Great governance amplifies and protects your employee recognition investment. Here’s how.
You want every dollar you invest into your recognition program to make an impact – reaching and rewarding the dedicated, amazing people in your organization.
More dynamic and responsive than compensation planning, recognition helps you spot and encourage great work when it happens. This merit-driven approach can increase equity and engagement exponentially – but the spontaneity of recognition also means it should be managed in a way that promotes effective and appropriate use.
Getting the balance right can be tricky. Some parts of your organization will use more or less recognition simply due to their role in the business. Cultural norms can also influence the free flow of recognition – some employees will feel more empowered to use the program, and some leaders will be more comfortable broadly encouraging participation and program spend.
So how can you ensure that every dollar of your recognition budget is being directed to where it will make an impact?
One of the best ways to keep recognition on track is through governance – the rules that oversee how the recognition budget is assigned, approved, and distributed to individuals across your organization.
Workhuman features multiple options that help with program governance to help achieve that balance and optimize your recognition dollars:
- Spend tools
- Data and analytics tools
- Recognition flow tools
All of these tools contribute to proper program usage in different ways – guiding the appropriate stakeholders while ensuring you don't overspend your budget.
Here’s a quick look at five of our governance features and how they can help you get more from your recognition spend:
- Award Advisor
Create more consistency and symmetry in how awards are given. Award Advisor is a series of quick multiple-choice questions available during the nomination process. It assesses the scope and level of effort around each recipient’s contribution and recommends the most appropriate award level. Set the Award Advisor as mandatory or optional in the nomination process to ensure more proportionality and equity around award types and sizes.
- Award Approvals
Set a threshold for awards to go through your approval process – following the management chain for either nominator or recipient. Using award approvals ensures oversight for every monetary-cost nomination – so recognition is always meaningful and appropriate. We recommend a single approval for the lowest-level awards and two approvals for the highest-level awards in your program.
- Abuse Detection
Abuse detection is a behind-the-scenes tool that flags frequent nominations and alerts your program administrator. Choose your own threshold for activity. Flagged nominations have a delayed delivery time frame to give you time to review.
- Manager Reporting
Workhuman features reporting tools for every people manager: My Team and Actionable Insights share individual recognition stats for each direct or indirect report – as well as compiling them across the team. Managers can see the amounts given and received by members of their team and the distribution of awards by type or reason – and take action to balance or encourage recognition where needed.
- Spend Management
Spend management helps you track and control recognition spending across your whole organization in a flexible, customized way. Track your activity against budget to ensure you don't spend more than you have allocated. Create individual budgets by department, business unit, location, or by leader, and then assign visibility to team administrators, stakeholders, or HR business partners.
The best recognition programs are those that provide clear guidelines for recognition without restricting or inhibiting the flow of appreciation. That’s why good governance is so essential to a strong, flexible program. Talk with your Workhuman account team today for help determining which governance tools will work best for your program.
