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Running a business is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle – each piece crucial and each move strategic. Even with the daily hustle, there's a constant quest for effective ways to manage and truly inspire your team.
According to a recent study, employees are more likely to perform beyond the scope of their normal job responsibilities when they constantly get recognition for their efforts in the workplace.
If you’re still reading, you’ve probably gotten the idea that employee recognition is central to an organization’s effort to provide a positive work experience to its employees. According to Forbes, a well-structured employee recognition program brings about a 31% decrease in voluntary employee turnover rate.
But the real question is, how do you do it effectively and effortlessly?
You need recognition software solutions.
In this article, we'll highlight how innovative software solutions transform how organizations acknowledge and reward their workforce and also explain the growing landscape of recognition software tailored for businesses. But first…
Employee recognition platforms are software designed to facilitate all reward-based activities of an organization. They help set up recognition loops that automatically reward meriting employees.
It’s a critical catalyst for raising the motivation of employees to optimal levels. Implementing employee recognition programs, especially in a virtual work environment, is the best way to appreciate hard-working and steadfast employees. Using public acclaim, welfare extras, and bonuses makes employees feel more valued. More importantly, it creates a company culture that acknowledges impactful work efforts.
It fosters continuous improvement because rewarding high-performing employees encourages other team members, especially remote workers who may often feel unmotivated, to put in more effort.
There are various employee recognition software that can help power your employee reward program, but how do you find the right one?
When making a decision, it’s best to know the essential features to look out for the ideal recognition platform. Criteria to curate the top-rated employee recognition software that can improve employees' job satisfaction include:
The most effective employee recognition platforms are those that support peer-to-peer rewards. Peer-to-peer recognition enables team members to acknowledge each other's wins. Peer-to-peer recognition uses functionalities of nominations, voting polls, and a broadcast feature that allows employees to share recognition across platforms like Microsoft Teams.
Implementing recognition software hinges on different factors. For instance, you’ll have to decide the monetary value of cash rewards, how accessible the software is, etc. So, it's best to use recognition software that makes the process much easier. User-friendly software clearly outlines employee onboarding and provides users with a dedicated 24/7 customer support service that attends to issues not included in the software support documents. User-friendly recognition software enjoys company-wide acceptance and utilization.
A recognition platform that allows you to create a reward system based on your organization’s core values is a great way to promote company culture. This helps to foster the adoption of these values among employees. Personalizing employee tributes on important milestones such as birthdays, work anniversaries, and project completions makes them memorable. Sadly, keeping track of these events can be challenging for HR departments, especially in growing organizations. So, an employee recognition software that automates monitoring these milestones will be a great addition to the company.
An ideal employee recognition software can successfully integrate with an organization's existing IT infrastructure, including the company's intranet and human resource information system(HRIS). HRIS integration helps to eliminate the time-consuming administrative task of enlisting or delisting employees from the platform. It makes adding or removing employees co-occur as the changes are made in the organization's HR database. An ideal recognition software also offers single sign-on(SSO) integration to simplify staff log-in, allowing team members to use the same login credentials to access a company's workplace tools. So, employees don’t need to worry about remembering different login credentials.
In employee recognition, comprehensive analytics and reporting are essential. It’s important to evaluate the impact of recognition on employee engagement levels and performance. Innovational recognition software provides reliable insights into these impacts and also assists organizations in crafting better recognition traditions. They also equip team managers with dashboards that enable them to monitor the progress of an organization’s reward program, including employee recognition statistics, the layout of recognitions, the company values being recognized, team performance, etc. A well-built recognition software furnishes an organization’s leadership with accurate financial reporting, making the reward schedules easier to manage and accountable.
Now that we know how beneficial employee recognition software solutions are let’s explore the best 20!
Here are top-rated recognition software solutions to set up, execute, and follow up employee rewards and recognition programs. They include:
Assembly seats at the pinnacle of the current generation of employee tools serving over 2400+ organizations, including Coca-Cola, Amazon, and Perforce. Its tagline; Work smarter, not harder, signals its commitment to user-friendliness and customization. It boosts employee engagement, lowers turnover rates, and promotes an organization’s corporate culture. Assembly allows you to compile nominations from your team, ensuring an acknowledgment of team achievements. It also allows you to attach reward points, and other team members can post contributory messages on the virtual announcement board when added to the notification.
