The company culture of an organization is the reflection of its practices and values.
One of the most common characteristics of an ideal company culture is the shared mission statement. Organizations with a powerful company culture often offer exciting and encouraging rewards to their employees. These rewards may include health insurance, extra vacation time, and sometimes even retirement plans.
Although company culture may vary from organization to organization, some give more preference to profits while others, besides profits, also value their employees. And therefore, they invest in employees in the form of different types of rewards. These rewards, in turn, encourage the workforce to be more productive and profitable.
Successful organizations know that expressing gratitude to employees and appreciating good work helps the company eventually. Besides offering medical and more facilities, recognizing hard-working and profitable employees lifts their motivation to another higher level.
So, let’s explore effective employee recognition software that can help you reward the best employees. I’ve also included the difference between manual versus automated employee recognition along with FAQs.
Top Employee Recognition Platforms in 2024
These are some of my favorite employee recognition platforms that I’ve listed for your benefits.
Bonusly
Bonusly is a well-crafted comprehensive staff recognition and acclamation platform. A workplace developed with its ambition of the best employee nurturement is the pinnacle of a great company.
Employees are the impetus behind the building of an organization. Employees who receive recognition are happier, perform better, and accomplish the highest glory for the company.
For the most sought-after workforce, Bonusly provides great peer-to-peer engagement. Here, employees may quickly show their gratitude for their coworkers by using Bonusly’s 360° recognition tool, thus, his/her achievement can be put forward in front of all.
Stronger and more cooperative working connections, as well as a greater feeling of community, belonging, and purpose, may all be found in this positive atmosphere. 
The automatic reward system is yet another feature of Bonusly wherein the staff members can win points and redeem them! The finest employee incentives are those that the staff members get to choose for themselves. Gifts include digital gift cards, corporate merchandise, cashout choices, personalized rewards, etc.
Last but not least, the people analytics dashboard from Bonusly makes it simple to analyze the patterns in recognition occurring on your team right now. You have access to a previously unheard-of degree of visibility into the relationships and participation patterns across your organization.
Nectar
Nectar is a fantastic employee recognition platform that lets you recognize excellent work and redeem rewards. It helps to keep your team engaged and connected.
Nectar supports both peers and top-down recognition. It offers a strong reward suite, letting your employees select from branded swag, Amazon items, digital gift cards, and more. With this, you can choose from commonly used awards that it incorporates by default, or create your own unique ones. This recognition platform lets you add multiple challenges to the system and thus keeps employees motivated.
You can add birthdays, anniversaries, and similar events of your employees so that you never miss wishing them. With this, you can also offer exciting deals and discounts to your employees across the country.
WorkTango
WorkTango’s Employee Recognition & Rewards feature is designed to elevate the employee experience by promoting key behaviors and company values and fostering connections among distributed teams. It offers a variety of program options to recognize and reward employees in a way that aligns with the organization’s culture.
With WorkTango, you can easily manage and measure the impact of your recognition programs through user-friendly dashboards. The platform also allows for customization, offering incentives, awards, celebrations, and tailored programs to meet your specific needs. Overall, WorkTango provides a simple yet robust solution to enhance employee engagement and create a positive work environment.
Motivosity
Motivosity is an employee experience platform that aims to create a memorable and engaging work environment. It helps organizations perfect important moments for their team members, fostering a sense of community and connection. The platform allows for recognition and rewards in various directions, including peer-to-peer, top-down, and bottom-up. It also focuses on manager development to enhance the employee experience.
Motivosity emphasizes the importance of gratitude and offers a wide range of rewards to show appreciation. It also provides actionable employee insights and data visualization to inform decision-making. With a mobile app and seamless integration with existing tools, it ensures accessibility and flexibility. The platform has received positive feedback from users and offers a comprehensive solution for enhancing employee engagement and satisfaction.
Awardco
Awardco is an employee rewards and recognition platform that simplifies the process of recognizing and rewarding employees. It offers premium-level features at an affordable price, making it accessible to organizations of all sizes.
The platform streamlines recognition through automation, handling service anniversaries, birthdays, and onboarding tasks. It also facilitates timely spot recognition programs, fostering a culture of appreciation through peer-to-peer and manager-to-employee recognition. Awardco boasts a quick implementation timeline, allowing organizations to get up and running within two weeks.
With millions of rewards available on the platform, including access to Amazon’s rewards catalog, employees have the power of choice when it comes to selecting their rewards. Awardco also provides full-service recognition and rewards, offering tax compliance support through its partnership with Deloitte and personalized expertise.
