Boosting Productivity, Retention, and Engagement: Unlocking ROI Through Personalized Recognition

Welcome everybody to our webinar today, unlocking ROI through personalized recognition with our featured guest, Forrester. We're incredibly excited to talk to all of you today. First, we're gonna start with some quick introductions. So my name is Eliza Gory. I am our VP of global e-commerce here at WorkHuman. And just to clarify, you might have seen another face, uh, as you looked at different advertisements for this webinar of Sarah Whitman, but you have me today standing in her place. I've been at WorkHuman for a little over three and a half years, and prior to that I worked for multiple retail and retail companies based in the Northeast, and it's been incredibly rewarding to bring all that expertise under a best in class recognition platform. I do wanna turn it over to our featured guests today, James McQuivey, to introduce himself. And James would love to hear a little bit about the work that you do at Forrester, um, that leads to the suspicion today. Yeah, Thank you Eliza. And, and hello to everyone. My name is James McQuivey, as you've already heard. I'm a vice president and research director at Forrester Research, and my team is the future of work team. Probably my favorite team at Forrester. If you know Forrester, you know, we look at how technology can be used by organizations to better serve their customers, and my team looks at how we better serve the employees so that they better serve the customer. It's a really great thing to be a part of, so happy to be here and, and represent our human centered point of view on the future of work. We're so excited to have you. So I do wanna get into our agenda to give you a little roadmap of what we're gonna talk through today. So, one, we're gonna start with evolving employee recognition and personalized recognition. We're gonna talk about fueling personalization and authenticity with ai. We're then gonna move into talking about maximizing ROI with the value of meaningful rewards, and then we'll wrap up with some key takeaways in human and centered best practices. And then we really wanna have engagement in this discussion, so we encourage everybody to stick around for the live q and a. So let's get into it. I'm gonna start by saying that people are your greatest asset, and it's imperative to make every investment that you make in them count, but let's be honest, nurturing that investment, ensuring ROI and keeping track of engagement. And culture isn't easy, especially when budgets are tight and expectations are sky high. This can result in recognition being viewed as a transactional practice rather than what we call transformational, which is a perspective that needs to be shifted, especially as HR professionals, many of whom are on this call, feel the pressure to find new ways to drive impact. So we know firsthand that building a culture in genuine intentional recognition fosters really deep emotional connections for your organization and ultimately drives better performance. I get the luxury of seeing this impact by working for a best in class employee recognition platform. But James, I'd be curious to get the forester perspective here as you look out across the broader landscape these days. Yeah, certainly what we have seen, it's been interesting, especially now that we're at the tail end of 2024, a year ago, we looked ahead to 2024, the way people were making plans about how they would approach their workforce, what they would do for, and what their employees. And we actually saw some concern. We, we predicted that 2024 would, would be a year in which we would pass through what we call the ex winter. And it's not that companies wouldn't, wouldn't be trying to work on ex, it's just that their shift would be away from maybe effectiveness to efficiency. And that changes the way people approach their workforce on very many levels. Some of them subtle, but they all add up to an environment that causes engagement to go down. And if you've seen some of the numbers in the first half of 2024, from our numbers, numbers from Gallup and others, engagement had been going down and continued going down through the first half of the year. So the ex winter, we were really concerned about, and here's what we're looking at now, we're, we're seeing the numbers start to bottom out and turn back up. And that's good in our data we've been publishing, uh, some of that information and, and that's good. It, it looks like companies have realized that perhaps they moved that that pendulum a little too much in one direction. But I think that the biggest thing we're looking at now is people are saying, okay, so ex matters. Maybe we short shifted it for a little bit, but let's come back to it. But instead of understanding the value of recognition and rewards as part of a foundational approach to employee experience, they're tacking it on at the end. They're saying like, oh yeah, we, we actually diminished the role of recognition and rewards for, for that period of ex winter. It got chilly. We're gonna warm it up by now putting carrots at the end of people's daily work tasks or weekly or monthly work tasks. Uh, and they're failing to understand that the actual recognition process needs to start earlier. It needs to start in the foundation of how people design the work tasks that need to be accomplished, how they build the teams that are gonna work on those tasks together. And then, of course, yes, how they recognize people for performing, uh, against those goals. So, you know, our concern for 2025 is that people are gonna say, well, what do you mean? We have recognition and rewards built in here somewhere, but it's all that transactional approach that you were talking about. Aha. It's now you've done this thing. Our investment in your ex is to reward you for that thing, as opposed to having that reward and recognition be part of a broader, more fundamental cultural shift and emphasis on who are we as a people and why do we care about the tasks that we're gonna work on together? And let's recognize the value of what we're doing along the way. So a little bit of worry in, in our, in our view of what's happening in 2025. But I guess the good news is you don't have to do it that way. You can be the organization that says, you know what? Let's be more foundational in how we approach this. Yeah. And listening to you talk it, it's such an interesting perspective, and I love this term of the, the ex winter, and hopefully, you know, people are starting to shift out of that as they think differently. But it's such a, it's such a short term solution versus investing for the long haul, right? And the opportunity to deliver upside in the employee experience and really have tangible business outcomes lies in doing recognition at the foundation of everything and doing it correctly versus what you described, which is like this tag on experience that feels very kind of conditional versus actually being the change you wanna see and exemplifying