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In a nutshell, Assembly is a recognition software solution that is fun, easy to use, cost-effective, and scalable. Book a demo today!
It's also a peer-to-peer recognition software appropriate for small and medium-sized companies. Nectar ensures employees feel attached and engaged, irrespective of where they operate. Its 360 employee reward and recognition platform helps build a system of value and camaraderie in teams by offering various reward options, including employee discounts, Amazon purchases, company swag, and shoutouts via a centralized information hub. Whether it's a centralized or distributed workplace, Nectar effectively facilitates employee rewards and maintains a robust workplace culture. Nectar's clientele includes Heineken, Major League Baseball, and Lasko.
Key Features:
This recognition platform is ideal for frontline workers, including healthcare, financial services, and hospitality employees. These sets of workers will typically not benefit from the points-based system utilized by most employee recognition software. To cater to this, Guusto provides employees with flexible gift redemption options. Rewards in Guusto get to frontline employees via print options, web, and mobile apps. So, companies can send employees gift cards or bonuses with substantial economic value. Using Guusto, a $25 gift card translates to $25. Also, Guusto is easy to configure and customize. It even allows you to test-run an initial pilot program before carrying out company-wide implementation. This way, you get to properly evaluate its workability before committing to use it to fuel your organization's recognition efforts. Guusto’s clientele includes Harvard University, Fairmont Hotels, The Body Shop, and Rexall Pharmacies.
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WorkTango’s recognition software boasts an impressive reward catalog. It uses a point system with an option to incorporate company-specific rewards. It empowers team members to recognize one another publicly and privately, irrespective of differences in time and location, both on the web and through its mobile app. WorkTango has a host of community-building features. This includes news feeds and interactive functionalities like commenting and reacting to public congratulatory messages with emojis, stickers, GIFs, and images. This helps to foster employee connections by adding a personal touch to peer recognition and increasing company-wide visibility. Its compatibility with team collaboration tools also enables recognition to be a prominent feature of daily workflows. It's a good fit if you intend to use a culture of rewards and recognition to enhance employee engagement and retention. Companies like Rexall, Accruent, HUB International, and Allianz use WorkTango.
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Bonusly is a user-friendly recognition software. It uses in-depth reporting and a remarkable compensation catalog to increase employee engagement. Bonusly has a straightforward redemption system where each employee receives a monthly point allocation, which usually ranges from 100-200, valued at $10-$20. Rewarding an employee entails naming the employee and stating the number of points corresponding to the prize value. It also has a public feed where the list of award recipients is published. This is great for motivating other members of the team. Team managers also share in this recognition because publishing awardees publicly helps to identify the top-performing teams in an organization. Like most top-rated recognition platforms, Bonusly also integrates smoothly with HRIS solutions and automates the celebration of employee achievements. It helps companies like Workday, Baxter, Qualtrics, and Survey Monkey establish a positive workplace environment where employees feel valued.
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Regarding automated reminders, Mo is at the top of its game. Mo, short for Moments, is a recognition platform with a vigorous nudge mechanism. It has a dedicated automated assistant reminding managers of upcoming celebrations so employees can be adequately honored. Occasionally, the assistant feature nudges team managers to shout out to employees who haven't been recognized in a while. Its moments and boosts feature bypasses the traditional top-down recognition method, which only favors high-performing employees. The moments feature enables busy managers to make meaningful connections with their teams by celebrating small and big wins. On the other hand, the boosts feature serves as a prompt, notifying employees to celebrate one another for their successes using comments, GIFs, and emojis. Mo provides companies like Aspen, Uber, Starbucks, and Deliveroo with all the tools needed to make employee recognition a habit.
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This recognition software is best suited for large-sized organizations. Its intuitive interface prioritizes the inherent value of reward to kindle workplace positivity and improve employee engagement. In this recognition platform, employees unite as a community to applaud team accomplishments. Employees receive point-based rewards for giving and receiving kudos from fellow employees, and they can redeem these points via an online catalog. Reputed clients of Kudos include DHL, ATCO, Warner, and Russel.
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It's a mobile-friendly recognition platform that combines direct recognition elements, goal tracking, thorough analytics, and employee surveys into a centralized platform. Companies using Motivosity can reward hardworking employees using ThanksMatters digital cards which are widely accepted VISA cards. So whenever an employee gets recognized, dollars are added to the card, which they can redeem at any business outfit that accepts VISA cards whenever they choose to. This introduces a lot more flexibility to employee rewards and recognition. Motivosity clients include Toyota, KPMG, Bosch, and Chick-fil-A.
