In a hyper-competitive market of today, customer touch-point experience drives the loyalty of the customers to the brand. While a number of parameters combine to provide that unique and desirable touch-point experience, it is well understood that it is the employees of the organization who ultimately deliver that genuinely memorable customer experience. It is not just the employees at the front-end but the employees across the company who are responsible. Given the employee churn that organisations are experiencing, it is important for the organisations to make their employees feel that they are valued. It is also important to cultivate a sense of belonging and align them to live the corporate DNA so that these attributes translate into the desired brand experience for the customer. This can be achieved effectively through the deployment of innovative and easy to use rewards and recognition solutions.

While there are R & R solutions aplenty in the market, the right solution should enable the organization to easily configure and easily deploy in such a way that all employees of the organization irrespective of whether they are located in office or working in the field are able to access it. This would mean that the solution should also be mobile friendly as a number of employees may not even have workstations and may be accessing it only on their mobile phones.

Companies typically configure the platform to provide points for recognizing extraordinary performance, demonstrating core values, showing care to co-workers, rewarding long service and celebrating team/`individual wins. These points can be awarded at the corporate level or at the departmental level as well. The platform provides for the budgets for these awards to be disseminated to the departmental managers at the operating level who then issue these awards as per pre-defined values. The employees cumulate these points earned by them and redeem these points for rewards from a catalogue.

The rewards on the catalogue have gone through a huge metamorphosis and today employee rewards catalogues can include anything from Tupperware tiffin boxes to dinner at TGIF,  Sawaroski  jewelry to subscriptions for e-magazines, weekend getaways to customized honeymoon packages. A FMCG client wanted categories like personal development courses, computer training programs and experiential travel packages to be included in the catalogue. Pre-paid gift cards which can be reloaded with the value equivalent to the points that the employees have earned, at the end of the year and which allows the employees to buy any gift of their choice including on online portals, and many IT and ITES clients are pushing for these products, given their employee profile.

Platforms which are hosted on the cloud are more cost effective and typically also have best practices built in and hence these are easy to configure and deploy. IT Companies also go in for a single log-in, which allow employees to access the R & R portal through the intranet and allows them to view their performance. We have introduced social media functionalities in our platforms, wherein employees across the organization are able to send e-greetings on birthdays and special occasions, are able to congratulate or like their colleagues on receiving a recognition and are also able to upload photographs to share events that happened in their department.  Companies which allow their employees to access social media on the web also allow employees to seamlessly post their recognitions or certifications on their facebook or twitter pages.

Employee engagements by some of our clients today take the shape of adventure clubs, book reading sessions, stand-up comedy shows in the cafeteria, hobby classes etc. Many of these may be held in-house or links to relevant sites curated by the company are also provided to help employees to pick up these skills or hobbies.

Overall the new age employee rewards and recognition platforms are becoming a powerful tool for corporates to engage, reward and retain their best employees.