Tips and Tricks: How to Enhance Employee Recognition on Workplace from Meta
Recognition in the workplace. Why is it important?
The concept of recognition in the workplace is more than just a warm gesture. According to psychologist Abraham Maslow, recognition is one of the five fundamental human psychological needs coming just after food, safety, and belonging in importance (McLead, 2023). It has been found that employees who don’t feel recognised, often struggle to describe what makes their workplace great, which can cause them to disengage entirely (Gallup, 2023). Studies show that affirmation, feedback and rewards are most effective for motivating employees to do their best work, fuelling growth, and giving them a sense of purpose, proving a recognition program is not just a nice-to-have; it’s mission critical for your organistion.
Luckily, one of the many benefits of having a digital employee communication tool like Workplace, is there are several ways you can recognise your employees quickly and easily. And the good news is, it’s pretty straightforward.
Five ways to recognise your employees on Workplace
A plain ol’ Shout out posts – A ‘shout-out post’ is one of the most widely used and most effective in Workplace. They empower both managers and peers to acknowledge and tag colleagues in a post publicly. That’s one of the reasons we love Workplace. Its inclusive nature ensures everyone has a platform to spread positivity openly and organically.
Send thanks feature – The “send thanks” feature is a quick and easy way to show Kudos and allows for personalised appreciation. Employees can navigate to their colleagues’ profiles, click “give thanks,” craft a gratitude-filled message, and even notify the colleague’s manager.
Badges – Workplace offers a variety of badges that automatically show appreciation to individuals. You can even create custom badges. Badges offer a scalable way to recognise and appreciate employees, and appear directly on an individual’s profile page. Badges are awarded individually or in bulk, and admins can toggle specific badges on or off at any time. System admins, content moderators, account managers, and any admin with a custom role containing the “manage badges” permission, can utilise this feature from the Admin Panel.
Groups – A dedicated ‘recognition group’ provides a visible home for expressing appreciation, and is a clear signal to your employees about the importance recognition plays in your organisation. While we encourage this, there are still some best practice approaches that you should follow:
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- Create an open group called “Recognition” and automatically add all your employees.
- Outline the criteria in the description or via a pinned post for inviting peer, manager, and leader nominations aligned to your organisational values and mission.
- Encourage managers to share stories of the impact their teams are creating daily, and encourage staff to share their appreciation of others who went above and beyond.
- Roll out regular initiatives like “Win of the Week” or “Teammate of the Month”, and encourage peers to submit their nominations and announce the winners through a regular live spotlight. We’ve seen this done exceptionally well. Customers often enjoy tapping into the healthy competitive spirit of their employees and often include prizes.
Limitations of Workplace recognition features
The above approaches are effective ways to practice appreciation and recognition within your workplace, but like all things, they have their limitations.
- If you aren’t careful you can end up with inconsistent and outweighed experiences. Posts can end up here, there, and everywhere if you don’t have a clear recognition strategy.
- It should also be noted that you can’t automatically tie your values or missions to a post in this way like you can with customised automation. It needs to be self-guided and enforced.
- You can’t automatically deliver rewards through these features as is
- Recognition features lack some reporting and can be hard to measure
- On a mass level, this can be laborious and manual if one person is administering this on an enterprise level
Compliment your recognition strategy with bot automation
While Workplace recognition has a few limitations, there are other ways you can employ automation to speed up and track the experience more seamlessly like Bots. Enablo has deployed recognition bots for a number of different customers to help them speed up processes, save time on manual labour, and help measure impact.
Recognition Bot (Frucor Suntory) – This bot allows employees to recognise peers in line with their organisations values. They simply open the bot, nominate their colleague, select a value, and include a message about their experience. This will appear as a post in a group for everyone to see. It also comes with insights capabilities to help you track and measure the levels of recognition happening across the business.
Features include:
- Peer-to-peer Recognition
- Simple chat workflow
- Links to customisable employer values
- Automatically posted in groups
- Admin dashboard for customisation and reporting
Service Awards Bot (G8 Educations ) – This bot automates and streamlines its internal employee service award programs. It helps G8 Education connect to multiple systems so when an employee has a birthday or a service anniversary, it automatically sends them a message recognising the occasion whilst also distributing a gift card. It also notifies managers, giving them a heads-up on employee milestones to encourage recognition organically outside of the app.
Features include:
- Birthdays & Service Anniversaries
- Fully automated process via 1:1 chat
- Gift/reward distribution
- Connects to multiple 3rd party sources for employee data and e-voucher rewards
- Connects to managers giving them a heads-up on employee milestones
- Admin dashboard for customisation and reporting
Recognition on Workplace – key takeaways
Recognition is an essential ingredient for cultivating engaged employees. As you start to map out or update your recognition strategy, make sure you use Workplace as your ally. Embrace techniques like shout-out posts, say-thanks feature, badges, and groups to embed recognition seamlessly. For those seeking to amplify impact, bot automation is also a great way to accelerate processes, champion the culture of appreciation, and save you hours of manual work.
Remember:
- Recognition isn’t just a nice to have. It’s a basic human need
- Leverage Workplace’s versatile features to bolster recognition initiatives in your organisation
- Have a clear recognition strategy to avoid spamming your people unnecessarily
- Use bot automation to accelerate processes even further and save time
Need help, or interested to know more?
If you are looking for further information or need help utilising recognition on Workplace, contact your friendly CSM or post your questions in our Enablo Learning Community. Or, if you would like to learn more about enhancing your Workplace recognition strategy, Book a Chat with one of our friendly consultants.