that in your organization. So let's kind of hang on that right recognition. And, you know, we have a, a couple experts here on, on the phone, but, um, it isn't transactional. And I find myself using this phrase a lot, and we use this here a lot at WorkHuman of this concept of recognition being done, right? And, and for those on the webinar, you're going to hear me use that a few times in this discussion. This is really critical to internalize as we shift away from recognition being conditional and transactional as James and I talked about. So how do we do that, right? How do we deliver on this in a business setting? Sure, rewards serve a purpose. They're not a bad thing, right? They're a great thing. But genuine recognition really needs to be the leader in the equation. Here. WorkHuman and research groups alike have found that when recognition is done correctly, workers experience improve daily emotions, stronger workplace relationships, less stress and lower burnout. And why is that? It's because personalized recognition creates really meaningful connections that enhance motivation, and it also promotes the frequency of those moments. I'm sure many of us in this session can identify with the system of a traditional performance review. I've been through a few of them in my time. And if this is the only feedback loop that you have as an individual, it usually keeps you guessing until the moment comes. And even if you're a high performer, it isn't the most celebratory and personal experience, and it's usually followed by, you know, a poultry merit increase or more scope with less resources. So it isn't necessarily a really feel good moment, and you're not necessarily getting this day-to-day connection to your company values on a real time basis where you would if you had a genuine and really intentional practice of recognition in place. So we have this slide up on the screen, and that is, that is a very kind of pivotal on the left side here. This is why recognition matters, right? It's that vehicle for feedback. It reinforces those core values of your organization, and it really matters to an employee feeling the way that they should be feeling at work, which is visible and seen and valued. And then there's this element of rewards, right? Rewards and recognition are two different things, but when they're both highly personalized and work together, it's really this killer combination of making the employee feel that value and also puts the power of choice into their hands in terms of how they wanna reward themselves for a job well done. So this is why this system, if done correctly, works and James, it, it leads into some of these human factors that Forrester identified on how you can impact an individual's experience in the workplace. And I'd love if you could touch on these in this next slide. Well, I think it's one of the challenges that we face in trying to say, all right, what does the program look like and, and how much are we gonna allocate for the rewards? And when do we trigger the rewards? Yeah. And tho those are important decisions that you have to make. But you gotta start with the fact that we are human animals. We are human animals that live in, uh, relationships with other human beings. We, um, we wanna have a shared purpose. And, and in our culture model, which you're looking at here that we use when we're helping companies work through culture, um, and in this context, when we want to talk about doing total rewards correctly, we wanna do it in the context of understanding the culture that builds that. Um, so we wanna have a shared purpose. We wanna be on a winning team that's doing good things for people that we like. I mean, that's just the way we're programmed as people. And when we're in environments where someone says, do Task X, and when you do that task, here's a, here's a reward. Well, that's a nice carrot. That's that conditional ex where you're saying, okay, if you do this thing, we will invest in you as an employee. Whereas the recognition piece integrated with the reward starts by saying, look, we agree that this purpose that we're working on together is valuable, and here are the behavioral norms that will get us to where we wanna go. We've established those norms. We've sometimes we've crowdsourced what the norms should be. We've, we've identified what those norms look like in our organization, and, and we recognize you for enacting those norms, for participating in those norms. So you did this behavior, it's, it's not just you achieved task X and you get the reward for it, but you have reinforced the norms that we as an organization have identified, help us achieve our shared purpose. And then we participate in what we call ritual and artifacts. And these are just, what are the visible signs of all those behaviors and our shared purpose? You know, are we seeing in our environment, whether it's virtual or physical, that as an organization we are genuinely trying to accomplish these things together? Well then we recognize every single one of those things. And in fact, the reward process can be a way where we put an artifact Yeah, we can put mm-hmm. Something in front of you that says, thank you for your effort in this, in this thing that we as an organization all agree is worth doing for our customers. So, uh, we, we really encourage that people think of their approach to this at the culture level, not just a task or outcome level. Yeah. And, and I really like this framework. It feels, and I kind of think about it and how we do it here at WorkHuman and how many of our clients do, it's very personal, but it's also collective, right? It's super actionable. And it also kind of sets the table of how recognition should be built and the things that a community should be, um, surrounding themselves with, right? And that kind of sets the tone for like how people engage within the organization and really how they recognize each other. Um, and if you keep these things and these principles in mind as you approach recognition as an organization, if you're using a tool to do so, it really, um, in the moment shines and delivers that ROI to your organization that you're hoping to get. So let's talk about ROI. Um, I wanna spend some time here because as we know firsthand that if recognition and rewards are done right, there is a really material impact. This isn't just a feel good initiative. If you think about recognition and what it means in the workplace, it's really a strategic move with tangible business benefits. We have a ton of data at our fingertips here at WorkHuman, and these are just a couple stats that are super exciting as you think about not only creating a more human experience in your organization, which is really what motivates me day in and day out, is how are we delivering on a more human experience where people spend a lot of their time and effort in their life, but also the, the impact that you can have on shaping a more committed workforce has a tangible impact to your bottom line as a business. And you can be directly responsible for that. So let's just go through a few of them. And I'm also gonna share a personal story as I walk through this. 