NAHL Group had an incumbent recognition program based only on incentive. To align recognition with its new people strategy, the organisation moved to a new provider who tailored recognition to NAHL’s company values to reinforce value-led behaviour.
Industry:
Consumer Law
Number of employees:
221
Number of companies:
35 yrs
Platform features:
Employee benefits, employee recognition, employee wellbeing
The challenge
NAHL Group is an umbrella group of four separate organisations who work across three different divisions and four geographically spread-out offices. Whilst each organisation under the umbrella operates separately, each shares a number of central office amenities, including NAHL’s incumbent recognition offering and a Reward Gateway benefits platform – “SourceIt!”.
NAHL saw recognition as an important part of its people strategy to build a better sense of togetherness and bring its business entities closer together. Unfortunately, NAHL’s incumbent recognition offering was financially-driven and didn’t recognise good behaviours or reinforce company values.
The Group’s team used plays from the book, “Build It: The Rebel Playbook for World-Class Employee Engagement,” and their own research to settle on the need for recognition which encourages peer-to-peer recognition in an authentic way whilst amplifying the message across the Group every day. With change always being a challenging factor, initial feelers showed push-back from staff who liked elements of the incumbent offering.
The approach
Seeing the opportunity to extend a successful partnership, NAHL chose to add Reward Gateway’s recognition offering to SourceIt!, giving employees any time, any device access to online, social recognition which is tailored to the Group’s values and employer brand.
The Group’s team chose to split their recognition across three levels. The first, peer-to-peer eCards, allows employees to send colleagues a personalised message of thanks with no financial value attached. The second, an award tied to NAHL’s values which allows the recipient to redeem against a set of gifts, with each employee being allowed to distribute one award per quarter. And the third, top-down instant awards with a monetary value attached for recipients to redeem at a retailer of choice on SourceIt!. Annually, recipients of certain awards are chosen by the CEO to receive the equivalent of $450 AUD to spend towards personal or professional development of their choosing.
NAHL also embedded a social recognition wall onto the platform to increase the visibility of recognition moments being sent across the Group by allowing colleagues to share in each other’s successes with likes and comments. This was key for NAHL as it meant that recognition was no longer seen as a secret act, providing employees with a fun, public and easy to use platform to both recognise one another and engage with each other’s recognition.
The results
Overhauling its recognition strategy and offering allowed the Group to provide employees with a tangible benefit which directly improved its Employee Value Proposition – seen by overall engagement across NAHL improving from 60% in 2017 to 81% in 2018.
The new recognition program was a hit with employees too, with an increase in visits of 50% from the previous quarter and 82% of employees now logging in more than five times a month. There was an 182% increase in the amount of eCards sent from what they saw in a six-month period with their previous provider, and NAHL also found that the first employees to send eCards where those who initially didn’t want the offer to change or didn’t engage with the incumbent at all.
In addition, NAHL’s team saw year-over-year progress through key measurements in the company’s employee survey. The amount of employees who agreed with “I have the ability to recognise and reward my colleagues” rose from 60.4% to 94.9%, “There is a strong feeling of teamwork and fun across the company” rose from 54.0% to 85.0% and “I am clear about what the company is trying to achieve” rose from 77.9% to 94%.