Additionally, the platform offers lifestyle spending options for more flexible employee benefits. Celebration kits and an ROI calculator are additional resources provided by Awardco to help organizations maximize the impact of employee recognition on behavior, culture, and retention.
Assembly
Assembly is an employee recognition software that brings all your team to one place. This incorporates a culture of working together as a team with a better understanding and context. With this software, you can connect the organizational projects, teams, and workflows.
Assembly lets you add special occasions that matter for every single employee. This way, as an HR or manager, you can never miss celebrating any of your employees. It lets you establish your customized workflow and reflect your goals. Assembly is the perfect single alternative to multiple tools you use separately for distinct functions.
Empuls
Empuls is an interesting employee engagement platform that helps you carry out employee recognition programs. It establishes constant communication between the employees, teams, and superiors.
With Empuls, you can create a set of opportunities and measure employee engagement by seeking proactive feedback. It also lets you listen and talk to the employees and fix the causes of disengagement. You can easily recognize decent behaviors and offer visibility to the efforts of every single personnel. Recognize the employees who meet or exceed organizational goals and reward them for excellent performances.
This software also lets you work on maximizing your employees’ savings by extending their incomes in a variety of ways. You can sign up for a free trial of this software.
Guusto
Guusto lets you shape your company culture by recognizing the best talents. By rewarding them with deserving incentives or rewards, you can make them feel motivated, inspired, and connected. Guusto offers employee recognition programs in 160+ countries with Mastercards.
Their recognition program includes Anniversary/Milestone/Years-of-Service Awards, Spot Bonuses, Peer-to-Peer shout-outs, wellness programs, goals, birthdays, performance awards, and more. Guusto offers simple execution of your recognition program with flexibility and inclusiveness.
The actionable reports it offers let you work on your workforce strategy to enhance engagement, retention, benefits, and more.
Runa
Runa is a great employee recognition software that lets you offer digital rewards to the best talents. With this, you can recognize the good work and celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays. It also lets you concentrate on the well-being of the employees.
Runa offers you access to a vast selection of digital gift cards backed up with reliable and lightweight APIs. It comes with a plug-and-play system that you can integrate seamlessly into your organizational system. You can request a demo instantly.
Cooleaf
Cooleaf lets you connect with your team and recognize them for their valuable hard work. This is based on an effective employee recognition strategy that helps you retain the best talents of your organization.
With Cooleaf, you can incorporate a meaningful and timely employee recognition program. The automated recognition with attractive incentives and rewards that it offers can help in motivating the workforce. The data-driven recommendations and activity evaluation help in growing performance.
Cooleaf lets you celebrate work anniversaries, birthdays, and such special events. You can book your Cooleaf demo by filling out an online booking form.
Kudoboard
Kudoboard is a platform that lets your team celebrate each other’s special occasions together and enhance collaboration.
With Kudoboard, you can automate the welcome emails to the newly joined team members. You can create shout-out boards and motivate colleagues to boost each other. It also lets you turn gifting on so that managers can add some gift cards to their Kudosboards. These can be ideal for maternity leaves, work anniversaries, etc.
BRAVO
BRAVO is the ultimate employee recognition software designed to help create a culture of recognizing and rewarding employees for going above and beyond.
Equipped with features like peer recognition, point awarding, rewards, and monthly allowances, BRAVO helps you track and improve performance in an engaging way that leads to increased retention rates as well as improved team cultures and profit growth insights.
BRAVO offers customizable insights for managers and companies. The ability to do one-to-one, team, or public/private recognitions, in addition to company branding, helps create cohesion between employees by allowing them to share their focus with colleagues while also receiving deserved praise from peers upon completion.
BRAVO software enhances workplace culture and engagement through its user-friendly interface, artificial intelligence capability, extensive survey templates, and gamification features.
These unique features promote user interaction with personalized rewards and incentives both internally within the company and from external partner brands in over 40 countries worldwide.
With BRAVO, users can easily recognize colleagues for meaningful occasions such as birthdays, anniversaries, etc., create surveys targeting specific teams, and access their own reward points wallet (known as BRAVOs) to redeem cash value benefits.
Its pricing structure has three editions: Starter, Growth, and enterprise, which vary based on the number of employees and some features.
Evergreen
Evergreen is an employee engagement and Carbon offset reporting software that empowers admins and managers to gain a better understanding of the team’s performance.
