Strategic rewards and recognition best practices

Luminous India realised that a strong rewards and recognition strategy was necessary to build a culture of innovation amongst its employees. Xoxoday helped design a strategic rewarding campaign, which positively reinforced the innovation efforts of the employees at Luminous. Within months of implementation, Luminous started witnessing improvements in its new product innovations and cross-functional collaborations. The Luminous case is noteworthy for best practices in rewarding, and is in sync with Schneider Electric, its parent company, which is known for setting world-class process benchmarks.

Similarly, many companies have strategically used rewards and recognition to reap business benefits by leveraging positive reinforcement. Here are a few such rewarding strategies that have been proven to be highly yielding:

1. Spot Awards

Smaller, more frequent and immediate rewards have a higher impact than larger and slower rewards. As opposed to waiting for an annual or quarterly reward, new R&R technology platforms, such as Xoxoday, allow leaders to recognise, reward and reinforce positive behaviours as they happen.

2. Integration with performance management systems

The time lag between achievements and rewards can be further reduced, if your R&R platform can be integrated with the performance-management systems. Such integrations achieve engagement and productivity effortlessly. Xoxoday and Freshdesk’s integration is a good example. Freshdesk’s customer service software is used by thousands of customers worldwide. With Xoxoday deeply integrated with Freshdesk, customer-service representatives get their rewards the very moment they achieve their targets, and can also choose to redeem their rewards instantly.

3. Catalogue with extensive choices

Rewarding the millennial workforce with limited or no choices doesn’t work. Considering their varying interests and aspirations, it is futile for an HR leader to determine what would possibly appeal to all of them. It is better left to them to choose from an extensive catalogue, such as that of Xoxoday’s, which consists of millions of reward redemption options, ranging from elite experiences to anything they would like to buy from Amazon or Flipkart.

4. Social recognition

The social recognition of getting rewarded is another key driver for the workforce which is active on social media. Instant rewards, irrespective of size, once shared socially, create a cascading effect. Seepika Singhal, head of total rewards, Luminous India, shared an interesting observation — “When we reward our employees, we use Xoxoday’s Empulse (employee engagement and collaboration software) to announce it on our companywide group. Their peers jump in to congratulate them and reaffirm their achievement, which is the first social recognition that they receive. Once these employees redeem the reward for an experience, say, a day’s outing with family, they further share it with their personal social network. This second level of social sharing again reinforces their rewarding experience, and interestingly even our employer brand.”

8. Peer to peer recognition

Key organisational citizenship behaviours are not all observable by a manager or HR. Loyal employees are an organisation’s brand ambassadors. They tend to continuously propagate their views to their peers, customers, vendors and other stakeholders and influence them to trust your brand. It is only a peer who can identify such not-so-evident behaviours and reinforce these through peer-to-peer recognition. Peer rewarding also works to improve team bonding, creating a culture of appreciation and even spurs cross- functional collaboration.

Great organisations have rewarding and recognition ingrained in their culture. With technology, these rewards now can be smarter and highly effective by being instant, frequent, on-time, and social, thus creating a positive reinforcement loop.