We’ve just launched our latest exciting feature: peer to peer employee recognition, also known as High Fives. In this article, we’ll explain how motivating peer to peer recognition is, and how high fives help your team congratulate each other.
Surveys have proven time and time again that peer-to-peer employee recognition is a powerful motivator. Even more powerful is when an employee tells another employee they are doing a great job. Who isn’t fond of receiving a thanks?
Recognition really is an important psychological need. Employees who know that they will receive recognition for doing their best by their colleagues, will have a strong incentive to do so, and therefore build teamwork and excellence.
Peer to peer employee recognition is 35.7% more likely to have a positive impact on financial results than manager-only recognition.
(SHRM/Globoforce Employee Recognition Survey, 2012)
When you see statistics such as that stated above, you then see how important employee recognition can be to your bottom line.
We can’t think of a better way to encourage employees to thank each other than using high fives.
The way this works is organisations can opt to turn this feature on, within their 6Q dashboard. At the end of each survey, a screen will display, asking employees to nominate someone (besides themselves), that is worthy of a high five, as per the image below.
High Five survey screen
These are collated, and shown to management, along with an email sent to the employees who receive high fives at the end of that poll period. They’re anonymous, both from leaders and recipients, which makes high fives a great way to motivate your colleagues.
Why is peer to peer recognition powerful?
As managers, we often see a high level view of our teams. We frequently need to ‘dig down into the trenches’ to see how a team member is actually helping her colleagues. Having a peer to peer recognition system is a great way to encourage an environment of gratitude, where colleagues thank each other for small yet positive tasks or actions.
41% of companies that use peer-to-peer recognition have seen marked positive increases in customer satisfaction.
(SHRM/Globoforce Employee Recognition Survey, 2012)
As human nature, we all crave the occasional thank you – it often feels that gratitude from our managers may feel like they are just ‘doing their jobs’, whereas when received from a fellow colleague, the thank you means even more to us, personally.
How to activate peer to peer recognition
It literally takes under a minute to activate your high fives if you are an existing 6Q leader.
All you need to do is log in to your My 6Q dashboard, navigate to your ‘My Organisation’ screen, and change the setting ‘Peer recognition’ to ON. The very next employee survey that gets sent out will have an additional screen at the end of the poll, requesting your employees (optionally) choose someone from their team to send a High Five to.
60% of Best-in-Class organisations stated that employee recognition is extremely valuable in driving individual performance.
(Aberdeen Group, The Power of Employee Recognition, 2013)
The process for an employee to choose a colleague, and hit ‘Send’ is literally a few seconds of time, however it’s a powerful tool as we’ve explained. Once the poll is complete, those who received a High Five will receive an email letting them know, and leaders will see an additional section in their next poll reports, which will display a list of those who received a High Five, and how many did each individual receive.
High Five notification email
These high fives are intentionally anonymous, and the nominee is not able to send themselves a High Five, ensuring that this isn’t a case of pure favoritism or ‘office politics’.
What should leaders do with High Fives?
We encourage all leaders to thank the people who received High Fives during the poll period; this could be simply an email, or another even more public approach would be to say thank you via your company intranet.
Companies with strategic recognition reported a mean employee turnover rate that is 23.4% lower than retention at companies without any recognition program.
(SHRM/Globoforce Employee Recognition Survey, 2012)
We would suggest an even more powerful method would be to bring the subject up at your next team meeting, and even considering handing over a reward. This could be as simple as a movie voucher or a bottle of wine, however a simple, small trophy or a cake that can be shared among the team are also budget conscious yet received very well.
Photo: L.A Foodie, Flickr
Coming soon to High Fives
On our product road map, we have a plan to create a ‘High Five leaderboard’ in leaders dashboards, so they can see how many High Fives cumulatively have been rewarded among their team.
This feature will allow management to monitor who are receiving the most, or who are receiving the least High Fives, therefore showing which employees are being most helpful within your team.
In Summary
This peer to peer employee recognition feature really adds considerable value and power to 6Q. In fact, we feel this is the most potentially beneficial feature we have added to 6Q so far. We are very keen to see how organisations are using the High Five feature, so please let us know if you have any questions or feedback at all.
If you aren’t yet a customer, you can sign up for a free 25 day trial, and test both High Fives and our employee surveys out. See the trial form, below.
