What is recognition in the flow of work?

What is recognition in the flow of work?

Ultimately, it is the way employee recognition should be delivered. It is about allowing recognition to happen where the work gets done.

Where work gets done has changed. Most organisations now use anywhere between 10 to 16 different software systems to run their business, and online employees spend at least 30 hours of their work week on their email and other collaboration tools.

For most employees, recognition does not happen in the flow of work - it interrupts it. We want to make it easier for employees to recognise and be recognised, regardless of the work they do or the technology they use.

Open APIs (Application programming interface) make this possible. An API is essentially a way for two different software systems to communicate with each other via a pre-defined, well understood and agreed upon standards.

 We have built an open recognition API that allows us to connect our award-winning recognition and reward platform with any workplace application. Recognition can now also be delivered via the workplace systems employees already use.

Can you give me some examples of what recognition in the flow of work looks like?

For some of our clients recognising in the flow of work is about sending and receiving recognitions via Workday, Success Factors, SharePoint, Yammer, Tibbr and Jive.

For others, it is about ways we can integrate our recognition and reward platform with point of sale terminals so that customer feedback can also be captured in the flow of work.

For an increasing number of clients recognising in the flow of work is more than giving employees the ability to recognise from any workplace application. It is also about using any workplace application to automatically recognise an employee’s achievements.

As an example, when an employee successfully completes an online learning course delivered by a Learning Management System such as Cornerstone or Saba, we can automatically trigger a recognition that makes their learning achievement visible to their manager and peers.

The public recognition of learning achievements improves learning participation and outcomes. The same principles are being successfully applied to improve the performance of employee referral, well-being and innovation programs and applications.

With your position on recognition in the flow of work, what do you see as the future of the recognition program?

The future of the recognition is bright. Recognition remains a key driver of engagement. Allowing recognition to happen in the flow of work will keep it relevant for new generations of employees regardless of their role, working environment or workplace technology.

It will also increase the scope of recognition. Integrating recognition into the way people work will allow it to improve the performance of other employee programs, systems and initiatives. In turn, this will also increase the amount of data employee recognition programs collect.

We are seeing this already. Many of the programs we deliver are successfully aggregating large amounts of employee data. This data is improving predictive analysis of employee engagement and providing new insights into employee behaviour and performance.

Recognition in the flow of work will allow recognition to permeate the whole employee experience. Recognition and reward won’t be delivered as a program. It will become an integral part of the way people work - a behaviour rather than a process.