Did you know that there is a direct correlation between your employees and your profitability?

Rewarding or recognising your employees is not just about the monetary gratification or role implication that it has; it is about increasing their happiness quotient and motivating them in a manner that they continuously fuel your business growth; it is about increasing their engagement at the workplace. According to Forbes, only about 15% of the worldwide workforce is actively engaged with the job and the company (1).

Dale Carnegie, famous writer and lecturer on self-improvement is known to have said, “People work for money, but go the extra mile for recognition, praise and rewards”. Praise, of course, is self-explanatory, and it helps in creating a great working environment and boosting the morale of the employees, by intrinsically motivating them. However, benefits, perks, and rewards & recognition, while joined in the ultimate objective of motivating the employees, increasing their productivity and enabling retention, are as different as chalk and cheese.

Benefits are the basic, non-wage compensation that act as a supplement to the salary – health insurance, Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs), term insurance, etc. Perks, on the other hand, while again non-monetary in nature, are additional somethings that an employer throws in to sweeten the deal of the position on offer – a gym/club membership, a company car, discounted travel fares, etc.

Rewards & Recognition (R&R) schemes are doled out to reward performance and recognize achievements. It is an acknowledged fact that a good framework and efficient implementation of R&R programs trigger positive behaviours among employees, which is why, over 90% of organizations are known to invest in a comprehensive and innovative R&R program for their employees (2) . Effective R&R programs in essence have to (3) :

 Recognize individuals & teams in a timely way

 Provide diverse opportunities for the recognition

 Create a repeatable & sustainable practice that can evolve into a program in the organization

While most companies have the quintessential top down approach of R&R, several more are realizing that there is need beyond just rewarding or recognizing a specific achievement alone. Value-based programs that link an employee’s adherence to a core value of the organization are now recognized as an R&R for positive behaviour as are peer-to-peer recognitions.

Change is, however, far deeper than it appears on the surface.

For one, organizations are sensing that they are now dealing with employees who are high performers and achievers, who need to feel constantly engaged to their work, and who have, unlike their predecessors, a much lower threshold when it comes down to staying in one job and organization for long. This is the generation of the millennials who expect great career prospects, good packages and good visibility in the organization. If you give them a traditional reward that says, much later, at the time of their performance appraisal, that they did a good job, it is probably way too late. The timing is crucial: reward a performance or behaviour when it is still fresh in the mind. Employees these days are more about instant gratification and social recognition. They want to feel acknowledged socially and enjoy an enhanced self-image (4) . These millennials are also digital natives.

Workplaces are also becoming more digital, mobile, global, agile and multi-generational and exceedingly social in different ways. Employees are posting their achievements on social media websites to get instant likes and comments from peers. In this scenario, not only are the traditional systems of R&R totally out of place; the entire approach to the importance of a program has to transition from a good-to-have to becoming a strategic engagement initiative and a must-have. Companies with a strategic initiative reported a 23.4% lower attrition than organizations with a specific R&R program.

Alongside the evolving behaviours of the employees, and their diverse need for motivators, there is also the fact that digital transformation has changed the face of every organization these days and the dependence on the Internet and mobile along with new generation technologies has come to stay. Social collaboration tools are gaining a lot of traction in providing feedback and giving instantaneous recognition. In order to maximize the Return on Investment (ROI) on their R&R programs, employers are leaning on technologies such as data analytics to help them get deeper insights, analyse and customize individual-specific R&Rs and give the employees a broader choice of rewards.

Some organizations are, with the assistance of solution providers, creating cloud-based integrated talent management sites where employees can get instantaneous R&Rs online from their peers and have all their achievements & milestones integrated into a continuous performance management process in order to increase the effectiveness of the conversations around their appraisals. Gamification of R&Rs where employees are given points for rewarding and receiving recognition is increasingly becoming a norm.

Integration is becoming the key to creating a sustainable and comprehensive R&R program loaded with the power of next-generation technologies such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create chatbots to measure and monitor positive behaviours. Organizations are turning towards solution providers, such as ZAGG Network, who can help them start the right conversation in a digital and socially connected world – the mobile, which is also rendered more secure by leveraging the power of blockchain technology. ZAGG Network is using the power of blockchain to not just create a single and unified platform for the R&R environment, but to also create an immutable and time-stamped distributed entry of all transactions. This makes the transaction easily retrievable but at the same time irreversible, which ensures that no fraud or manipulation is possible. The use of smart contracts also reduce the costs associated with legacy systems management as well as those related to possible fraud. Additionally, blockchain also enables the exchange of R&Rs in a real-time environment, expediting the whole process.

Employers and employees can now sign in to one interconnected intranet platform to benefit from:

 A single online and branded environment that acts as a central hub for all R&Rs – recognitions, rewards, peer-to-peer recognitions, performance recognition, milestone achievements, etc.

 Integration with the performance appraisal system in order to have a continuous and sustainable R&R practice

 Seamless integration into the organization’s HR system to keep track of the employee’s growth tangent, along with access to a real-time dashboard

 Regular monitoring and measurement of employee behaviour, ideas, innovations and performance

 Gamification of R&Rs where employees can send and receive points that can be seamlessly redeemed for a wide array of rewards using blockchain technology

 Analyse and manage rewards to understand their effectiveness and the organization’s ROI

 An integrated portal that brings together employees from diverse regions and cultures onto one single platform

 Regular newsfeeds, Leader boards, notifications, etc., to make it more socially engaging

 Global catalogue of gifts, rewards, experiences, vouchers, etc.

Looking at the transformation that has panned out in the global R&R space, there is no doubt that the world of recognition is changing like never before and that technology is at the helm of things, steering this transformation. While the new technologies are creating novel nuances in how an effective R&R program can run, they are also opening the doors to forging newer relationships in a digitally-connected world – they are helping organizations create effective R&R programs for digitally-native employees.