Best practices in holistic recognition in rewards space

NIIT Technologies is a global IT solutions organization addressing service requirements of clients in many areas such as travel and transportation, banking and financial services, insurance etc. The company is helping businesses design agile, scalable, and digital operating models. NIIT Technologies has created a challenging and fulfilling work environment, which is transparent, innovative, and development-oriented. The endeavor is to build an organization where people look forward to working toward building new ideas and adding more value to their work.

Business Challenge 

With enterprises all over the world experiencing transformation in various business activities, the IT companies are expected to engage with customers as value-adding partners, bringing new ideas and new value into the customer’s business. In an industry that is at an inflection point, NIIT Tech aspired to take a strategic view of customer service excellence and needed to transform the company’s culture to provide exceptional value to customers and build a new and sustainable competitive advantage. As a result, there was a need to focus on nurturing a culture of innovation, appreciation and employee recognition. 

Solution 

In order to strategically align itself with the business strategy to embrace service excellence and service vision “New Ideas, More value”, NIIT Technologies underwent a cultural change journey aimed towards ‘Uplifting Service Levels’ of its employees across all levels and provide a holistic experience to both customers and employees through a structured intervention. 

INSPIRE, a reward and recognition program, was launched with the aim to nurture a culture of continuous innovation, value add and superior service experience to customers as per global benchmark. It created a loyalty-based redeemable rewards system where currencies called “crowns” were awarded. This end-to-end online solution helped implement the strategy, create focus and encourage result-orientation across the organization. The Recognition and Rewards Policy was divided under two categories:

Functional/Business Awards: These awards reward and recognize outstanding contributions by employees within a function. 

Organization Level Awards: These awards reward and recognize employees at the organization level every year.

The program INSPIRE has innate culture change dimension in its design, and hence was integrated with a set of five behavioral traits focusing on customer centricity, innovation and continuous value add, which are:  

• Think Customer
  
  
• Challenge Status Quo
  
  
• Unleash Ideas
  
  
• Improve continuously
  
  
• Take Ownership
  
  

Impact and metrics

The new version of INSPIRE was launched by the company in 2015. It was specifically designed to engage employees through innovative social applications that change behavior and achieve measurable engagement objectives. Over last three years of its comprehensive and sustainable journey, it has become way of life and has been instrumental in:

• 4000+ SMs recognized from 2013 till 2016
  
  
• 1566 awards received by NIITians
  
  
• >180 Role Models and Success Stories released
  
  
• The Recognition and Rewards Policy helped to build a sustained appreciation culture. Motivated employees generated 4,786 ideas out of which more than 1,086 have been implemented resulting in superior value being delivered to customers.
  
  
  

NIIT Tech’s VOC (Voice of Customers) score improved considerably. Also, NIIT Tech’s ability to proactively bring ideas to the table to solve business challenges improved. A case study on “New Ideas More Values” by Ron Kaufmann titled “How a Global IT Solutions Company is Creating a Culture of Delivering Exceptional Value to Customers” was published that showcased NIIT’s achievements, which are:

• 60% gain in customer-facing ideas
  
  
• 16% gain in employee engagement
  
  
• 6% gain in Net Promoter Score delivered
  
  
• 3% growth in overall Employee Engagement Survey scores
  
  
• Attrition rate reduced to 12.9%
  
  
• Employee turnover lowered from 17.70% reported in Mar ’15 to 14.55% in Mar ’16.
  
  

For the 153-year old RR Donnelley, an integrated communications company that is into 24/7 customer service business, collaboration within team members and cohesion among different teams are the basic hygiene factors, a lack of which often hit business deliverables. In creating a culture of cohesion and collaboration, it was realized that a critical component was amiss among their employees – thinking holistically as a team. To encourage this attribute in its employees, the organization realized that rewarding a team for solving a business challenge might be the only way to take stock of the situation.

Business Challenge

One of the key business processes for RR Donnelley’s outsourcing services involves XBRL services to companies in the US. Executing such high level in-depth detailing along with the complexity of the process led to frequent errors. For a 24/7 customer service business, it is essential to employ a rotational workforce that is perennially engaged. An analysis by the company showed that glitches often cropped up not because of lack of knowledge, but more because of lack of cohesion and coordination within members of the team leading to disruption in work flow. Oversight and lack of awareness about the collective capability as a team were bottlenecks that hampered productivity.  On-time delivery (OTD) and the number of defects per job were some of the business metrics that got affected.  The most adaptable remedial path identified by the organization was to encourage collaboration by the team and enable them to think holistically and not independently as individuals. The business need was to inspire employees to own each individual job as a team’s liability.