'cause as I was preparing for this moment, I really had to kind of reflect on some of my own experiences with recognition. But first, you know, we've done a ton of research and, and 80% of employees that have a strong recognition program in place agree that their recognition needs are fulfilled and they feel engaged at work That's enormous. 80% of the population then looking at turnover, that's, that's an expensive venture, right? Attrition is costly. Hiring is costly. You kind of start to erode your culture if you're seeing really high rates of turnover. But this is fascinating if you look at this chart. So looking at turnover rates, folks who have not been recognized turnover rate is higher, which is, is pretty obvious if you kind of step back and think about it. But when a recognition platform is in place, or a solution or tool, people who are recognized for a personal milestone are less likely to leave, right? Their commitment to their organization is reinforced. People who are recognized for performance on a regular basis in the workplace, also less likely to turn over people who are recognized for both, right? Again, like a great combination of two ways of being valued in a place where you spend a lot of time, the rate drops to 6% from 19. That is a huge delta. And if I think about this in a really kind of tangible and real life example, um, being recognized for a personal milestone. I ran the Boston Marathon in 2023, and everybody knew about it because I was complaining about the training for months on end, and I just made people listen to it. Um, but when I completed that very big milestone for me personally, a coworker of mine wrote me an award for a personal milestone of a sporting triumph. And what was so incredible was they kind of went on this journey with me, uh, whether they liked it or not, hearing about my training, and then how I felt on the day of the race. And tens and twenties and thirties and fifties of people camped on to this award and congratulated me for that moment and were cheering me on. And that is an event that has nothing to do with work, but it made me feel incredibly valued. And that my peers, my managers, other leaders in the organization and friends really cared about something that I was doing outside of work. And it made me feel incredibly valued. And then if I think about being recognized for performance, you know, whenever I get an award for a respect for teamwork or respects for results and innovation on something that I've just worked really hard on with my team, and I'm recognized for that, I'm feeling like real time. The contributions that I'm making to my organization are recognized and people are seeing them. So you see this chart, but it just to put it into a real context, those are the kinds of things that kind of ignite this commitment to your organization and also to the premise of recognition. And then this bottom stat here, um, this is a really cool one. So employees who receive recognition for a life event versus those that don't, are two times more likely to recognize others, and they're one and a half times more likely to be recognized. And that is a very, um, exciting thing to think about, about the culture that you create and kind of this flywheel effect of, of appreciating others and being very authentic in how you deliver that moment. James, I I'm curious for your reaction here is you kind of digest these statistics and think about this in a very kind of real world and less transactional landscape. Yeah. It's not surprising to see these numbers be what they are. Um, and I, and I hope everyone looks at them and thinks, okay, I gotta do this right, because I want benefits. Uh, it's also interesting to contemplate the range. I mean, your example that you shared is a range of what people can be recognized for within the organization. When the culture is performing in the way that we want it to, there is a recognition, uh, an appreciation culture that's, that's happening. Um, and, and that's wonderful because it creates that feeling of I have a shared purpose and we are on the team together. But as you say, it can also go all the way to the other side of, I performed well in this task. That task moves the business forward. Yeah. And someone saw that I'm moving the business forward. Well, what's gonna happen? My likelihood to repeat that behavior is going to go up. This is again, something we know about human behavior and human psychology. And so if we've identified the behaviors that we want to recognize, and it can be something small, it doesn't even have to be something that's part of a formal recognition program, especially if the culture is performing at this level, it can simply be your managers saying, you know, in that meeting we had that difficult moment where people were having a hard time expressing that, that hard thing, and you stepped up and you said the hard thing everyone else was avoiding. And I just wanna recognize that was hard for you to do and I'm glad you did. Thank you for having that kind of courage. You know, guess what? Courage is gonna multiply. Yeah. And other people, especially if you can say that kind of thing in front of other people, it's like, Eliza said this thing the other day that's got me thinking, and I'm really grateful that she said it. Everyone else is gonna think, wait a minute, I can have the courage to say things too now. And, and that's ROI that we're not even measuring here on this screen, right? Right. I've, I've learned how to be successful in this organization and it feels good. I'm going to do it more. Yeah. It's incredibly exciting. So let's talk ai, it's a really exciting position to be in where you can make a difference for your employees while driving business results for your organization. And to that end, using every tool and cutting edge resource available can make this a more effective practice. AI is a, a really powerful enabler to do this and a super valuable resource for practitioners and leaders alike. James, there's, there is so much going on in the AI space in general. Um, I'd love to get your take on how Forrester views AI as an enabler to support culture and recognition. Yeah, Absolutely. Because one of the things that's happening, of course, is AI went through its boom period where everyone was talking about it every 10 seconds and now it's already starting to cause questions. And people are wondering like, really, do I need AI there? Or I tried AI here and it didn't work. And so there's a settling right now that's happening, and what is AI really, really good at? So I wanted to share our perspective on what AI is, is able to do for us and in this specific context. Think about it very, very simply, what I just described of someone in a meeting saying, you know, Eliza said that really smart thing. I learned something new, or that took courage. Or, those are very specific kinds of recognition, uh, events. And, you