It is the only peer-to-peer recognition software designed to cultivate team culture while helping make a positive impact on our planet. Users can recognize achievements and contribute to tree planting.
With more than 300,000 trees planted by users around the world, leading companies are using Evergreen to publicly recognize their peers and amplify environmental or social initiatives.
Unlike other reward systems available today, Evergreen allows teams to give timely feedback with real rewards that can be tracked in a public team channel.
Evergreen helps teams offset their carbon footprint, prove their environmental credibility, and visualize their contribution to the planet with badges and metrics.
The platform also allows users to track personal and company-wide Carbon offsets while seeing who is giving or receiving recognition in order to deliver visibility on company values.
Integration with Slack and Microsoft Teams makes it easy for any organization. The companies can try it free of cost for 14 days and can upgrade to its very simple and single pricing pattern.
Giftogram
Giftogram is a unique platform that gives you everything you need to send gift cards quickly and easily – whether it be one employee or an entire staff. It is a state-of-the-art employee reward platform that gives them a variety of options in gifting products available from popular brands.
It helps the company boost its delivery capability of gifting either digitally or physically, where they can also make it personalized along with distinctive custom messages and logo branding. Recipients can then redeem from over 200 retailers, restaurants, and services worldwide.
Giftogram is trusted by thousands of the world’s top companies, such as T-Mobile, Samsung, Amazon, Microsoft, Ameritrade, Ikea, and many more.
Giftogram provides enterprise-level tools and features to help businesses effortlessly manage their gift card program. Giftogram makes it simple, from quickly sending out bulk cards and automating anniversaries, birthdays, or other milestones for employees and customers to assigning budgets and employee management. Its detailed reporting allows you full control of your budget while giving users an easy way to send and receive gifts in minutes.
Additionally, the platform can be easily integrated into leading HR and CRM platforms like Workday, Zenefits, Hubspot, and Salesforce so that sending gifts and communication can be easier.
Creating an account allows you to flexibly purchase Giftograms when needed without any additional costs incurred.
HeyTaco
HeyTaco is a comprehensive employee recognition platform designed to help organizations build stronger, more engaged teams on Slack and Microsoft Teams.
With HeyTaco’s intuitive features, including taco giving, leaderboards, custom rewards, and surveys – all offered in one centralized dashboard. Companies can easily reward good behavior while gathering useful feedback to foster a healthy workplace culture.
Track engagement analytics from the central dashboard, including feedback surveys, while Taco TV shares activity throughout your workplace.
Utilize leaderboards for top givers/receivers, create tailored rewards redeemable with tacos earned, and tag them according to company values for increased meaning and more.
Furthermore, its integration APIs facilitate customization of the users’ experience.
The software can be tried free of cost 30 days after the trial period, and it can be upgraded to its economic pricing structure.
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Kudos
Kudos recognition platform will help you recognized your employees’ efforts and keep them happier so they can work with more dedication, efficiency, and competence. It supports several levels of rewards and recognitions to appreciate employee performance.
The software includes gift cards, holiday packages, rewards, and other experiences to employees to make them feel better and foster trust. Kudos’ powerful dashboards help you view insights into every employee’s experience, performance, and workplace culture. With these actionable analytics, you’ll know who is performing well and deserves appreciation.
With Kudos, you can implement an amazing workplace culture by initializing award programs, automating employee celebrations, tracking employee morale, and more. Apart from this, it allows HRs to build resilient and strong cultures to let employees perform better.
A small recognition and reward can engage the workforce, improve performance, reduce employee churn, maintain a strong culture, and more. Kudos help you to know who is giving quality work, who is sincere, who is dedicated to their work, etc. so that you can appreciate their work and discipline in front of everyone.Pros Cons ✅ User-friendly, you don’t need technical skills necessarily ❌ Tracking the status of the points can be challenging for employees ✅ Redeeming option is great ❌ Reporting and analytics could have been better ✅ Offers multiple levels of recognition ✅ Customizable awards
Book a demo and understand how the tool helps you recognize and rewards your best employees.
Terryberry
Appreciating your employees with Terryberry will help increase their engagement levels so they are motivated to work more efficiently. This employee recognition and rewarding platform offers multiple solutions to appreciate employees’ achievements and helps you build and develop a strong culture across your organization.
Terryberry includes social, manager-led, and peer-to-peer recognition in a single place. You can create a competitive environment by implementing customized rewards programs to motivate your employees. With this platform, you will no longer miss any employee career milestones, achievements, and anniversaries.