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Workvivo empowers employees to fully connect to a company regardless of where they work. It sparks renewed vigor in a company's culture by unifying communication, teamwork, and recognition. Workvivo provides employees with a complete social network experience and equips managers with a multimedia messaging function. It also has built-in feedback tools and detailed analytics to help HR professionals monitor employee morale. Workvivo clients include Ryanair, Bupa, Motherson, and White Castle.
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Cooleaf is a cool way of celebrating your workplace MVPs. It promotes manager-led recognition, where managers can readily commend employees for embodying the company’s core values in a particular task. This helps to motivate employees and also reiterate the company’s core values. Coolleaf also provides dashboards that help mnagers show the company's core attributes and rewards. Additionally, it empowers companies to capture employee presumptions with powerful pulse surveys. Companies can also customize their impressive reward catalog with company-specific culture rewards. Coolleaf’s user-friendliness and easy customization make it an excellent choice for companies keen on integrating and promoting their core values through employee recognition. Coolleaf’s clients include Orangetheory Fitness, Toyota, Mountain Seed, and SalesLoft.
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It's an all-inclusive recognition software solution complete with customization and automation features. With Awardco, it's easy to select which employees deserve recognition and why they do. Its latest feature, AwardCodes, allows you to reward deskless employees offline, ensuring every deserving employee gets recognized. Award codes are redeemed by simply scanning to receive the corresponding reward value. Awardco has a unique employee anniversary recognition feature. To celebrate an employee marking a significant service milestone, Awardco empowers team members to generate Digital memory books to compile impactful contributions made by their long-serving teammates. Using the bonus boxes feature, employees can send gift packages put together on the platform directly to their colleagues' addresses. This is an excellent means of driving peer-to-peer recognition. Awardco customers include Paramount, Hertz, America’s First Credit Union, and Percepta.
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Over the years, Workhuman has helped to revolutionize employee experience using creative recognition solutions. Employees can easily provide, accept, and redeem tributes. Also, Workhuman enables employees to celebrate each other's accomplishments, building a culture of continuous professional development. Workhuman combines machine learning and behavioral science to give HR managers in-depth insights into an organization’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I). These real-time insights enable organizations to act swiftly to maintain an engaged workforce. Its social recognition platform serves clients like LinkedIn, Cisco, Biogen, and Schneider Electric.
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This recognition software provides complete employee engagement solutions to improve business outcomes. These intuitive tools enable managers to link employee engagement to performance directly. Its peer-to-peer recognition tool feature also allows employees to trade recognition with each other in the form of digital badges, awards, and messages of commendation. These recognitions are shown on the platform’s live recognition feed in real-time. Clients of Quantum Workplace include Getty Images, Bakertily, BKD, and Fossil Group.
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Achievers recognition software prides itself as the best corporate culture builder. It helps organizations develop a company culture that promotes improved employee performance and engagement. It's an ideal tool for boosting employee engagement, rewards, and recognition in a central information hub. This recognition platform renews employee enthusiasm using a wholesome recognition experience. Achievers have listening tools that allow organizations to actively receive employee feedback, informing the approaches to enhance employee retention. Achievers' customers include General Motors, Kellogg's, Scotia Bank, and McDonald's.
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Vantage Circle is global recognition software that provides organizations with AI-powered employee engagement solutions, offering noteworthy ways of immersing themselves in their workforce. It offers flexible financial and non-financial employee rewards through its user-friendly platform. It also has a social recognition feature for peer-to-peer recognition. With Vantage Circle’s multinational prizes catalogs, employees can trade their reward points for gifts from over a thousand brands. Even so, they can use these points to purchase products from different stores across over 59 countries. Vantage Circle has various recognition options for long-serving employees, including a digital service yearbook, anniversary point rewards, and a curated milestones testimonial. Reputable clients of Vantage Circle include Wells Fargo, Coinbase, and Bosch.
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This software solution aids organizations in drawing in, engaging, and retaining the best talents using motivation-driven recognition, surveys, and communications. Its primary goal is to help organizations build a culture of recognition by continuously celebrating contributions that reflect their values. Clients of Reward Gateway include Orbis, ABC Medical, and Five Star Bank.
