Why All Your Recognition Programs Should Be in One Portal

I was recently asked what the benefits are of integrating all of your recognition programs under one recognition portal.

Consolidating or bundling your recognition programs together, allows for greater flexibility with giving better and more frequent recognition in multiple ways.

Let’s take a closer look at what happens when you house your recognition programs under one portal.

1. One Point of Entry. You can use single sign-on (SSO) authentication, or your regular login credentials, or even a hybrid, to enter all of your recognition programs in one spot. You have a central domain by which you authenticate entry. Then your session is shared across all the other recognition program pages/domains.

This is like having the door key and going through the front door of your home. It’s exactly the same as your integrated recognition portal. You give permission for visitors to look at the other rooms in your house once they get in. This is like entering into your recognition portal and the multiple recognition programs you might have, like career milestone recognition, social recognition program, points-based performance recognition, and an award nomination program, etc.

Having just one entry point makes it inviting for employees to come in and express appreciation to their peers.

2. Everyone Can Know Recognition. By having a central recognition hub all of your employees can know exactly where to go to give anyone recognition.

A central recognition point allows you to integrate with your HR information systems too. This permits you to send emails or other forms of program notifications, reminders, and information about the programs, but especially to recognize your employees.

Advanced communications can be set up to provide communication campaigns and education to strengthen manager and employee recognition practices and usage of programs.

A variety of recognition programs give multiple opportunities for improving the social capital in a company. For example, employees can demonstrate care and appreciation through the programs for employees going through a stressful life event. These actions build up positive relationship strength. In addition, your recognition programs help maintain, or bridge, distant or disconnected relationships. Think about how recognition can be given across departments, or even the globe, as you interact with and acknowledge people for the great things they are doing that have helped you.

Each of your recognition programs can provide helpful tips on how to give meaningful recognition through the available options. Educational resources, articles, book information, videos, tutorials, and micro-learning content, can all be designed and developed, to reinforce recognition practices through your programs.

There’s very little excuse for not being able to recognize employees or peers when you have a one-stop recognition destination to go to.

So, while one employee might not be physically present at another employee’s career milestone celebration, they can still express appreciation to them through the newsfeed on their social recognition program.

3. Accumulation of Recognition Data. An integrated suite of recognition programs allows you to look at all the recognition program data and reports from across every program. There will be lots of data-rich exhaust that comes from each program.

Recognition data should take you beyond descriptive and diagnostic analysis and straight to predictive and prescriptive analytics. This is the power behind an integrated recognition platform.

You will likely be able to weight the value of different types of programmatic recognition data based on the employee workforce and purpose you’re targeting. This allows you to gauge the impact of different programs on people and performance.

For example, social recognition programs provide a more emotionally rich and people connecting opportunity when people communicate recognition. No surprise that this program’s data is a better predictor of customer sentiment and customer satisfaction over other programs. You might value this program’s data more highly with wanting to encourage greater customer service.

Consider how award- and reward-based programs are much better predictors of success with productivity and sales results. While this is important to keep in mind, you don’t want to make rewards the only focus or people might game their results. Another reason why you should have multiple recognition programs.

With access to all recognition program data, managers get the benefit of seeing a consolidated report across all of the programs. They can examine how their direct reports are maximizing their usage of each of the recognition programs. From this information they can provide any needed coaching, performance development, and education, to improve employee skills in recognition giving and using the programs.

I am confident these three areas alone will enable you to identify more benefits from having an integrated recognition platform.

Recognition Reflection: What benefits have you gained from having a central recognition portal for all of your recognition programs?

Roy is no longer writing new content for this site (he has retired!), but you can subscribe to Engage2Excel’s blog as Engage2Excel will be taking Roy’s place writing about similar topics on employee recognition and retention, leadership and strategy.