Improve workplace culture with Weekly10 employee recognition software

Behind every great work culture are people who feel heard and valued. Recognising hard work and effective habits is the basis for all positive reinforcement. And positive reinforcement is arguably the most valuable management tool you have. A workplace where everyone's encouraged to say thank you or call out great work helps build trust, effective collaboration, and better wellbeing. But it's tough to keep track of all this great comradery without proper employee recognition software.

Recognition is one of the key drivers of employee engagement. It's essential for making employees feel both proud and valued, which are two of engagement's main KPIs. Without it, people lack a frame of reference for their efforts. In those situations, it's easy to feel like you're not accomplishing anything, and hard to tell how well you're actually doing.

But, when everyone's involved in a culture of recognition, it helps to break the ice and build connections. It encourages engagement and helps people strive to be their best. High levels of employee engagement can increase productivity by over a fifth. It also increases rates of retention by 40% and innovation by 44%. Highly engaged staff are even 37% less likely to be absent from work.

How to improve employee recognition processes using software

Every aspect of Weekly10 is designed to promote positive workplace cultures through employee engagement. Sentiment analysis dashboards give you insight-rich, bespoke reports. 10Pulse helps to quantify levels of engagement in your business. And you can automate the vast majority of performance conversations. And tying it all together is our weekly employee check-in.

The Weekly10 check-in has three forms of recognition

• Mentions are our most popular recognition feature. When you give someone a recognition question in their check-in, they're able to tag anyone else in the organisation using the "@" key. It's a quick and easy way for anyone to flag up their team's achievements every week.
• Pass-ups are especially useful in large businesses. They allow you to include an answer from an employee's check-in in your own, so your manager can see it. This is great for promoting accomplishments and improving the visibility of your top performers. But it's also a great way of forwarding feedback to help improve work cultures.
• Pass-across is like giving someone a pass-up. But, instead of sending it up the chain of command, you're sending it to any particular person in the business. So, if two people from unrelated departments end up collaborating, you've still got ways of connecting them through our employee recognition software.

Our employee check-in is the perfect social juncture for both managerial and peer recognition. But let's start with how you can leverage check-in recognition opportunities as a manager.

Giving recognition as a manager

As shown by some of Gallup's past research, 28% of employees report that their most memorable recognition comes from their manager. Recognising your people's hard work isn't just good for them. It's good for you as their manager. Peer recognition may do a lot of the heavy lifting around basic motivation (more on that in a moment). But praising someone's work as their manager strengthens their relationship with you. It builds trust and shows that you value your people.

With Weekly10, you've got an employee recognition app directly in Microsoft Teams. Ideally, you're reviewing check-in updates every week. That's the perfect opportunity for some easy, direct employee recognition. When you review their answers to your questions, you can post written responses to each one. The same goes for their OKR or SMART Goal updates in the check-in's second half.

So, while you can review an update in just a few minutes, it's often worth taking your time. Thank them for their hard work and congratulate them on their achievements. But make sure it really is a personal note. Copy-pasting the same handful of corporate thank-you notes is going to get old very quickly.

Promoting a culture of peer recognition

So, there's three ways to use a check-in to give recognition. Mentions are definitely the easiest feature to rollout when you're starting out in your recognition strategy. You've just got to remember to include recognition questions in everyone's check-ins. But that doesn't mean you can't go a step further.

Scoreboards can be a great tool for encouraging recognition. Weekly10 profiles already track the number of mentions and pass-ups each user receives. Try and track the number of mentions people can give out to get people using their recognition questions to their full potential.

You can even keep score of who gets the most mentions from others. Just be sure to keep it light-hearted so things don't get too competitive.

And, when it comes to pass-ups and passing across, the best thing you can do is be transparent and lead by example. Ask permission before you pass someone's comments up, then be sure to do it in your own check-ins. This shows employees when it's appropriate to do, and should eliminate any anxiety around using the feature.

Managing remote, flexi or hybrid teams? Grab a copy of our latest best practice guide: Employee Engagement in a Remote Working World. Download your copy here 👇