Meaningful Technology

Empowering the emotional impact of employee recognition

By:  Jonathan McClellan, Employee Recognition Segment Director at Hallmark Business Connections

I think we can all agree that employee recognition plays a huge part in the ongoing success of today’s businesses. Engaging, connecting, and empathizing with your employees strengthens your relationship with them and helps create a work culture that fosters greater feelings of being valued, increased productivity, and enhanced performance for your entire organization. Simply put, by “telling them,” you create meaningful connections that deliver measurable results. But how can you maintain authentic, meaningful connections in your employee recognition program when you have 100, 1,000, or more employees? The answer is technology—technology that allows you to work in a meaningful, yet effective way.

Emotionally Impactful Enterprise Effectiveness

Efficiency in your business’ tools, procedures, methodologies, and processes are key to enterprise effectiveness for your business. And when it comes to employee recognition, it’s truly no different.

While face-to-face communication is the best way to recognize an employee achievement or milestone, turning to a technological solution doesn’t have to mean losing warmth or emotion. In fact, technology can make an enterprise-wide recognition program more authentic and meaningful while being efficient. To do this, it must deliver speed, service and scalability in the following ways:

Speed—the ability to recognize, react, and reinforce the employee behaviors and accomplishments that matter most, when they matter most. Speed in your recognition program shows that you care enough to make their moment a priority.

Service—Your technology solution’s ability to give the right people in your organization the right tools to grow the relationships that benefit your business. By empowering them with resources that give them real-time, reaction capability, they can respond on the fly and recognize on the go.

Scalability—An employee recognition solution must ideally offer a platform that is nimble and responsive to the changing needs of your business over time. The technology needs to provide the consistency, clarity, and control that make your job easier, your employees happier, and your bottom line the happiest.

A Note on Scalability

Why are consistency, clarity, and control so important to scalability in an enterprise-wide, recognition solution? Simple. They preserve the continuity, message, and security of your brand, mission, and vision.

In short, scalability ensures your employee recognition solution remains consistent across your organization in how it’s managed, used, and most importantly, received.

Scalability from a technology must offer clarity by providing the tracking, measurement, and reporting a business needs to gauge effective and efficient performance of the program.

Scalability helps preserve security when the technology actively administers and monitors a business’ rules, obligations, and checks and balances in order to maintain compliance.

Recognize the opportunity

Please don’t believe that a technology solution can effectively replace the ol’ face-to-face. It can’t and shouldn’t ever happen. People thrive on human interaction and always will. But, leveraging technology correctly can help your organization build and strengthen relationships when being together isn’t possible. Whether it’s because of a physical distance or a logistic issue, a technology employee recognition solution can fill the gap and ensure a special moment isn’t missed or delayed when it comes to recognizing and celebrating the employee responsible. “telling them,” says a lot about you. And when done in a timely, authentic and sincerely way, it helps your employees and your business thrive.

Jonathan McClellan leads the employee recognition business unit at Hallmark Business Connections, providing strategic leadership and employee enrichment solutions for Fortune 500 performance-centric businesses.