Reaching the 87% of employees who are disengaged, with an effortless rewards program

Since Gallup revealed such horrifying levels of employee engagement it’s been high up on the HR agenda, and with statistics like this it’s easy to understand why:

With today’s tech-savvy generation revealing the lowest levels of trust (only 19% of Millennials say most people can be trusted compared with 40% of Baby Boomers, which is the lowest ever on record) and the highest expectations in terms of social tools available in the workplace, tackling this crisis may seem daunting.

Yet there are quick wins out there which will help you drive a culture shift to increased collaboration and more trusting employees.

So let us take you on a journey of the simple tools you can make available through your intranet that will support you in getting there.

Today’s topic: an effective and effortless rewards program.

How does a rewards program on your intranet work?

In simple terms, Rewards is a tool that allows employees to recognise their peers when they help them in their role by giving points. It’s completely up to you how this is managed, who can award points to who, whether they equate to a prize over time, how many points employees have to give; it’s all designed with complete flexibility to suit different corporate cultures and budgets.

So what?

Now you may be wondering how much of a difference this will make. When the Rewards Widget appears on your intranet homepage, it’s there for everyone to see, and naturally gives you a boost – who doesn’t feel a warm glow from getting publically recognised for doing a good job?

You can see where this is going:

• Rewarding one another instantly builds relationships and creates a more collaborative culture, regardless of department, location or seniority
• Those recognized want to continue to do a good job to build their points and get acknowledgment of a job well done
• Others want a piece of the reward pie too, for their name to appear on the homepage, breeding collaboration and a more productive workforce

The stats speak for themselves:

How are other organisations using Rewards?

Well the best place to start is at home. At Interact we award colleagues donuts on our intranet, which we call Homer. You build up your donuts and exchange them for prizes. Each employee receives 10 donuts per month to give out.
Once you’ve built up a bank of donuts you can choose to spend them how you wish, from the smallest prizes which are reasonably achievable (15 donuts for a box of chocolates) to the more challenging targets such as 410 for an iPod Nano. At the end of the year there is an additional prize for the person who has received the most donuts over the course of the year.

Business Environment built Rewards into their HR framework

A customer who inspires us with their use of Rewards is Business Environment. Their innovation saw them included in the industry-leading Nielsen Norman Group’s Enterprise 2.0 2013 report.

Business Environment initially offered Amazon vouchers for a set level of points. However they then chose to rebrand their Rewards to ‘Smarties’. Anyone can still reward anyone else with Smarties but passing a vocational qualification also gains you points.

When Business Environment conduct annual reviews of employees, their manager is given an export of each reward their employee has received. The review process now includes an employee’s view, a manager’s view and a record of peer-to-peer impact – cheerio to the long pause when you get asked “what did you do eleven months ago?”

Still not convinced?

We’d be happy to discuss our Rewards tool and other customer examples with you. In the meantime check out this Interact careers video, where our employees talk about what’s important to them in the workplace: