Should Employee Recognition carry offline or online interpretation?

What are the activities that come to your mind when you say offline recognition systems? Annual employee-of-the-year meetings? Once in a six months event? 1:1 meetings?

Right. Mine too. But, guys, let me state that employee recognition goes far?beyond all these formal-on-high-heels happenings. It is pretty simple and office-centric. You don’t have to spend millions of dollars on those ceremonies where your employees will get free food and on the next day be in huge oblivion. And then, on the other day, the only thing accompanied is going to be a headache and hilarious videos taken by teammates’ smartphones. Not saying that these events should be excluded from the company's annual plans, but recognition should go beyond these kinds of events. It should not find its interpretation in a toast presenting a certificate with a gift that the employee won’t even like.

Recognition should be given daily as it drives engagement and motivation within the company. And we all probably picture the path of the company with engaged and motivated employees, aren’t we?

To sum up, some scholars sayings, ambitious, engaged, and strongly accountable employees are the ‘key reasons for the company’s success. However, the point is that we still happen to cooperate with the companies that are still into having an offline recognition interpretation rather than online software. However, the fact made us come up with an article stating the true benefits of online recognition software.

Let’s dive deeper to grasp the tangible assets of both ways.

Pros and Cons of Offline Recognition methods; 1:1 meetings

We recognize our employees’ hard work during our 1:1 meetings. This is what we hear most of the time when we ask what are your ways of offline recognition.

There is a strong belief that 1:1 meetings are part of our day-to-day practices. These are the meetings happening quarterly, as a minimum, with Team Leaders and Supervisors or HR managers. 1:1s are extremely important, they help to communicate the daily progress with the management, but what if you do have 100+ employees. And second, your recognition will remain between two or a maximum of 4 of you. Nobody in the company will ever know that Jack has been recognized for his big contribution in a Marketing campaign or Mary on her certificate in UI design. The company will lack transparency and the good things will remain silent. And third of all 1:1s have their true calling, they are not for recognizing your employees but rather giving and receiving feedback, pointing out some setbacks, helping to plan their future development, etc.

As Andrew S. Grove said it well in his classic book High Output Management, “1:1s are fundamental elements in the manager/employee relationship, but perhaps the best source for organizational knowledge that a manager can get”

Now imagine you are the HR manager in this case. Imagined? If yes, then you should see yourself deadly tired from those countless 1:1 meetings, and sitting in your office is a huge ambiguity about the reward. And the scary question; what should I buy as a gift? Total mess, right.

How to avoid this mess?

Lucky Carrot , which is an employee recognition software, besides being a peer-to-peer recognition tool, gives a chance to companies to reward their employees for a huge contribution, achievement by sending to its employees a box of virtual carrots. And as long as these carrots carry financial value the employees go to Lucky Carrot’s “Rewards” section and Redeem one of the famous and admirable gift cards. Easy right?

First, we save a lot of time. Second of all, the employees reward themselves by choosing their dream gift card. Third, as long as Lucky Carrot provides a chance to the management to organize the employee’s recognition in online software, the company’s Thank-you finds its interpretation on the company’s timeline. Everybody sees the “Thank You” and feels its importance.

Top-down rewarding

How do badges replace the annual “Employee-of-the-year certificates”?

Have you ever been recognized as the employee of the month in an annual corporate meeting? Probably many of you. It somehow feels awkward, right? And you know why? Most of the time during the year these employees are not usually being recognized. The reason is that these companies are hierarchic one and a little bit lack the part of evaluating the importance of recognition. Daily basis recognition is not finding its interpretation in these companies.

Instead, people may have with?Lucky Carrot? because the platform itself automatically generates the badges of the employee of the month, the most active user, the Top commenter, the Rockstar; the employee who got Thank-you-carrots from the peers with the company’s all values, etc. And you don’t have to wait for the annual event to be recognized as the employee of the month or the Rockstar, because the process is automatic and it finds its beautiful visual coverage on the platform and gets its special reward from the management.

Lucky Badges

All the data is being collected based on the employees’ activity conducted on the platform, i.e., sending and receiving carrots, commenting on the posts, etc. The crucial thing about all these is that the whole decision-making process is derived from the objective data that Lucky Carrot provides. Now except for your gut feeling, you do have a huge amount of data to enjoy in its broad sense.

Of course, there’ll still be companies loyal to their offline recognition methods but what we face nowadays made us refresh our priorities and have a fresh look at various innovative solutions. These are the ones that unite our employees, keep them engaged, make HR managers' lives easier, and overall save time. And what else do we all need to thrive at our fullest capacity unless we are in a company with such kind of?online employee engagement software ?