People Analytics: Increasing Employee Engagement through Non-Monetary Rewards

This is the third blog in my People Analytics titled blog series. 

The first blog, entitled “People Analytics-It’s about the People not the Numbers” focused on the human side of People Analytics. 

The second blog, entitled, “People Analytics: The Robots are Coming (A view of the future and a current AI product review)” focused on the non-human side of People Analytics and provided a current AI product review.

This third blog focuses on the impacts non-monetary rewards have on employee engagement and my thoughts on an innovative rewards vendor. 

Trying not to work on vacation

I decided to take an extended vacation recently and visited the Hawaiian Islands. While it’s always hard to get away and separate your mind from work, I attempted to do my best. However, as I reviewed all the exciting experiences my hotel concierge offered me, I began to think “Would a surfing or stand-up paddleboard lesson given to me by my supervisor increase my employee engagement?." I’ll answer later in this blog.

For those wondering, I ended up choosing a beginner surfing lesson and it was an amazing experience. I got up after 3 tries and rode the longest wave of my group. Although I'm happy with my accomplishment, I won't be going pro anytime soon.

My personal experience with non-monetary employee rewards

My experience with non-monetary rewards goes back to my BearingPoint and Accenture days where I was awarded points for consulting project success. I would use the points to go into an online catalog and pick out gifts such as retail cards or various technology gear. I remember one year I saved all my points to purchase American Airlines plane tickets for a snow skiing trip. Although the point rewards were not significant monetarily to the company, they made a big impact to my employee engagement and were used as inputs in my performance reviews.

The important part about the point awards is that managers and above could give them either to subordinates or peer to peer. In addition, the point awards could be given for a number of different reasons related to the company values. The key was you wanted to perform in every reason category so you had a better chance of getting a point award. This mentality helped drive employee performance.

Research on Rewards

A 2013 Cicero study of company employees, titled “The Effect of Performance Recognition on Employee Engagement” provided notable findings:

·      When asked what reward would improve the relationship with their manager, 49% of employee respondents selected ongoing effort recognition and 32% selected above and beyond performance recognition, compared to 20% that selected a 5% salary bonus.

·      Employees from all the US/Canada region that received strong performance recognition were nearly 3 times more likely to be highly engaged compared to employees that received weak recognition. 

A 2012 Bersin study of member companies titled “The State of Employee Recognition in 2012” provided several notable findings:

·      Companies with recognition programs highly effective at improving employee engagement had 31 percent lower voluntary turnover than their peers with ineffective recognition programs. Bersin referred to these lower turnover companies by stating “These companies build a culture of recognition through social reward systems (tools that give people points or kudos to reward to others), weekly or monthly thank-you activities, and a general culture of appreciating everyone from top to bottom.” 

·      Companies with the most sophisticated recognition practices were 12 times more likely to have strong business outcomes.

A 2011 Infographic from Socialcast titled “The Power of Recognition in the Enterprise” cites many different employee recognition study sources with notable findings. Due to high number of sources, I will let you view the detailed infographic yourself.

Discovering Blueboard

After reflecting on my initial question, my experiences in consulting, and the research studies, I decided to investigate non-monetary award companies. I wanted to determine if there was a company that had an innovative product in the non-monetary rewards space aside from the point award systems. This brought me to Blueboard which is an experience based rewards company. Not only does their service platform include surfing and stand up paddle board lessons, they even have the “James Bond Experience.” That experience includes skydiving in a suit, an exotic car rental, and mixology lessons. All together they have over 300 experiences that can be distributed by managers to employees.

After reading the website I wrote the company and they connected me with Anthony Johnson “AJ” (Business Development Rep) and Morgan Chaney (Head of Marketing). I asked them if they could provide me research showing the impacts of their product on employee engagement. They sent me a link to research titled “The Impact of Experiential Rewards.” The article provided notable findings from a 2016 survey of Blueboard client employees that used the service. The results were very impressive and showed the following:

·      99 percent of employees felt more appreciated

·      96% of employees are more motivated to perform

·      97% of employees believed Blueboard rewards positively impact company culture

·      98% of employees agreed that Blueboard Rewards help retain top talent

Conclusion

I think by now you as a reader are getting the point—non-monetary awards are effective and make a strong impact on employee engagement. My personal thought is having a supervisor award me a surfing or stand-up paddleboard lesson would definitely increase my employee engagement.  Therefore, I would recommend considering trying the Blueboard service if you are an HR Leader with several hundred employees or more.

For more information on measuring employee engagement reach out to me via the Lang Analytics site contact page or my LinkedIn page. We can supercharge any aspect of your HR Analytics program along the curve from reporting optimization to predictive analytics and have deep experience designing, administering, and analyzing employee surveys.

For more information on Blueboard contact AJ directly via his LinkedIn page or email at [email protected].