Terryberry’s Be Recognized enables you to develop a purpose-led and engaged organization by applying custom rewards, analytics, corporate wellness, and more. This is adaptable and meets your unique requirements to simplify all recognition processes. It includes jewelry, custom rewards, and more that you can customize as per your requirements.
You can integrate your existing business tools, such as Outlook, Slack, HRIS platforms, Microsoft Teams, and other workplace tools. You can now engage your employees more in your business and enhance your productivity.Pros Cons ✅ Capabilities to meet essential recognition needs of a company ❌ Limited reward options ✅ Offers customizable options ✅ Drives employees engagement ✅ Amazing response team
Just fill out the form and schedule a demo to experience the working culture of Terryberry and explore its reward options.
Reward Gateway
Build a culture of appreciation, recognition, and rewards across your organization with Reward Gateway. It offers a customized solution so that you can easily apply reward programs. In addition, you can enable everyone, from leadership teams to frontline employees, to participate in this program and appreciate those who deserve it.
You can leverage multi-directional recognition and reward to drive your business growth by aligning programs to your values, employer brand, and missions. Reward Gateway is a recognition and reward platform that helps you memorably recognize your employees. This helps them engage more and work efficiently.
Reward Gateway allows you to create an innovative culture within your company to recognize your employees continuously with on-the-spot awards or rewards, no matter whether your employee is working from the office, home, or anywhere else. This allows them to feel part of your company, values, and purpose, enhancing productivity.
You will get customized e-cards, redemption options, branded mobile applications, customized service awards, managerial rewards, automated recognition, and more. You can add your colors, brand elements, style, etc. to make your reward and recognition culture more shiny.Pros Cons ✅ It offers plenty of customization options like color, style, format, etc. ❌ Reporting feature could have been better ✅ User-friendly interface ❌ Reward options should be more ✅ It provides many rewards and vouchers ✅ Cards are instantly loadable
Discover more solutions to implement in your business reward culture by taking a live demo.
Now, we will explore in detail about employee recognition software.
What is Employee Recognition Software?
Employee Recognition Software is an innovative and interactive platform for companies to shape their engaging workplace in such a manner that employees feel they are getting noticed for their hard work.
It is a perfect tool for those companies who want to make their employees feel valued and appreciated. It helps in the development of a strong company culture by valuing as well as celebrating success, thus leading to an increase in the employee retention rate.
Among others, its state-of-the-art features comprise a user-friendly dashboard, peer-to-peer recognition options facility, security measures to service compliance purposes, awards and recognition programs for birthdays or work anniversaries or for achieving milestones, etc.
Employee recognition software solutions increase employee engagement for all types of businesses and various sizes at the same time, which in turn increases employee morale and productivity.
Features One Should Look for When Choosing the Best Employee Recognition Software
The right employee recognition software contributes to a positive workplace culture and employee satisfaction, so consider features that focus on these factors.
Below are the top features that companies should consider while finalizing the employee recognition software:
✅ The platform should be easy to navigate for managers and employees, with a simple interface and intuitive design.
✅ Software should offer multiple recognition options, such as peer-to-peer recognition, manager-to-employee recognition, and company-wide recognition.
✅ Prefer software that facilitates social recognition, allowing employees to acknowledge and appreciate each other’s achievements.
✅ Customizable rewards that fit your company culture and budget and should offer various options to choose from, such as gift cards, merchandise, experiences, or donations to charity.
✅ Real-time reporting and analytics is one of the important features a company should look for as they help to track the success of your recognition program in terms of trend identification measure effectiveness.
✅ Easy integration with your existing systems, such as HR, payroll, etc, to ease the recognition process.
✅ Software with scalability capabilities to meet the needs of a growing company is vital and also provides on-the-go access.
✅ The software should support Industry-standard security protocols to safeguard employee data.
In addition to the above features, the company can also take into consideration the size and structure of the organization, budget allowance, and cultural values. With careful consideration, you can choose the best recognition solution for long-term success in rewarding those who continuously make valuable contributions towards organizational growth.
Importance of Employee Recognition
Employee recognition is also termed social recognition. It is the deed of acknowledging your workforce publicly for who they are and what difference they are making. With such recognition from superiors, employees get to know each other and feel more enthusiastic and inclusive.
Employee recognition is among the most significant factors impacting productivity, workplace engagement, and employee retention.
