Are you aware that a peer-to-peer recognition program can significantly boost employee engagement?
While this may not be top of your priority list, it’s time to reconsider. Gallup says disengaged employees cost the US economy $450 billion to $550 billion in productivity each year. Moreover, only an average of three in ten employees in companies are engaged. As you may well know, employee engagement is a critical factor in productivity and retention.
If such data is also valid for your organization, you’ve got your work cut out. One of the critical things you should know about employee engagement is that recognition is essential. Traditionally, employee recognition is manager-employee. However, this method is not inclusive or the only effective type of recognition. A quality employee engagement program can do wonders.
This is where peer-to-peer recognition comes into play. It allows employees to participate in their colleagues’ recognition. Moreover, it involves the use of personalized group and individual rewards.
Read on to learn more about how a peer-to-peer recognition program can help you increase motivation levels, productivity, and retention.
What Is a Peer-to-Peer Recognition Program?
Before getting into peer-to-peer recognition, it’s essential to understand what recognition entails. It refers to the open acknowledgment of employees’ contributions and efforts. Over the years, employee recognition programs have evolved significantly. In most cases, it involves top-down feedback to employees from management.
Peer-to-peer recognition programs involve using feedback from employees to recognize and reward their colleagues. If you think about it, it’s a sensible strategy, as employees are ideally placed to notice each other’s efforts, ingenuity, and commitment. Moreover, peer-to-peer recognition offers key benefits that impact the entire organization.
Related: Personalize Rewards to Strengthen manager-employee Relationships
Benefits of Peer-to-Peer Recognition Programs
When an employee’s output, skills, and talent are recognized by their colleagues, it can make them feel appreciated for their work. In addition, it can help increase their confidence and sense of belonging to the team and company. A peer-to-peer recognition program sets the perfect foundation to build a more compassionate and collaborative workplace environment.
#1 Reinforces Company Culture
Arguably the most significant driving force to how conducive the work environment is to company culture. Company culture refers to the shared values, attitudes, goals, and practices within an organization. Ideally, company culture should help employees feel good about their job and the company. In turn, this helps increase productivity and collaboration and reduces turnover.
A peer-to-peer recognition program can help with all this by strengthening connections among employees, thus influencing how they view and treat each other. Therefore, by adopting such an approach, you’ll also be reinforcing a positive, inclusive, and encouraging company culture.
#2 Enhances Team Morale
Employee morale is one of the most misunderstood professional terms. While it touches on an individual’s mental and emotional state, it’s much more than that. In the workplace, it’s also about an individual’s or groups’ perception and confidence about future outcomes.
More importantly, it’s a measure of how employees feel about their place in the company and the work they do. Multiple studies about employee morale have been conducted on various demographics across different industries and locations. The results show that there’s a direct link between morale and productivity.
One of the best ways of raising individual and collective employee morale is by strengthening working relationships. This can be easily achieved by implementing a peer-to-peer recognition program that provides a foundation for team members to recognize great work and extend appreciation and encouragement to each other daily. In turn, camaraderie increases and morale improves.
#3 Creates a Cycle of Recognition Giving
Employee recognition has various benefits to the individual, workforce, and company. Encouraging recognition to occur more frequently by anyone in the company ensures such benefits become common. With top-down recognition models, this is hard to achieve.
On the other hand, it’s much easier with a peer-to-peer recognition program. Once an employee receives recognition from a colleague, they’ll be more likely to notice and appreciate the efforts of others. As a result, this creates a continuous cycle of credit.
According to the Incentive Research Foundation, receiving recognition in private is the least preferred method among employees for being recognized. A peer-to-peer recognition method allows people to be publicly rewarded for their hard work.
#4 Improves Performance
What happens when employees have a greater sense of belonging, more confidence, increased morale, and are engaged more?
If you envision an increase in performance, you’re right. When people know their efforts are being noticed and appreciated, they tend to want to work harder to help their team and company succeed. As this happens at individual and collective levels, achieving company objectives will be much easier. More importantly, the company is more likely to enjoy increased profits and a better ROI.
According to a study by Gallup, increasing engagement has a significant impact on productivity. A one percent rise in engagement can increase sales by 6%. Also, companies with highly engaged employees are 21% more profitable. With a peer-to-peer recognition system, you can unlock such value within your organization.
#5 Greater Trust Between Workforce and Management
For an organization to achieve its objectives consistently and enjoy continuous growth, there should be high levels of trust. However, this is a scarce commodity because employees are sometimes fueled by unhealthy competitive mindsets. When it comes to the level of trust between management and the workforce, it can be worse.
Peer-to-peer recognition can help improve trust. As employees appreciate each other’s efforts, they’re able to strengthen connections and build trust. This allows them to collaborate better and deliver better individual and team performances. Over time, the trust may spread from individuals to teams, ultimately creating an environment of trust. At this stage, trust between management and employees improves.
#6 Increases Organizational Fit
Part of building a solid company culture and growing a company is bringing the right people on board. Beyond skill sets and accreditation, employees must have the right cultural fit. Otherwise, it may sow discord in the workplace.
Along with strategic recruitment, it’s also essential to improve the organizational fit of current employees. Fortunately, you can quickly achieve this with a peer-to-peer recognition program. This is because employees are more likely to agree they’re an organizational fit if they’ve been recognized recently.