know, having someone who has the personality that wants to do that recognition or they've learned from the culture that that's all great, but it's very hard to scale in a way that ensures that it's happening Yeah. At all the possible points that it could happen. And that we are following up to show that it was actually productive and useful so that we have the motivation to continue to do it. And that's where AI is going to play a huge role. It's going to help us scale up the power of doing this, not, not only in the obvious ways of, of, you know, making suggestions of particular recognitions that we can extend to someone or particular rewards that someone might be able to, to qualify for that, that that's going to be useful, uh, in, in terms of executing the recognition that we want to have happen. But for AI to be able to learn over time how we as an organization want to scale up to make it easier to do more of that kind of recognition. That's gonna be one of the powerful things, uh, about this. And I think a lot of people are worried it's going to be about automating this process. It's, it's not about automating the cold process. It's about accelerating this warm process where we get the humans to do the thing that humans wanna do, which is recognize their peers for doing a great job or be recognized when they've done something, something. Well, people want that, that's a warm thing. And so rather than seeing it as automating it in a cold way, like I said, I, let's talk about accelerating the warmth that we're trying to create in our culture, and that's what AI's gonna help us do. Yeah. And it's been incredibly interesting. You know, I joined Work Human three and a half years ago, and the discussion around AI was, uh, there was a lot less noise around it. And now it's been super interesting to think about how we're leveraging it here. And it ties with a lot of what you're saying, James, where we're starting to develop state-of-the-art tools with these exact principles in mind, right? It's not replacing the human, it's actually making the human much more effective and more authentic. And what it does too is it allows us to really leverage, um, real time recognition data so that organizations can have conversations with it in their own native language. And that that can help across a couple buckets. Like one is leaders getting real time trustworthy insights about their company's culture. It's giving managers guidance on their people at an individual level to help with development or skill mapping or finding a mentor for somebody to tag up to. And it can also help with organizations preparing for the future. Um, I mean, it's so interesting to think about prior places where I've been, where succession planning feels, uh, kind of data driven, but not really, and it's sort of, um, maybe more a political game, et cetera. The power of ai, the more recognition that we get and the more personalized and authentic and real time data, we can call that into, like having very strong recommendations of the future of your organization based on what those individuals are doing there. And we're also, James, you made a great point, and this is incredibly exciting to me. 'cause this is what powers everything that I just walked through, is we're also harnessing AI for people to write more meaningful recognition that is fundamentally different from just having AI write it for you. So you can check the box in the moment, and that school of thought is out there, and that plays more into that transactional kind of like, get it done real quick, write a quick note kind of mentality. What we're using AI for, it's so much more than that. We wanna aid people to essentially say more in the moment and be more authentic. And that makes that moment of recognition far more personalized and also in someone's voice. And then it allows us to gain insights and richer data. And also for that individual that's utilizing this kind of tool, it, it's sort of prompting them on how to think going forward and what you can do if you start doing that to a scale, the perspective, right, or scale level that you described James, it really is going to be a way to unlock a ton of opportunity within the organization. The strides being made in AI are really exciting as we think about how it adds value in the recognition space. But there are other recognition features that separate great recognition platforms from the good or the not so good on the personalization from. And as we look at, and I'll draw on WorkHuman for example. There are some features that enable people to really max out on recognition being done right outside of some of the things we talked about here in, in terms of how we're leveraging ai. And up here on the slide here, you'll see a few of them, but there are a couple things that, uh, can enable people to be more authentic and more personalized and more participatory, right? And recognition and create that community and that culture, uh, that people can feed off of. And some real time examples in our own product are things like automated welcome rewards with personal messages for new employees. Um, I just had two folks start in the past month, and it's a super rewarding moment as a manager to put their picture up there, write them the super heartfelt, um, welcome note, and then see hundreds of people across the organization welcoming you to the squad. Typically, when you're a new employee, you know, your manager and maybe a few teammates for the first week while you're just trying to get your bearings, what an incredible moment for a new associate to set that tone and welcome them to your organization. Second, building custom programs and goals all under one platform. This is where you can customize to talk to different groups that are surrounding a certain goal and really make a big deal out of it and make it a thing that the team is rallying around and the organization is seeing and appreciating improving communication with inclusion advisor. This is another feature in our tool where, um, you know, we write recognition, but sometimes there's bias in that. And this is a way to coach ourselves and each other on how we remove these things. A perfect example is we find ourselves using filler words like, you seem like you know what you're doing, or you seem like you've got it covered, seem as sort of doubting that person. So things like our inclusion advisor are going to catch those things and remove kind of ambigu the ambiguity and bias in the process and award personalization. I am a personal offender of this feature and I love it, but there's a lot of things you can do outside of just writing the award. You can put gifts, you can put memes, you can put photos, um, you can also, for those who don't really want to be out in the forefront, you can make them private, right? So there is a bit of personalizing to the individual knowing is this gonna make them laugh or do they want something that's just pretty like Steady Eddy, or do they really not want to have their recognition