19 March, 2021
Importance of Having Flexibility in Your Rewards Platform
The definition of total rewards for employees has changed over the years, and encompasses a broader scope including employee recognition, incentivized learning and emotional wellness. However, firms have been slower to move in this direction. According to Deloitte, only 11 percent of employees globally believed that their rewards strategy is highly aligned with their organization’s goals. This discouraging number was found in 2019, before the challenges of a virtualization and increased stresses due to the pandemic came into light.
With the disruption of workplaces, the need for a robust employee recognition and rewards program is paramount to engage and retain top talent. However, to truly increase the ROI of the program, customizing your engagement platform to match your organization’s values is essential. Having a ‘default’ software solution implemented in the firm will always leave you with a wish list of features and functionalities that can’t be fulfilled. No two firms are alike in terms of rewards workflows, behavioral values to encourage or even employee preferences when it comes to selecting rewards. Following are just a few examples in which a flexible recognition software can be configured to meet specific requirements:
- Hyper-personalized Rewards:
Catalog curation can be done based on employee demographics and their mapped preferences. Moreover, reward options visible to an employee can even be configured down to the location/department/hierarchical level. These can range from shopping vouchers and experiences to offering the option of donating points to the firm’s CSR initiatives.
- Nominations and Approval Workflows:
The nominations procedure in each firm varies across award categories and frequency. An efficient software platform can configure workflow rules to allow self-nominations, criteria based automated nominations, multiple levels of approval, auto approvals etc. This ensures that the end-to-end process is digitized, lending complete top-down transparency into the rewards process.
Surveys can be targeted to certain relevant sections of the employee based on the questions to be answered. Tired of adding individual recipients from a particular team, department or even coming up with new lists for new joiners, employees who have been with the firm for 5+ years etc? A customizable platform helps you automate segmented surveys and trigger them at defined milestones.
Budgets for rewards often face drastic changes when faced with business highs and lows. Moreover, business unit budgets can often change depending on factors like team growth, performance and attrition. Thus, it is imperative for a platform to be able to adjust to changing budgets by changing reward points present with the unit administrator on a real-time basis.
An internal platform administrator can only become a sole owner once they have complete control to edit platform functionalities to meet their exact needs. From creation of badges and recognition categories to determination of points associated with each category, DIY abilities give the organization command over the framework while saving on the costs of building a customized system internally.
A successful rewards platform is not only strongly aligned with business goals and organizational culture but is also attuned to changing employee needs. A hybrid workforce means that flexibility in total rewards is going to be the only way to keep a remote workforce engaged. Agile businesses need to digitalize their offline rewards to offer a rich, relevant rewards and recognition program that appeals to a diverse employee base. As the focus shifts from rigid, employer-driven incentives and benefits to more individualistic, performance-based incentives, digital platforms can help managers view performance metrics, offer quick feedback and stay better connected with teams, giving a decisive advantage to not just engagement but business performance as a whole.