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This is a step away from the characteristic ‘one size fits all’ approach employed by most recognition platforms. Boostworks introduces a new set of dynamism into employee recognition. It allows you to celebrate employees by focusing on their uniqueness. Boostworks is a good option if you want to upgrade your existing employee recognition program. Clients of Boostworks include Bapia, Seopa, CISI, and pirkx.
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As the name implies, this recognition tool offers a box full of perks and benefits for companies to celebrate their employees anytime, irrespective of where they work, helping to strengthen the ties between a company and its workforce. With Perkbox, there’s no limitation to company size or complexity. Perkbox keeps all employees satisfied and motivated through its unified employee value proposition (EVP). Every team member receives a personal employee recognition experience from Perkbox, enabling companies to express how much they value each employee. Perkbox clients include Purple Bricks, Bosch, and Trainline.
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This tool works best for small and medium-sized companies. Qarrot’s driving vision is its commitment to providing moderately sized companies with user-friendly, innovative, and relatively affordable recognition software solutions. Qarrot provides HR professionals with essential gamification elements, automated reminder features, and public communication feeds. It helps you develop a recognition program that works best for your organization in terms of size and available capital. Qarrot caters to companies like Enchanted Oaks, Econex, Animal Hospital, and Ameriflex.
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It's a recognition software solution that empowers organizations to provide a rewarding work experience to members of staff using highly customizable recognition options. Workstars is compatible with everyday workplace productivity and communication tools, including Slack and Microsoft Teams. Integration with these tools promotes social recognition, increasing the overall visibility of top-performing employees across an organization. Using simple appreciation and performance tips, Workstars is boosting the employee recognition drive of organizations such as Parsons, AstraZeneca, PennyMac, and Trac.
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According to Gallup, the engagement rates of employees receiving wholesome recognition experiences are 20 times higher than those not adequately appreciated.
As reported by Deloitte, a one-size-fits-all solution no longer works. Appreciation resonates well with individuals if it evokes a more personal sentiment. A one-size-fits-all approach robs you of the opportunity to spot these individual nuances. It doesn't consider individual preferences but constructs reward programs to serve The average employee. For instance, in contrast to popular belief, non-monetary incentives have tremendously increased employee motivation, retention rates, and performance.
This shows that data power the future of recognition software. The good news is that the massive advancements made so far in fully leveraging data capabilities are billed to shape employee rewards and recognition in the following ways:
AI-driven recognition platforms are redefining employee recognition. They make personalized recognition across the different teams of an organization feasible by helping organizations fulfill the personal recognition preferences of employees. Identifying these inclinations using past reward choices and feedback can provide accurate insights. Based on these insights, they offer employees appropriate reward options, allowing them to choose the option that inspires the most motivation.
With workplaces becoming increasingly hybrid, the ideal employee recognition software will be those that can easily adapt to cater to remote employees. Remote-centric features like centralized recognition feeds help to promote inclusivity in a hybrid workplace, fostering rapport amongst employees working in different locations. Also, gamification makes recognition occur in real-time and boosts the social bonds in teams. Remote-friendly rewards and recognition features will play a key role in helping companies minimize the turnover of talents by cultivating a sense of belonging among employees working remotely.
The growing need for organizations to provide personalized rewards to employees as engagement strategies will lead to the enhanced analytics reporting framework in recognition software. This will enable organizations to extract invaluable and actionable insights from employee data. With AI-powered recognition platforms, HR professionals can use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to break down survey responses, communications between team members, and interactions on collaboration platforms. This will help them spot sentiments and identify patterns in employees’ disposition towards an organization's core values. With these, organizations can formulate a tip-top employee recognition plan.
The importance of employee recognition can not be overemphasized. It's a ripple that starts with a simple acknowledgment and extends to create waves of employee engagement and loyalty.
By investing in recognition software, businesses aren't just embracing innovation, they are investing in an improved culture of appreciation and a significant drop in employee turnover.
Recognition platforms provide organizations with a resourceful interface for implementing recognition strategies. These tools automate key processes with functionalities like user-friendliness, peer-to-peer recognition, customization capabilities, integrations, and in-depth analytics, ensuring that every deserving employee is recognized.
You can begin your investment today with Assembly, which offers AI-powered personalized custom rewards solutions and advanced intelligent analytics. Book your demo today!
Recognition strategies are the different methods organizations use to ensure that all employees have the prospect of being noticed, acknowledged, and appreciated.
