Driving Employee Engagement Using Recognition Badges

Employee engagement is the emotional commitment employees feel towards their organization. It is the extent to which employees use discretionary effort, are committed to the organization's success, and feel empowered and passionate about their work.

“Companies with highly engaged workforces outperform their peers by 147% in earnings per share” - (Gallup, 2018).

Employee engagement is really important! Beneficial effects of employee engagement include boosted productivity; increased client satisfaction; keeping your best employees and enhancing the culture of the organization. But how do you increase employee engagement? Recognition is an effective method. Despite being the easiest and fastest way to improve engagement and morale, it is often underutilized in the workplace. Badges represent an easy-to-integrate recognition method.

PeopleGoal’s recognition badges functionality and social recognition module are powerful tools with which you can create unique recognition structures which have real positive impact. Badges are continuously growing in popularity. They make things fun, whilst also monitoring and boosting levels of engagement and performance! They convey a message of achievement and acknowledgement, exemplifying an individual or team for exceptional achievement, expertise or conduct. They can even be used to signify an individual’s career milestones, highlighting the holistic nature of badge functionality. Using recognition badges to boost employee engagement is an effective method that more and more companies will continue to use, and it can be an innovative metric to gauge the health of a team.

Benefits of using Recognition Badges

There are five key benefits to using a badge recognition system:

Drive engagement in the digital workplace

Badges allow for a different type of engagement – digital. This follows a transition from traditional to continuous performance management. Prior forms of employee engagement are still relevant and justified, but companies need to begin to develop digital engagement pathways as well.

Specific and Relevant

Badges allow managers to combine general recognition of discretionary effort and performance with acknowledgement of specific tasks and achievements.

Grows Expertise

Over time individuals may show a pattern of receiving badges for a specific task or skill. This signifies a shift from good performer in an area to an expert. This, in turn, leads to aforementioned cascading effects, namely: employee development, increased information sharing, teamwork and improved performance.

Holistic Recognition

We all know the importance of recognition. Above we’ve viewed recognition in terms of skills and performance, but is important to note that badges can be used to highlight an individual’s commitment to company service. New qualifications, work anniversaries and promotions all qualify for recognition. It is important to give the employees the appreciation and awareness they deserve, which may in turn engender further engagement in other employees.

Helping track engagement and performance

Badges can be used as a metric to track engagement and performance in a given team or department. There are two main reasons why a team may not be meeting normal rates of giving and receiving recognition badges. It could be that they don’t like the module, or more importantly, it could be that they may be having performance and engagement issues. Put simply, monitoring recognition provides an indication for the health of a team.

Types of Recognition Badges available on the PeopleGoal Social Recognition module

PeopleGoal’s badge functionality is part of the social recognition module on the platform, which allows teams to recognize employee performance and promote peer-to-peer contributions across the company. The social recognition module is visible to all employees across the platform. The badge functionality comes with 16 pre-configured badges which can be customized to suit your company’s values. Outlined below are the badge types available on the recognition module.

Individual

These can be seen as individual accomplishment by employees who exhibit ‘above and beyond’ behaviour and show commitment to the organization. Anyone can issue these badges when they like and for any reason, allowing total flexibility for individual recognition. When a badge is given to an employee, recognition is evident to all employees across the digital workspace; this allows employees to identify a real-life example of what discretionary effort and commitment looks like. The PeopleGoal social recognition module makes the process of acknowledgement and awareness an easy, simple and effective process.

Team Contributions

These badges are just as important as individual ones. They signify the employees’ importance and effort on a group project. Did they play a critical role in an imperative section of the project? Did they co-operate well with other employees? Maybe they exhibited key leadership qualities? There is a whole range of possible qualities or examples that an employee may have displayed to deserve recognition. It is important to understand that badges shouldn’t be used for individualistic behaviour alone, organizations operate on the co-operation and teamwork of their employees and as such, team contributions should be acknowledged and endorsed.

Expert Knowledge

Recognize your thought leaders and specialists with expert knowledge recognition badges! Perhaps you have employees who act as guides, teachers or thinkers on a certain capability or topic. This in turn, allows development of employees across the organization. Here, not only does recognition drive employee engagement, but can help a number of benefits including information sharing, employee development and teamwork.

Customizable Badges

On the PeopleGoal badge functionality you can customize badges to target specific individuals, achievements or qualities, in effect creating a personal process of social recognition and awareness. You can create your own badges and line these up with your organization's culture and core values, and even upload your own imagery.

At PeopleGoal, we want to help you to create an effective, engaging set of tools that support your team in their professional development and work to deliver your unique business outcomes. In our next few posts, we’ll start breaking down the individual elements of the performance management process itself and showing you how to build these up from scratch.

If you would like to know more about employee engagement you can read more here: #EmployeeEngagement