11 November, 2021
How to create a digital nominations module in your R&R platform
Lights, camera, accolades! Company awards are a highlight of any corporate R&R program. The impressive glamour of an award ceremony, however, involves weeks of sweat and tears of the HR team! Manual distribution of forms, approval reminders, awards procurement and distribution are a tedious affair. Moreover, offline award nominations also have limited visibility to employees. Translating these processes into a robust digitized framework can help a firm mitigate these challenges. This blog is the final in the series of- ‘How to build an R&R program’ and will help you digitize your offline nominations processes for a smoother execution.
Before we get into the how, let’s talk a little more about the benefits of a digital nominations tool and why it must be a part of an employee engagement platform. Firstly, including the nominations workflow will help align awards to a single set of values and performance metrics, that are also used for non-monetary recognition/kudos. This not only increases platform adoption but also encourages systemic behavioral change, as the expectations from a model employee are clear. Secondly, making award nominations accessible through a digital platform will make the process fairer and more equitable. Thirdly, it will provide visibility into the approval process and jury decision-making, thus holding decision makers accountable. Finally, it will reduce administrative hassles as well as procurement costs if the firm partners with an R&R vendor to fulfill award deliveries, whether in office premises or employees’ homes. You can read more about these advantages on our other blog on this topic.
Once you have defined your recognition categories and a budget framework for your awards program, you can use the following steps to create your digitized nominations workflow:
You can digitize your offline forms for this. However, the form needs to be comprehensive enough to indicate not just the award name but the associated attributes like the company value or KPI. Additionally, it can have pre-filled templates for citations and a list of supporting documents with a provision to attach them in the form itself.
- Define the approval workflow
This involves deciding who will approve award nominations and the layers of approvals each nomination will go through, along with the deadlines for approval. As a general practice, high-stakes awards like ‘Employee of the Year’ or ‘Best-in region/country’ awards have a complex approval process, which needs to be mapped on the R&R platform. The names of jury members and their discussion notes/results should also reflect on the platform for enhanced transparency.
- Create an awards disbursal structure
This will depend on the awards calendar and the type of award being given. If it’s a cash-based or e-gift card based award, it can be disbursed instantly through an integrated e-commerce catalog. Else the HR admin should be able to upload a winners’ list which will ensure that award trophies/gifts are procured through an RnR vendor. Alternatively, a digital platform can facilitate automated disbursal of performance awards, based on certain pre-defined algorithms which use performance data, recognition data and so on.
Award ceremonies are a sanctum of achievement and growth for a firm’s best performers. A digital R&R platform helps in automating related backend processes while retaining the values and essence of awards in a virtual environment. A highly usable digital platform has the added advantage of boosting employee experience while motivating more employees to step up to qualify for nominations!