publicly displayed? You can really get personalized based on what you know about the people that work for you and the people that you work amongst. And then viewing and participating in the award feed. Um, I'm probably dating myself here, but I was one of the early users of Facebook and the Wall right concept of people commenting on your activity. It's very similar here in terms of the award feed, and it is so incredibly rewarding when I write a message of recognition to an associate of mine and I see an SVP from another area of the company piling on and celebrating the efforts of one of my associates where they might not be in their day to day, but they're super impressed by what they're seeing and they wanna chime in and let that individual know that they see them and they're excited about the behavior and the progress that they're making in the work they do. So I just commented from a work human perspective. James, uh, I'm curious if you have a broader perspective here, looking across the recognition space in terms of how intentional features go a long way to build up the kind of community and behavior we wanna see in the recognition space. Let's come back to that Word scale that I was talking about. Yeah. When we first ai, because personalization has always been this thing that we wanted to achieve, but it really relied on having individual managers and leaders just really like put it in their agenda to make sure that they did this and try to be creative and how they do it, and borrow best practices from their friends and so on. Um, with the help of ai, we can scale that. We can scale it, and that's that, you know, my description of the future of AI assisted performance and and recognition, uh, as being a warm accelerator rather than a cold automator. Yeah. And to me, that's, that's the kind of personalization that we, we all want. None of us are gonna feel warmly toward obviously canned, uh, recognition, even if it scales up five times as much, we're being recognized more, but we can tell that there's less feeling behind all of it. Um, and so that's the power here of using AI in this warm way to just accelerate the power of recognition. And it's very exciting when we look at what we think makes a good platform or tool to do this. We are waiting more and more like, yeah, sure, there's some basic things that you have to be able to do, but if you are not seeing personalization as the key to scaling this up and you're not using the most sophisticated approach to that personalization, you probably won't be able to help companies accelerate and embrace this approach. Absolutely. So moving over to rewards. We've talked a lot about the value of personalized recognition. I do wanna switch gears and, and really focus on rewards, especially, especially monetary ones. So there's a couple schools of thought here on e thanks programs versus monetary reward programs. And we know for a fact that programs that consist solely of things like E thanks actually do more harm than good. And we know this because we've studied this. And what you see up here on the screen are a couple interesting bites of data where we've looked at different programs across multiple customers and recipients and workers who received five plus awards with at least one having monetary value were four times more likely to stay with their organization. Conversely, a worker with five plus E thanks awards became three times or 3%, excuse me, more likely to leave the organization than a worker who received no recognition at all. So rewards really matter, and they really matter in line with recognition, two different things, but they work very beautifully together when done well and done right, something tangible that showing your employee, you're investing in them not just in the moment of recognition, but in the moment of reward has a material impact on their commitment to the organization. But what's also really important is that reward experience. So a store experience, reward, redemption experience, whatever you wanna call it that's designed around the idea that selecting a meaningful reward for hard work is critical in the flywheel of recognition. A celebratory redemption experience completes that moment in a way that allows employees to feel that they deserve something special, which increases engagement with the program and with colleagues and I, I say this that has the person who works in e-commerce on this session, it's really important to nail that. And here's how this should look in practice, and this is what my team is working on day in and day out to deliver that reward experience as part of recognition. So I'll walk you through this there, it's a, a flywheel effect on here, but we'll, we'll talk through it. The employee receives an award, it's a super positive experience where good work is celebrated and it lifts up the employee. Then we're typically trying to bring the employee into the reward experience by reminding them that they've done a great job. Come on into the store, spend your hard-earned points, reward yourself. And it's really important to kind of let them know that these things are there and that this moment doesn't have to end, right? It can keep going. And when they come into their e-store, we provide a really engaging experience. It has to be inspiring, it has to be friction free. Um, and it has to be scalable, right? So our reward experience here, I mean, we have people redeeming every two and a half seconds, which is really cool because clearly there's a lot of recognition happening through our platform, but there's also a lot of people carrying through that moment and rewarding themselves and they're going, and you want to have a really incredible offering. So in prior places where I've worked, I've either sort of gotten a credit to the store that I already worked on, or I got, um, a branded stapler when I was actually the buyer for staplers, and I could get that for free, right? So, uh, what you wanna make sure for the employee is when they're coming to kind of cash in on that moment, that there's a big element of choice for them to choose from. And that's where, if I think about our own kind of reward experience here, we're human, we have gift cards, we have merchandise, we have experiences, it really puts the power of choice in the employee's hands at a great value. And then within that moment, it needs to be a moment for pause and reflection. So if I think about, okay, I've, I've gotten this incredible recognition moment from my leader, from Sarah who who was originally supposed to do this webinar. When I go in and I go through the process of selecting something that's incredibly personal to me, whether it's booking a, a New York City Girls' weekend, um, by getting a hotel room with my points, or it's getting a Dyson air wrap because I wanna refresh my haircare routine, or it's getting a gift card to Lowe's because I actually have a big house project coming up and I'd love to fund some of that, I'm thinking of Sarah in that moment. And within that experience, there's