Welcome to 3Sixty Insights’ latest #HRTechChat. Jeff Cates, CEO and president of Achievers, joined us last week for an illuminating conversation around the rationale behind recognizing employees and how to extract the most value from the activity. Following are some ideas we discussed:

For any organization that wants to improve its workplace culture, employee recognition is a really good, intuitive place to start

Organizational leadership’s attitude toward the workplace culture is critical to success

The data show that employee recognition goes far, far beyond the idea of paying staff competitively (or more); day-to-day recognition has a far greater impact on changing behavior

It is exceptionally difficult for employers to institutionalize day-to-day employee recognition in the absence of a platform for doing so—let alone next to impossible to measure results

This is why systematizing employee recognition is so important: it produces a wealth of data that organizations can use to measure impacts

Analytics from these data, furthermore, help leaders maximize goodwill with their staff

With the help of these prosthetics, even leaders with strong propensities to recognize staff can improve by tailoring their intent to the ways their people comprehend or prefer recognition

A dedicated platform also introduces efficiency to workflows around employee recognition, giving the activity concrete benefits for organizations that elect to embrace the activity