Boosting Employee Engagement with Peer to Peer Recognition - EmployeeConnect HRIS
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peer to peer recognition

Boosting Employee Engagement with Peer to Peer Recognition

Smart companies embrace multiple channels to create productive and happy employees. These include building a great culture, augmenting the career growth of employees, having a reward and recognition program, providing learning and development opportunities, as well as providing some intangible benefits.

Reward and recognition programs tend to motivate and inspire employees to perform better, while at the same time helping them to display behaviours that are in alignment with the organisation’s vision. In a typical scenario, it;’s is the supervisor who is responsible for delivering the reward or recognition. However, slowly, this norm seems to be changing these days. Organisations are turning towards social recognition. This entails involving various stakeholders in the recognition process. Social recognition encourages individuals to recognize good work and makes recognition a part of an ingrained culture.

Why You Need Peer to Peer Recognition?

In today’s modern workforce employees need to extensively collaborate with their peers on a day to day basis. A peer to peer recognition program provides an amazing opportunity to build a culture of positive reinforcement. Research says that human beings release Oxytocin, the happy hormone, when someone thanks them. It tends to make the recipient feel collaborative and happier. Apart from this, it also makes the concept of recognition a more decentralised and democratic one. It communicates a powerful message that every individual’s opinion is valuable. This culture helps in building a culture of inclusion and trust. It also helps to fuel healthy competition and drives stellar performance.

Peer to Peer Recognition has a Positive Connection with Employee Engagement

According to a recent survey conducted on employee engagement in 2016 by SHRM and Globoforce, 90% of the workforce opined that a value-oriented peer-to-peer recognition has helped them to become even more content with their work.

Peer to Peer Recognition Positively Impacts Business Results

The benefits of peer to peer recognition are not just restricted to creating better engagement. It has found to impact business results positively as well. As per a research carried out by SHRM and Globoforce, peer to peer recognition is 37.7% much more likely to have a positive bearing on the financial results. This is, in fact, a strong business case to encourage and adopt peer-to-peer recognition.

An excellent example of peer to peer recognition allows employees to send teams and individuals a personalised thank you note either electronically or through print. When this was implemented, within two years, 76% of employees received such notes from their managers or colleagues, and around 53% had granted a buzz to their peers. As a result of this, the motivation and employee engagement figures improved by around 8% and the number of satisfied employees increased by 13%. It also led to a better comprehension of the business vision amongst employees. It increased by around 18%.

Another organisation worked towards increasing employee happiness at work. It introduced a non-conventional bonus system wherein they recognised and rewarded peers at work. As per this scheme, immediate colleagues paid their peers with the help of a points-based peer to peer recognition program. With the help of a platform, these points were then converted to money, and the rewarded employee was given the option to spend it on a host of reward options.

Stories as this help to highlight how employee engagement and peer to peer recognition are closely connected. It also emphasises that organisations must make use of this opportunity.

As the workforce dynamics and demographics are rapidly changing, more and more employees are becoming a part of the mainstream workforce. Thus the preference for peer-to-peer recognition is likely to increase. Hence the happiness of Millennials at work is much more correlated to the connections that they develop with their peers as compared to their direct managers or supervisors. This generation of Millennials values transparency and openness of which peer to peer recognition is based exactly on that.

Byron Conway
byron@employeeconnect.com

Content Coordinator at EmployeeConnect