moments for me to actually tap back into that award and remind myself of that incredibly personal moment that I had with Sarah and that moment where she recognized me and made me feel really good, and I can actually thank her in the moment within that experience and let her know what I got. And then the big wheel keeps on turning. I come out, I have a wonderful experience, and I pass it on to the next person, or I walk over to Sarah's office and thank her on top of already doing it via the store myself. So it is really incredible. Like when you think about coupling recognition that's highly personi personalized and the reward that goes along with it, there needs to be authenticity and personalization in both of those things. And then a really, really strong experience that doesn't make it hard for the employee to carry on and relive that moment again. And then go on and give that to the next person. So before we move into key takeaways and next steps, I do wanna close on a moment that to me, personifies why personalized recognition and rewards matter. So this is a gentleman who sees the moment when some family scenarios were happening that put him into a why not or why wait position to take his dad to a Liverpool game, to which clearly his father is a super fan. So this gentleman, uh, he saved up his hard, uh, hard earned hoarded points to pay for hotel and airfare, which allowed him to cover the bananas cost of tickets for his parents and his wife. And if you kind of read this last line here, I won't go word for word, but the sentiment coming out of this, like this wasn't just a transaction, right? He had worked really hard and gotten recognition for it and felt incredibly valued by his company, and he was able to do something for his family that was life changing. And he closes with, I was a big weepy mess in the best way when he heard his, you know, favorite Beatles song come on when they were at the stadium, and he closes with saying it was a profound, profound experience. Now, the e-comm person in me, when I see these kinds of stories to which I see many of 'em, it validates things for me. Like, yes, we have an 87% CSAT rating and this is why. And that is unmatched by other e-commerce giants even in the space. Or, you know, this is a testament to the fact that 95% of employees using our recognition and reward platform rate their store experience or their reward experience as excellent or good. But this really goes beyond the power of the store. This story directly showcases the value of making that investment in recognition and doing it right. And these are the kinds of things as somebody that has come from an e-commerce background but now gets to work in this, this beautiful world of recognition, uh, this is super gratifying to see and shows why we we can provide an ROI on an investment made in a program like this. So as we wrap up, um, James, I'd like to turn it back over to you just to talk through a couple of these human-centered best practices as people venture off and kind of digest and think about recognition and how it can play into their organization. Well, and all within this heading of the ROI of recognition, of course, because when we start talking about human-centered this and that, a lot of people think, oh, okay, you're talking about the soft side of work, but I need to do the hard side of work too. And that's what we're talking about. We're talking about doing this in such a way that it builds the business and the people for future business success. And, and you do that by making recognition authentic, and you make it part of the shared purpose or the vision and values that your organization has established. So you tie recognition to that and you tie it to the behavioral norms that you have, uh, identified will help support that vision and value and purpose. And so you are really creating this, just this engine of recognition that is tied to the things your business is trying to accomplish. And that really, when you can then make that personal, that becomes powerful. And that's where AI is going to help. And, and as long as you're approaching AI in this human plus AI rather than AI alone or AI plus human, which is actually backward, you're using it instead to scale up this warm accelerant rather than a cold, uh, uh, a cold automaton. And it then gives the humans the time and space to do recognition in a way that only humans can, um, which then just reinforces the whole process. So I mean, human centered best practice is, is the core to the ROI that everyone is seeking. Yeah, absolutely. And I, um, I initially opened this session, I think my first sentence here was saying that your people are your most important investment and we need to make count. So things like, and it's this third kind of takeaway here, making a monetary investment, let's say, to the tune of 1% of payroll towards a recognition program being done right, is a way to make a calculated investment that's really backed by a strong guarantee of ROI for your organizational goals in the now and for the long term. So in closing, I, I'd love to thank everybody for joining us today, and thank you, James, for a really exciting conversation so far. We've seen a ton of chatter and great questions in the chat, so I'd love if we could take some time to open this up and dive into the q and a portion of our time together. Okay. So let's start with some questions from the chat. We've had a lot of really solid ones in here, um, and apologies for some camera issues that just happened, but I'm gonna start with one great question that came in from Shanti. Shanti, thank you for a couple of great questions here in the chat. And I'm gonna flip it over to James. So James, the question is, how do you know which reward and recognition program is best for your organization and, um, knowing it without creating an entitlement mentality in the process? Sure. Well, I really like the, the, the back half of that question the most because that gets at the strategy of how you implement the program. I mean, obviously you could use any program more or less effectively, right? So it is not so much about the program, it's how it gets integrated into the organization, how managers are then empowered to use it in such a way that it isn't this carrot. And I did notice the carrot dialogue. I was trying to catch up on the webinar chat and the, the carrot dialogue. I'm sorry for those of you out of the culture, and I'm just blindly referring to, uh, carrots as a motivator. And you're like, what is that supposed to mean? So thank you for the answers, whoever answered all that in the chat. But yes, it is, um, this idea that you fall into the trap of using your recognition program in such a way that it's only a transaction that it is, I do this thing, I get this thing. Um, and, and, you know, incentives need, need to be aligned to achieve specific tasks, but recognition is broader than that, and it's more integrated into the culture. So the goal is to make sure that whatever program you're using, it allows