Recognition strategies include:
Making recognition in your workplace common practice by employing both traditional and informal recognition practices ensures your employees always feel appreciated irrespective of their hierarchical cadre.
A good example of recognition in business is the paid leave surprises that Apple provides its employees during the holiday season.
These rewards are customized for each awarded employee. This is because the reward system is optimized to recognize employees who celebrate holidays different from the days only recognized in the U.S. This shows how companies can appreciate the workforce and foster commitment.
Ensure you’re genuine, thoughtful, and authentic with your recognition because that’s the type of recognition employees cherish the most.
That being said, no two employees are the same. Employees may often prefer different forms of recognition based on their experiences, personalities, and backgrounds. For instance, more reserved employees may opt for private recognition, but this recent report says that more than 50% of employees prefer public recognition, particularly from their senior colleagues and managers.
Ideally, as a leader, it’s best to identify the type of recognition each employee prefers. You know this by interacting with team members personally and observing how they respond to rewards. If you notice they’re uncomfortable, try a different approach.
Get the foundational knowledge on creating an employee recognition program that boosts employee engagement and helps them feel valued.
Explore Guide
Yes, at Assembly, security is a top priority. Each quarter, we have ongoing security work that is everyone’s responsibility. While we maintain a strong security posture, it was important for us to prove to our customers that we do everything we claim to do. This led us to pursue a SOC 2 Type II report that would provide evidence of our compliance with industry gold-standard security practice.
There is study after study showing that employee recognition leads to increased engagement. This in return creates an environment where employees are happier and more motivated which increase productivity and reduces voluntary turnover significantly. In order to filled critical roles, companies tend to spend nearly twice the value of an annual salary. Assembly is an investment in your employees that supports your bottom line.
Yes, we will offer contracts for companies with longer-term agreements to help larger customers have more certainty around future costs.
The minimum agreement term is a 12-month subscription.
We do and for FREE! Any new customer needing further support to get started with Assembly to ensure you're set up for success can request custom onboarding support. Improving your employee experience is about much more than just using our amazing software; it’s about transforming your business to create a workplace that people love. That’s much easier to do with the personal support and advice from our passionate people experts.
At the time of redemption (when your employees exchange their points for a paid reward) you'll pay face value. If a reward is a $10 Amazon gift card, your cost will be $10. All paid rewards are billed for on a monthly basis.
The good news is that you don't have to pay for rewards upfront because we only charge you when points are redeemed, not when they're earned.
We offer discounts or educational or charitable organizations. In order to secure a discount, you'll first need to book a demo with a customer support specialist.
For all other organizations, we are willing to consider longer-term agreements in exchange for discounts. To set up annual plans or longer, you will need to book a demo with a customer support specialist.
If you're on a month to month plan, you can go here and cancel anytime. If you're having concerns or need help setting up your account for success, you can always book a demo with a customer support specialist.
If you're on a longer-term custom plan, you'll need to reach out to your customer support specialist to cancel your account or email us at support@joinassembly.com.
Great question! You can customize your core values to match your organization's to boost and track alignment. You can change your currency from the 🏆 emoji (our default) to any emoji of your choice. You can swap our logo for your own. You can also set up company culture rewards such as, "Lunch with the CEO," "Buy a book on us," and so much more!
While we recommend a peer to peer set up where anyone in your organization can give or receive recognition, you can set up Assembly however you want. If you need to limit the people who can give or receive recognition, that's perfectly fine and can be done from your Admin, here.
Assembly connects to the tools your employees use every day to offer an easy, seamless experience with minimal change management.
Assembly has integrations with HCM/HRIS systems like ADP, Google, Office 365, and Slack. We also integrate with communication tools like Slack and Teams so you and your employees can access Assembly wherever they work now.
That depends on the company's permissions set up. That said, over 90% of the employees on Assembly's platform are recognized on a monthly basis. That means nearly every employee across all of our customers are receiving regular recognition from their peers, managers, or leadership. We're extremely proud of this.
They are not required. You can use Assembly without having rewards set up. However, we don't recommend it if you intend to have a high adoption and usage rate. You can always keep the costs down by offering internal culture rewards that are fulfilled by you internally.
No, you can remove allowances from anyone or everyone. It's up to you but we do recommend using points whether they're worth a real dollar value or not. Companies that use points have a much higher engagement rate even if those points don't exchange for real dollars.
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