Rewards and Recognition Vendor Achievers Uses Data to Help Companies Improve Employee Engagement

The Achievers Customer Experience (ACE) event taking place in Toronto, Ontario afforded attendees the rare opportunity to participate in an event that focused on the value of employee rewards and recognition programs. Participants enjoyed product demonstration sessions and talks about best practices and customer success stories that unveiled thought leadership and real rewards and recognition program management issues while staying away from the sales pitch.
 

The Rewards and Recognition Conversation

Employee rewards and recognition is a central topic in workforce psychology, particularly with respect to employee motivation. Employee motivation is important for many employers, especially in developed countries, as the demand for certain types of highly qualified labor has soared. Employers not only have to compete with each other to attract the best workers but they also have to ensure high workforce utilization (maximizing the efficiency of their employees).

Initially workforce motivation was approached from a somewhat simplistic perspective: monetary stimuli was applied at set thresholds or project milestones, such as a certain number of units delivered within a certain period of time, and this practice was expected to lead to higher labor productivity and quality. Over time, however, employee motivation has been recognized to depend on many variables (personality, belief system, education, life experience, company culture, and working conditions, to name a few) and consequently requires different types of stimulation.

Hence, organizations have become more and more interested in acquiring tools and expertise to measure and understand employee behavior. Based on such insight companies aim to implement employee engagement strategies meant to drive employee motivation on the job. Ultimately it is about higher productivity and high returns on employee labor, but demonstrating appreciation for employees has become part of the equation. 

A Platform for Appreciation

Achievers offers a technology platform enabling organizations to support rewards and recognition programs. Companies can set up various mobile, social, and gamification-enabled environments where employees and managers award recognition to each other. Employees can accumulate points that translate into merchandise, gift cards, and other types of rewards.



The Achievers platform is a good venue for expressing everyday appreciation—a recognized motivational drive for many workers—including peer-to-peer “thank yous” and acknowledgement of efforts or of a job well done that are not necessarily attached to units of measure. This type of interaction exposes a worker’s merit more frequently and enables employers to have continuous visibility into performance and accomplishments.

As companies also attempt to instill certain cultural values and behaviors in their employees, the platform can function as a behavior-driving engine, enabling managers and human resources (HR) to manage the necessary conditions that determine employees to act a certain way. For example, Scotiabank uses Achievers to motivate customer-facing employees to promote the benefits of self-serve banking as opposed to using teller services. 

From Managing Rewards Programs to Data Intelligence

While Achievers developed its technology as an employee engagement tool, the company quickly recognized that the rewards and recognition program management platform could be complemented by data insights. The vendor has been collecting employee behavior data with respect to rewards and recognition programs since its inception in 2002, giving Achievers a significant data pool that it can leverage towards becoming a data service company.

Sparked by a reality shared by many organizations at the time, that the existing employee satisfaction survey tools were insufficient in unveiling reliable information about employee experience, Achievers developed Engagement Pulse, offering live insights into employee morale as well as historical employee morale trends.

Engagement Pulse relies on data provided by employees. Employees report daily levels of engagement on a scale (such as 1 to 10) and they can also provide unstructured text comments regarding their state of mind or the state of their work, etc.  Unlike standard reports which rely on data from a certain time span, Engagement Pulse offers employers a detailed pictures of employee engagement on an ongoing basis, allowing them to intervene and adjust not only their rewards and recognition programs but also overall employee engagement strategies.

 

Helping HRIS with Mapping Real Team Networks

Employee systems of records managed typically with human resource information systems (HRISs) yield static organizational charts where teams are drawn top down from manager to direct reports and then horizontally peer to peer. As a result, they cannot show informal leadership or ad hoc emerging teams. This limitation has been an obstacle in determining the best working teams that stimulate employees to enjoy themselves on the job and deliver better results.

Achievers is a social platform where employees offer each other recognition and the system comes with built-in features for social recognition data analysis capabilities. As a result, it offers the ability to indicate who really works with who and oftentimes in what capacity, as most employees offer recognition that acknowledges specific work circumstances, such as meeting deadlines, impromptu help, consistent daily support, and so on. 

Achievers’s Success Community

Unlike core HR technology, which can run without direct employee involvement, the success of social rewards and recognition technology relies on employee adoption. Achievers is keen on ensuring customer success and consequently offers a series of services delivered by dedicated teams of experts to each customer.

The Achievers services teams help customers understand their rewards programming needs and design the best solution that corresponds to those needs, a somewhat common step for any implementation. But, once the solution has been implemented, the vendor continues on not just with support services but also with user adoption, employee engagement, and leader performance monitoring, thus helping organizations understand if their rewards and recognition programs are delivering the envisioned value and goals. 

Rewards and Recognition Programs at Work

Rewards and recognition programs are an important tool for understanding what makes employees deliver top results while at work. While compensation management and succession management are transactional mechanisms set in place as currencies for the work provided by employees to an organization, rewards and recognition platforms function as engagement and motivational tools.

Achievers has been developing the technology to manage rewards and recognition programs together with the data analysis capabilities to measure the success of such programs with a granular view of employee behavior. But, while devising sophisticated analytics that offer visibility into what makes employees tick and the affinity between certain employees, the vendor also has to acknowledge that many organizations may not have the internal mechanisms to consume and act on such information.



Furthermore, although data analysis and business intelligence are definitely becoming an integral part of human resources technology, it remains to be seen whether SaaS and HR data intelligence vendors will offer HR consulting services alongside the applications and platforms that they sell. While software vendors might not have to offer consulting services through their professional services teams, awareness should be brought to clients that the aid of third party consulting companies is required for data intelligence to be put to use. 

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