you to have really good visibility into what it is that people are being recognized for, that it is tied to the values of your organization. Uh, I mentioned in the cultural part and a little bit in the summary, uh, there at the end, but that to me, this is very, very important. It's sometimes you get into the program, what are the features, what are the costs? How are we gonna implement? And all that's necessary. But really in the end you have to say, are we taking the time to make this part of how we approach our culture overall? Um, and if we are, then I think we don't run that risk of an entit entitlement mentality. Like, okay, I'm only gonna do things if I know I'm gonna get a cookie or a carrot at the end of that journey, but instead knowing that I'm gonna do things because I'm satisfied with contributing because I know I'm being recognized for what I bring to the organization, and it opens opportunities for me to imagine what else I could do for this organization. So that's, that, that to me is probably the more strategic thing to be thinking about on top of the correct question of, you know, which program do we select and how do we implement it? And kind of a related question here, um, that I, I'd love to dip into the question is how do you prevent the recognition program from becoming a routine and eventually diluted that it becomes a norm and interest is lost, or its effectiveness is lost? And that's a great question. I I would argue that it should become a norm. Mm-hmm. If you're tying recognition and doing it meaningfully, right? And you're tying it to your values and your expectations of your employee and making it a part of your culture. And also training, coaching, ensuring that people understand that these need to be meaningful moments, and also giving them the tools to scale that, right? We talked about AI being, being something that can help scale more meaningful and personalized recognition. It doesn't become a norm if every time you're receiving something, it's incredibly unique to you and to your company values and personal. Um, it's a very good norm to have. In fact, and I mean, I've been receiving recognition for three and a half years. I hope to for many, many more. And there is no dilution, uh, in the feeling that I get when I receive something that is tailored to me, or if I'm writing something that is tailored to an individual that's on my team or that I work with. The other thing that's helpful here too is that a very strong rewards experience also helps people not lose interest, right? And kind of keeps it as this good norm. And that's where somebody getting something that, you know, we walked through a couple statistics here and there's some really powerful data points of people receiving monetary recognition and then having this incredible experience of redeeming that reward in an environment that is very thoughtful and also tied to the moment of meaningful recognition. We, we use the, the flywheel word a lot here, and James and I have used it a couple times in this conversation, but that is what keeps this like high on people's minds and continues that practice, um, so that it doesn't get diluted over time. And it is a very good norm to instill in your culture. James, I don't, I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. That's my reaction. I love your answer. I love the idea that it's a norm, but if you do it correctly, that's a norm that is promoting energy rather than getting boring and repetitive. I, I'd just say from a human psychology perspective, we do like variety. We, we do find that if something gets repeated multiple times, it does become routine in that way. And so maybe the thing about the norm is that we make the norm that we try to make it personalized to, Hey, you did this thing and that's why you're being recognized. Or, you know, I, I want you to be able to choose how you experienced this reward. And an example you gave is a great one of being able to say, well, I'm gonna use this reward in this particular way, and that, that solidifies the uniqueness of that moment. So I, I do think we need to make sure that there's variety in how we express it and how people are allowed to enact it so that, so that just the natural human nature of being bored at repetition doesn't kick in. Absolutely. Um, there's another great question in the chat. Uh, what are the best employee engagement programs and which companies use them? And Shante giving you the, thank you so much for the best setup possible in this webinar, but, um, we're human, which, you know, I work, there obviously is one of the top providers in this space, and yes, I am probably a bias party by saying that, but we also have validation from well-known, reputable software reviewer companies like G two who have, uh, consistently rated us a top provider in the space. And, and I couldn't agree more. So very direct answer to your, your question. And another related question is how do we find out more about what WorkHuman has to offer in terms of setting up a program or imp improving the current one? You can go to workhuman.com. Uh, we have a, a demo that you can experience on the site. You can also reach out, uh, to anyone from WorkHuman and they can direct you in that area. But the easiest thing to do is go check us out on workhuman.com and sign up for a demo. Um, another great question that's in the chat is what are, what are proven ways to get managers to own recognition and not hand it off as solely an HR task question? I feel like that question some things. Yeah, that's a really great one. James. I'd I, I, I'll give my perspective, but I'd love to hear yours first here. Oh, sure. So from my perspective, this is, this is absolutely a very specific risk because, uh, HR does technically own this process usually and manages the tool. And depending on how strategic of a partner HR is seen as in the organization, it can influence, you know, I'm here talking about, connect this to your values, make sure it's part of how your organization operates. And you may not have the influence, at least at first to help people see that recognition needs to be done that way. And so it might take some time, and I, I recognize that. I don't want you to make you feel like you're the only one doing the heavy lifting out there. 