Current Situation
Rewards and recognition strategies are diverging into two separate functional competencies. Rewards is split between fiscal and nonfiscal rewards while increasingly being tied into total rewards strategies within compensation management. Recognition is growing more social with links to communications, performance, and workforce inclusion. While both retain their origins in recognizing and elevating employee success, rewards are trending to favor individual achievement, while recognition layers in social aspects in support of work communities and collective best practices.
Goals and Objectives
Enterprises are driven to rewards and recognition by dual challenges to incentivize work performance and improve how employees communicate and recognize achievements within work communities. Rewards de-standardize compensation (comp) growth by supporting variable comp structures tied to achievement, skills development, and career milestones. The goal is to streamline comp expenses while improving the value connection between employee success and comp (fiscal or nonfiscal). Recognition fills in gaps between comp growth while surfacing trends and timelines for personal and project achievement. While recognition can aggregate to determine rewards comp pacing, it also builds a stronger sense of team belonging, identifies best practices toward milestone achievements, and improves work culture around nurturing and advancement.
Technology Deployed
Rewards and recognition systems come in several configurations: standalone as individual systems, bundled together with elements of people analytics, recognition integrated into communications systems, and rewards included as part of performance or compensation management.
In all cases, out-of-the-box–ready APIs make it easy to extend rewards and recognition data into performance readouts, analytics behind compensation triggers, compensation planning, and AI and machine learning that support predictive resource deployments in employee experience.
Use Case Summary
Rewards and recognition are evolving to encompass the use cases of the data and insights they provide. Rewards are increasingly being integrated with performance and compensation systems as compensation management evolves around total rewards strategies that stratify pay techniques. Recognition is being used to understand achievement and engagement trends viewed through the lens of productive teams and divisions. Extending recognition data to AI and machine learning combines people analytics with recognition data to help optimize operations like team design.