Solution 

To solve above mentioned challenges, the business division and HR business partners of the company came up with a ‘Gamified Recognition Program’ by developing teams based on exciting themes. For example, ‘Full Throttle’ was a program based on F1 racing where 5 teams, named after popular F1 teams competed with one another. Each team was assigned a mentor in the form of a business leader and teams scores were regularly updated on a score board on the work floor. Teams achieving defined quality target (95% and above) and meeting OTD gained fuel points and groups missing the target and delivery time lost fuel points. This not only triggered teams to perform well and chase the leading team, but also played a vital role in energizing the work floor environment, crucial with a young workforce.

Such a Gamified Recognition Program is fun, outcome-based process of employing competition/game elements and techniques to engage employees, reward, recognize and keep them motivated to achieve end results. While most of the gamified practices in the service industry were primarily focused on rewarding individual achievement that would contribute to the team, the company planned to leverage a larger holistic Gamified Recognition Program to improve team spirit and collectively enhance team performance.

Impact and Metrics 

Such innovative rewards strategy truly helped the company in many ways. Apart from the positive influence on the business metrics, the program helped in individual development of the employees and holistic development of the team. Also, it improved on-time delivery from 93% to 99% and quality increased from 94% to 99%. 

Apart from increasing cohesion among team members and collectively enhancing the organization’s output, it was interesting to note that Gamified Recognition Program had caught the attention of other business verticals. All the business teams including the support functions are looking at employing this technique as a tool to recognize and reward teams and employees. The program was packaged in different themes like Formula 1, Movies, Global Stock Exchange, creating a frenzied excitement on the production floors. 

Results

• The quality improved by 94% to 99%.
  
  
• On-time delivery sustained at 99%.
  
  
• Compliance to process improved from 80% to 99%.
  
  
• Attendance during “High Volume” seasons improved from 82% to 93%.
  
  
• Knowledge transfer within employees working in shifts was seamlessly achieved.
  
  
• Increased accountability and responsibility drove ownership of tasks across levels.
  
  

The highlight, however, was the holistic development of the team. 

The astonishing growth rate of Reliance industries has resulted in bringing together some of the world’s best talent. And employee recognition has played a very important role in ensuring positivity and collaborative spirit within teams. Realizing the need to manage large scale, real time workforce across verticals, the company needed to come up with innovative recognition programs.

Business Challenge 

In order to nurture the collaborative team spirit and foster an ambience of positivity in the working environment, a need was recognized by India’s largest private company Reliance Industries Limited, for innovative recognition programs. The company conducted an employee satisfaction survey (R-Voice Survey), which revealed that its Rewards & Recognition practices mostly hinged around rewards and that there was a scope to enhance employee recognition model that could further enhance cross-functional collaboration and positivity.

Solution 

‘R-Sammaan’, a structured, branded and yet flexible program was the common umbrella platform for all the employee recognition programs that was made available to employees through an online portal and a mobile app. Existing practices followed over the past decades were absorbed, amalgamated or accommodated under the aegis of R-Sammaan that was designed with the intent to bring a change in the behavior of employees, and empower them to become more appreciative and grateful. 

The need to have a common recognition approach as a requirement towards becoming a world class employer was impressed upon by the Executive Council (EC) of the organization along with the Chairman and MD. The power of recognition and the numerous benefits associated with this practice at a low financial cost, made for a compelling case to be approved. Research data on the benefits of expressing appreciation and gratitude was shared with the EC to help in their decision making. Consequently, a concept note with relevant business and research benchmarks was shared along with the technology and tools that were available in the market. Finally, the company dedicated its own IT resources to build the digital platforms (mobile app and portal) for the recognition program, R-Sammaan, which was received well by the organization.

Impact 

The ‘R-Sammaan’ program has been in place for 7 months and has already ascertained approximately 20% penetration. Employees have responded positively to the element of recognition and the technology used has ensured that the employees embraced the change without any hassles. The induction of HR Leaders from world class companies like GE, Amex, BP and other places as a part of the HR Transformation program also resulted in cross-pollination of world class HR practices. Patterns of recognition based on demographics, time dependent incidents, hierarchical levels across teams, company values and other such indicators have helped in designing further interventions with a greater level of efficacy.

After the successful launch and stabilization of the ‘R-Sammaan’ program in the Hydrocarbons business, the next step for the company is to replicate it in the other 2 businesses viz. Telecom and Retail. In addition to this, the company has other entities like Life Sciences, Foundation, Hospitals, Schools, Sports and Media where it plans to roll out this program. A 3-year road map has been drawn for its implementation across the entire company group.