The Recognition Revolution: The Power of Tech in Modern Workplace Culture

In this UNLEASH webinar watch Mervyn Dinnen, Co-creator at Talent Watch speak with Navin ‘Nuvs’ Jain, Product Evangelist at Workhuman, and Sara Lupi, Global Head of Employee Experience at Sanofi Consumer Healthcare speak about how organizations are harnessing strategic recognition to drive financial growth – talking through use of systems, bias mitigation, and real business outcomes.

Webinar Highlights:

The Power of Recognition – With a recent Gallup and Workhuman study finding that 84% of company value comes from the workforce’s talent, skills, knowledge, and work ethic it’s clear that recognition has a role to play.

Indeed as Navin ‘Nuvs’ Jain, Product Evangelist at Workhuman laid out: “Strategic recognition is a flexible and potent tool to drive value and recognition.”

As the Gallup and Workhuman stats show recognition is an important part of work culture with recognized employees 3.8 times more likely to feel connected to their work culture, and recognition clearly boosting individual productivity which can lead to massive commercial gains – especially if that recognition links to the corporate values.

Sara Lupi, Global Head of Employee Experience at Sanofi Consumer Healthcare has seen this in real life. When rolling out a new strategy they needed new workforce behaviors to drive this and to embed this recognition with technology as the enabler was the answer.

She said: “We know this [recognition] is a great way to improve our place of work, our collaboration skills, bringing together, in a consistent way our people – and a recognition platform helped bring this to life.”

But changing to a recognition culture can be difficult…right? – Lupi shared her top tips for driving that recognition culture. A leadership mandate is good, as is mapping the organization to understand how recognition works, phasing out old styles, and understanding the need for good change management. “Those elements are all critical to use,” she said.

She also said that setting the principles of recognition and making it genuine, timely, and aligned with where you want to see the culture go is crucial. It also has to make sense within localized work cultures. “When recognition and reward is personalized and genuine it can go a long way,” she added.

Driving culture and recognition with the right technology – As Jain laid out in the webinar: “Strategic recognition is key to driving engagement and culture.”

He added that it’s best when it’s authentic, related to work when it’s equitable, and personalized too – and believes technology can help with this. Tech can help drive recognition at scale, make it public, and can spot biases and improve the language used in recognition, via AI, to make it more impactful. Listening, surveys and connection-building can also be driven by the right tech.

Of course, some may worry about cost but Jain argues that HR has to think about it as a strategic investment that can save HR money via reduced turnover, an improved culture, and engaged employees. Indeed, especially if that tech meets employees where they are and isn’t just another app to download.

What does our UNLEASH audience think? – An important part of joining a live UNLEASH webinar is to put questions to the experts and engage in live polls to see how peers and other practitioners are doing.

To get a sense of how often attendees were being recognized, we asked them. 30% have been recognized this week, 30% in the past 30 days, 30% can’t remember the last time they were recognized, and 10% more than 10 days ago. On the flip side, when it came to recognizing others: 50% had recognized someone in the past 30 days, 10% more than 30 days ago, and 10% didn’t recognize someone in business that recently.

A clear showing that HR does understand the power of recognition.

“I love this poll… what’s fascinating is that the impact of giving recognition can be higher than being recognized…so thank them,” said Workhuman’s Jain. He then added that technology can help drive further recognition if HR can understand the links between recognition, less turnover, and greater engagement.

As one customer told Workhuman: “ “Employees getting at least four awards had astronomically lower turnover rates…” It led Jain to conclude: “This shows the positive impact of regular recognition.”