#7 Improves Relationships Amongst Employees
When it comes to driving the organization forward, employees are a vital cog. They facilitate production, sales, service delivery, etc. While each employee has their job and responsibilities, their roles are in different ways intertwined and reliant on each other.
Therefore, different departments, teams, and individuals will have to work together in some ways. For this to happen effectively, relationships between employees need to be strong with a unified goal and desire to see the company prosper.
One of the best ways of lowering a person’s guard is complimenting them. Peer-to-peer recognition allows employees to achieve this easily but with an added bonus of rewards. As they recognize each other’s efforts, they can improve and strengthen relationships.
#8 Promotes Transparency
By design, peer-to-peer recognition programs are transparent. When an employee chooses to recognize their colleague, what they say about them is visible for all to see. This shout out ensures that recognition is for justified reasons. Moreover, it shows the employees and managers that are yet to say something about any particular recognition effort.
Some employee recognition program platforms offer the ability to publicly display those recognitions for all to see. Depending on the program you choose, recognitions may come with points employees can use to “purchase” items on the same platform. You may decide to allow all to see points accumulated per employee and the different point levels that unlock higher value items.
Related: 4 Employee Rewards Trends We Expect for 2021
#9 Supports Inclusion and Diversity Efforts
Inclusion and diversity have become key topics in corporate setups in recent years. Undoubtedly, it’s important to have divergent views, personalities, and skill sets in the company. However, making each group gain a sense of belonging is challenging but essential.
Implementing a peer-to-peer recognition program can help you with this. As employees recognize colleagues for their unique experiences and skill sets, they give each other a greater sense of belonging. Such outward recognition is one way to support the company’s inclusion and diversity efforts.
#10 Empowers Management and Team Leaders
Managers have the mandate of ensuring that teams and employees under them perform as expected. But it’s not only about oversight. It involves ensuring that working conditions are conducive and setting the tone for working relationships.
While this is generally easier said than done, one of the best parts of a peer-to-peer program is the insight it offers. When there are high levels of recognition within teams, you’ll know that morale and engagement are also high.
On the other hand, if recognition is low, you will know that there’s a problem within the workforce. This allows you to work towards identifying and mitigating it.
#11 Reduces Employee Turnover
In recent years, the talent competition has been rising significantly, and with good reason. Modern workplace ecosystems call for more than simply performing core job activities. This is due to the fast-changing nature of the world and industries.
Employees who excel in other areas such as leadership and creativity are much more valuable because they can inspire others to be their best or find unique ways to solve problems. Such skills are not necessarily inborn. They may develop through experience and exposure.
For your company to have stability and continuous growth, it’s essential that you retain top talent. Beyond high salaries and vacation days, employees today value positive working conditions that allow them to grow. Forbes found that employees want to work with a purpose, feel recognized and have their employer show them gratitude. A peer-to-peer recognition program can help you significantly reduce employee turnover.
#12 Reduces Reliance on Management
Ordinarily, managers serve as the primary driving force behind improving appreciation, engagement, and collaboration, but your responsibilities as a manager are not limited to this. It’s likely that you drop the ball from time to time. While it may not be deliberate and seems innocent, it can have significant ramifications on the team.
Another key benefit of peer recognition is aiding teams to become more self-sufficient. It gives employees a more significant, albeit indirect, role in improving engagement and morale. All you need to do is set the pace and monitor the progress.
#13 Reduces the Perception of a Hierarchy
Your organizational structure from the board and management level to the employees dramatically influences your success prospects. However, such structures often create the perception of a hierarchy, which serves to feed feelings of alienation among staff.
As employees recognize each other’s efforts freely across all levels, peer-to-peer recognition programs can help remove the sense of hierarchy. With this, relations and trust between different levels in the organization are likely to improve.
#14 Improve Customer Satisfaction
For many companies, improving customer satisfaction is the top priority. While it’s easy to view efforts towards customer satisfaction as attempts to please consumers, they have significant business value. For starters, 86% of buyers are willing to pay a higher price for a great customer experience. Moreover, their willingness to pay more increases with the product’s price.
Some of the additional stats on the customer experience you need to know include:
- Personalized experiences have resulted in an impulse purchase by 49% of buyers
- Companies with robust omnichannel customer engagement strategies enjoy a 10% Y-O-Y growth, 25% increase in close rates, 10% increase in average order value
- 72% of customers with a positive experience will share it with six or more people
- One bad experience is enough for a third of customers to leave a brand they love
As you can see, the experiences you provide customers and their overall satisfaction have a crucial bearing on business outcomes. It influences the lifetime value you can get from each and how they present your brand to peers.
After implementing a peer-to-peer recognition program, employees will likely be more eager to perform their roles and be much happier doing so. They may share such positivity with customers while delivering top-notch services.
Unlock Your Team’s Potential
It’s easy to assume that a salary and job perks are enough to motivate and keep an employee focused on their job. However, it’s essential to appreciate that humans are social beings. As such, the environment your employees are in and the interactions they have will influence their performance.
Instead of leaving such things to chance, take the proactive step and use a robust peer-to-peer recognition program.
In this regard, there’s no better solution than Xceleration. It allows you to build a culture of recognition that will take your company forward. Contact us today to learn how you can unlock your team’s potential with our peer-to-peer recognition program.