't recognised because the recognition was so late!

Therefore, employee recognition software allows individuals or managers to recognise someone instantly and may include on-the-spot manager awards.

Reward and recognition – as both reward and recognition are essential for employee engagement, ideally, your employee recognition system will provide options for recognising and rewarding employees. For example, the recognition area could involve simple features like shout-outs or acknowledgements for individual or team performance. Still, there might also be options to give awards to individuals or select a reward if you are recognised for one.

Option for social recognition – for a truly inclusive culture, recognition should reach beyond just allowing managers to recognise employees. Social or peer-to-peer recognition is also a fundamental way to motivate and encourage employees and let them recognise each other.

This also links to how individuals like to receive recognition, as there will be different motivators, and peer-to-peer recognition can be incredibly powerful.

The ‘nice to have’ Software Features

The following features may not make or break the success of your employee recognition software, but they can certainly help to improve it:

Reportable – effective employee recognition software should allow you to create reports on the data at any given time. This flexibility will enable you to create reports to gain insights into the workplace recognition system in real-time to assess your culture of recognition and the success of the systems.

Compatible – it's likely that you have more than one system or software within your company, and even HR may use multiple systems. Therefore, your employee recognition system must be compatible with your existing HRIS or workplace systems to make a seamless user experience.

For instance, if you use a self-service system for your employees to select benefits or holidays etc., it would be much easier for them if they had a single sign-in where they could access all this and the employee recognition system. If you make it easier for them to use, it's probably more likely to use the recognition system. By aligning the recognition software with the HRIS, you ensure that employee data is accurate.  

Personalised – if you can use a software provider to personalise the recognition system to your organisation, it will blend into the organisation and feel more authentic. This could be by using a recognition platform that uses your brand logo or colours and may go one step further and brand vouchers or cards as reward options.

Collaborative – when reviewing software providers, it's important to consider which ones will work alongside you to improve your recognition culture and be a partner to your organisation rather than a hindrance. Ideally, your software provider will be able to help you set up the right employee recognition system for your organisation and values and work with you over time to review how effective the software is and if adaptions need to be made.

Tell People About the Recognition Software

Don’t forget to tell everyone in the organisation about your excellent employee recognition software and encourage them to use it. For example, you could show a demo of the software and what it can do during a new starter induction and give existing employees practical tips and ideas, so they use it. 

You can also add recognition How-Tos in intranet posts, blogs, or videos so that individuals have easy access to understand how the software works. In addition, you could show demos of the software on screens around the office, and managers could discuss it in face-to-face or virtual team meetings.

And Finally, Ask For Feedback!

Once your employee recognition system is in place and is actively being used, after a period of time you can ask for employee and manager feedback as to how it’s working. You may include questions in your employee survey about it, and managers can also ask individuals for feedback informally or in focus groups. Once you clearly understand what’s working well and what could be improved, you can review your strategy and discuss options with your software provider.

There’s no doubt that you need to recognise your people and their contributions to the organisation, and employee recognition software can really help you to build a recognition culture. By making it easy for individuals (regardless of their level or location) to recognise each other at any given time, you are on your way to normalising feedback and recognition within your organisation. You want your people to show up to work with purpose, passion, and energy, and a culture of recognition can help you to encourage this.

Sorwe provides the tools you need to provide and receive recognition in your organisation. Please get in touch with us to learn more about how Sorwe solutions can help you improve your reward and recognition practices.