'cause there it's, this is a common issue. Um, but I think that the most important thing besides making sure the culture accepts that recognition is something a manager wants to do well, that it's not a burden on them. Like, here's a new tool, here's a new task. You're gonna have to log in here and do this thing, but you're doing them a favor. You're saying, Hey, managers, I know you're always trying to recognize your people. Let me make this super easy for you to do this in very personal ways. I'm actually gonna cut the time it takes for you while increasing your effectiveness. I mean, everybody in the world of HR and management in general knows that your direct manager is single largest contributor to whether or not you're engaged at work and likely to stay there. And so telling managers like, Hey, you, you, you love your team, they're great. Um, and you want to be effective at keeping them here, this is one of the tools that we're gonna give you and make it super easy for you to do. So you're, you're positioning it as, I'm doing you a huge favor because you wanna be the best manager you can be. We see that we want to help you. I, I think that's, that's at least how I would approach those conversations. And I think, um, just commenting from a work human perspective, as we think about, okay, we have a very, very engaged pro program manager, right? The HR practitioner that's putting this program in place and they're pumped about it and they want it to work. However, they are reliant on the employee population feeling the same energy as they do about recognition. And I think if, if you're looking at platforms and providers out there, it's really important to kind of poke on what does the support actually look like from my provider to educate those managers on the value of recognition to, um, have things within the, the provider platform software itself that helps to aid and create those behaviors. James said, making it easy, but you can't just say, we're gonna make it easy and here's this thing and go, there actually need to be features in the product and communication mechanisms, or even a consulting group right from your provider that can help you as a program manager really kind of create the change you wanna see in your organization with proven tactics of, of how we embed that within your org and assist you in that venture. Um, there's a great question, um, that was asked by, by Paige in the chat. What metrics should we track to measure the effectiveness of a recognition program? Hmm, well, Some of them in your, in the data that you shared. I mean, we are looking at, at, um, I mean, from my perspective, yeah, the key driver that I'm looking at is whether or not you believe your manager, you know, depending on how you phrase it, we wanna know whether people think their manager has their back or is providing them resources. What, whatever particular tool you're using to measure manager satisfaction, I would look for that because that's probably the link that's going to be easiest for you to see when you, when you do this well. Um, and then the second one, you know, you're looking for, there's so many things that influence whether someone is likely to stay. Um, but you, you should be able to see that, um, that intention to stay as well as the attrition over time. That will probably take a little bit longer to measure. There's many other metrics though, Eliza, I'd be curious to see what you, what you see on your side. Yeah, I mean we, this kind of gets into the discussion of ROI, which we, we went over, but if I kind of bucket it in, okay, when we're looking at the, the effectiveness of a program for one of our clients, we're typically looking at turnover rates and a reduction in those. Uh, we're looking at productivity and productivity can be defined in a, in a couple, you know, schools of thought. Is it top line, right? Like, how is the company performance or it's serving employees and flat out getting the data and like, are they feeling more productive at work with a recognition program in place? And then there's engagement, right? And that's typically done by a survey, et cetera. And there are also things, um, you know, those are the three biggest buckets that, that we would recommend, right? When we talk about the impact of our program, we are looking at those, but then it kind of depends on your workforce and the chat is blowing up and I saw somebody talking about like offline workers or different kinds of, um, populations. Not everybody sits behind, uh, I know you can't see it, but a desk, right? Which is where I am right now. And there are things like, okay, what if we put a safety program in place for a client and that's how we wanna deliver on ROI, um, work injuries cost $171 billion a year between, you know, medical legal compliance training, et cetera. We know things like companies that have really strong safety programs, recognition programs tied to it, and that they're using it, see a, see a huge reduction in, uh, recordable injury rates, right? It's like to the tune of 82% versus companies that don't utilize these programs. And you kind of step back and you're like, wow, that is like a huge cost savings to my coun my, my company. Like that is clear, ROI on putting a recognition program in place. And then you put your human hat on there, it's like, wow, people are incentivized, right? By participating in a reward program or recognition program and is very closely tied to a goal we have as a company. But what we're getting them to do by having these interactions is be more mindful of the goal. It's also be more mindful and care about each other, right? Keeping each other safe at work and holding a higher bar on performance. And then they're also getting rewarded for it in the mix. So, not to go off on a tangent, but there are a few buckets in how we think about it and it can be tailored to the organization and really what they're trying to achieve. But turnover productivity and engagement are probably like the big three that I'd be thinking about as you think about metrics. Yeah, I, I know we're about to close here, Eliza, and I'm seeing so many questions we didn't get to. I know several of them about budget. Like, look, I'm in a small organization, or I'm an industry doesn't have a lot of budget. I, I wanna just emphasize the importance of making recognition part of the culture regardless if that recognition is purely just stopping in a meeting and saying, wow, Eliza, what you just said is the smartest thing I've heard on this topic all month. That is a huge motivator to someone in that moment. And it doesn't require extra budget, but it does require a cultural approach to having the courage to just say out loud, wow, what you just did is really a great contribution. I mean, I, I see in the chat here, a lot of you were actually thanking each other for your comments. You're, you know, you're already in this, uh, your personalities, you're ready to recognize and if you can spread that idea in your organization and then as budget becomes available, you'll know when to apply the budget to reinforce that, I think. Wonderful. Thank you for addressing that. 'cause I noticed that that was coming up very often in the chat. So we are at the end of our time. I know people probably have a two o'clock that they need to get to, so I wanna be very mindful of it. But thank you for joining James and myself today. If you want to learn more about how to use the principles that we talked, talked through today and how they can be applied in your organization, um, please connect with, uh, our team after this webinar. It was a, a privilege to talk to everybody here today, and we hope you have a wonderful holiday season. Thank you. Thank you.

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