Employee recognition can help organizations in the following ways:
Encouraging Excellence
Employee recognition is the forming foundation of excellence in the organization. It helps to provide strength to the relationships and a purpose to achieve desired organizational goals.
Employee Engagement
Workforce engagement is the most important factor in the success of any organization. Employee recognition plays a vital role in achieving employee engagement. According to a survey, employees expecting to be recognized for their efforts are likely to have a 2.5 times more engagement rate.
Employee Retention
The success of any organization is reflected by its employee retention rate. Surveys cite that around 44% of the employees planning to leave their jobs is due to lack of recognition. To retain good employees for longer, it is essential to recognize their efforts from time to time.
Enhanced Productivity
Motivated employees are more likely to put more effort into achieving organizational goals. All your workforce would be interested in being recognized. And if you offer regular recognition to your employees, they will get motivated to work harder. Of course, their hard work will drive more productivity in your organization.
Automated Vs. Manual Employee Recognition
To integrate employee recognition programs into your company, you need a well-planned recognition system in mind. This program includes rewarding employees with incentives, gifts, wishes on birthdays, anniversaries, and much more.
There are plenty of employee recognition software and apps available online that help in effectively implementing this program. Though this can be achieved manually, for organizations with good employee strength, it can be time-consuming and difficult. Sometimes, HRs and managers may forget dates and instances when they need to put forward emails and notifications. In such cases, the recognition program does not sound effective.
The process of employee recognition can be automated with a bit of intervention and required modifications. It can also save a lot of time for managers, who can invest that time in teamwork.
FAQs
Implementing and managing an effective employee recognition program with the help of software can significantly enhance employee engagement, boost morale, and foster a positive work culture.
Let’s see some of the best practices and guidelines to consider:
– Define clear objectives and criteria for the recognition program that are aligned with company values and employee behaviors, which are attainable and support organizational goals.
– Automate notifications and reminders to encourage participation and timely recognition.
– Create multifaceted initiatives that are tailored to the needs of diverse work groups and reward individual contributions in terms of a wide range of incentives such as gift cards, experiential perks, extra time off, monetary bonuses, or flexible working arrangements.
– Encourage managers to incorporate recognition into regular one-on-one meetings and team interactions.
– Highlight employee achievements and successes through company newsletters and social media channels.
– Assure efficient roll-out and implementation of the employee recognition program by developing a communication plan to introduce its features and train managers and personnel on nomination and recognition processes while providing steady guidance for successful adoption.
– Highlight employee achievements and successes through company newsletters and social media channels.
– Incorporate recognition into performance reviews and feedback sessions.
– Track program engagement, participation rates, and reward distributions using metrics.
– Surveys and feedback sessions regularly collect employee input to assess the effectiveness of our program on morale, engagement, and productivity.
– Generate reports and insights to track program effectiveness and make data-driven decisions.
– Track program engagement, participation rates, and reward distributions using metrics to generate reports and insights for data-driven decisions. This will help to assess the success of employee programs in terms of morale, productivity, and engagement.
– Encourage a culture of gratitude and positive reinforcement among colleagues.
– Make recognition a regular and ongoing practice, not just a one-time event.
Yes. Employee recognition software allows companies to tailor incentives based on individual preferences and behaviors that most likely help to motivate each employee, ensuring personalized engagement and satisfaction.
The following steps would assist in getting you data insights about the software to know about its effectiveness:
– Gather feedback from employees about their experience in order to improve the areas that fascinate the employees and increase their participation.
– Data metrics and reports provide greater insights to measure the effectiveness of Employee Engagement.
– Monitor redemption rates that will provide insight into employee preferences as well as any likely issues related to reward selection.
– Measuring the Impact of a Program Through KPI Comparison before and after implementing the program is again one of the important steps to knowing the value addition of the software.
– Conduct annual, biannual, or quarterly employee satisfaction surveys to track changes in perception and identify emerging trends.
– Compare your program’s performance to industry benchmarks to identify areas for improvement and best practices to adopt.
The above-mentioned points will help you evaluate your employee recognition program and ensure it remains a valuable tool for motivating, engaging, and retaining staff.
Conclusion
Employee recognition is an integral part of any organization. So, if your organization lacks this, it is time to understand the value of your workforce. A motivated, engaged, and satisfied workforce can make the game, while a dissatisfied and demotivated workforce can break the game. Try any of the above-listed software and incorporate employee recognition in your company.
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