From Strong Teams to Smarter Organizations: The Power of Investing in Your People
The world of work has changed drastically over the past few years.
New ways of working – hybrid and remote. New technologies to facilitate virtual collaboration and to assist with automating workflows and processes. New, younger generations entering the workforce.
All of this begs the question: In what ways does your company need to adapt to the changes? And how can you effectively navigate through change, positioning your organization to thrive instead of just survive?
It starts with a focus on your people.
Whatever external forces alter the way the world of work gets, one truth has held constant through the years – work simply does not get done without the people in your organization.
It starts with the human. It’s always started with the human. Brains, passion, resiliency, adaptability, creativity – whatever skills a job calls for, it’s the people who answer it.
Let’s explore the ways you can invest in your people to build stronger, smarter organizations:
The Impact of Gratitude
When was the last time you received a heartfelt compliment? What about the last time you gave one?
Chances are, whether you gave or received the compliment, it made you feel good.
That’s the impact of gratitude. And, in the workplace, it’s a powerful tool to connect, engage, inspire, and motivate employees. Why? For all the same reasons it connects people outside of the workplace.
Enter employee recognition: a simple and straightforward way to express gratitude in the workplace.
For years, Workhuman has studied the impact of recognition in the workplace. In partnership with Gallup, we have developed a framework for companies to operationalize recognition across their organizations, known as the “five pillars of recognition.”
Recognition does more than just boost an employee’s mood in the moment. Gallup and Workhuman research points to the long-term impact of recognition – those who feel fulfilled by recognition are less than half as likely to be looking for or passively watching for job opportunities.
But not just any recognition will do.
To see the biggest impact from recognition, all employees must be empowered to give and receive recognition, building a ripple effect of positivity up, down, and across the organization.
At Workhuman, we call this recognition done right. And it’s what builds a force for good, where everyone feels seen, valued, and appreciated for who they are as people, as well as what they bring to the organization.
The end result? Employees who are more engaged with one another – and more invested in the organization overall.
Wondering where and how to get started with recognition? Consider these 5 tips:
- Make recognition accessible: The easier it is for your employees to give recognition, the more they will do it. Communicate early and often about giving recognition and make sure employees are equipped with the resources they need to make it count.
- Make recognition an important part of your culture: Take recognition from a practice to a core company value. Make it a daily habit but also set aside designated times and events to highlight it and make it special.
- Train managers: Enabling manager and leadership participation in a recognition program is critical to its success. Set the expectation of providing recognition regularly but also teach managers and leaders how to do it well. Educate them on the impacts of recognition and guide them on building strong teams through positive feedback.
- Model the behavior: Leaders must set the example by providing recognition themselves. Recognize leaders – they often receive the least recognition – while also encouraging them to let employees know what they do is important.
- Prioritize recognition: Give recognition the attention it deserves. Set aside the time, money, and energy needed to get it right.
Supercharge Recognition with AI
Recognition does much more than uplift your employees – it also teaches you a lot about your employees.
To help build a more human workplace, Workhuman has debuted new, AI-powered innovations that mine recognition data for unparalleled insights into employee skills, culture, and the ways teams work.
That’s what we call Human Intelligence™ – and that’s what we call smart thinking.
Put plainly, Human Intelligence is the output of recognition data and AI. It’s an entire ecosystem of game-changing, AI-powered innovations that work together to achieve two main goals:
- Promote meaningful recognition across the organization, and
- Unlock employee and organizational insights.
Let’s see how it all works in practice:
Workhuman iQ & the AI Assistant
“We have a lot of data – but we don’t know what any of it means.”
Sound familiar?
One of the primary benefits of having a company-wide recognition program is having a rich repository of employee and cultural data at your fingertips. You can get a good sense of employee strengths and skills sets based on what they have been recognized for, and you can get a full picture of which departments are collaborating well cross-functionally.
But the key is to leverage these insights for action – for example, you may uncover a “rising star” across the organization and select that employee to lead a major departmental initiative.
But, as with anything else in a dynamic workplace with many competing priorities, what you lack is time. Time to analyze the recognition data and derive insights and actions that help you further your people strategy.
That’s where AI comes into play.
With the new Workhuman iQ, fueled by 100M+ data points across Workhuman’s Social Recognition® platform, you get talent and culture insights within mere seconds. That’s the power of AI.
Let’s say, for instance, you want to understand the most common skills for employees across a certain department, based on the recognition messages they receive.
With the Skills feature within Workhuman iQ, you can easily access the top skills across teams and departments – as well as which skills employees don’t have. Perhaps you notice that collaboration is only represented across 15% of recognition messages, prompting you to take action by facilitating cross-functional project work and encouraging managers to recognize this work when they see it happening.
The point is that you’re taking the guesswork out of skills identification by harnessing the collective power – the Human Intelligence – within Workhuman iQ.
But the crown jewel of Workhuman iQ is the AI Assistant.
Built like a chatbot that uses AI to understand and generate human-like text, the AI Assistant leverages the world’s first recognition-specific language model to surface profound insights on skills, performance, and culture, as well as recommend strategic action to solve your most pressing pain points.
Think of it as your “sidekick” of sorts, providing an instant response to any prompt you serve up.
Let’s say you want to understand who across the organization regularly demonstrates leadership qualities, or you want to learn how new hires are impacted by recognition.
The AI Assistant, trained on data from within the Social Recognition platform, including data from within your own company’s recognition program, provides real-time answers to these queries – saving you valuable time and pointing you to the right information easily.
Workhuman iQ Snapshots
Company leaders know the value of recognition – and research indicates they are giving increased attention to its long-term impact. Gallup research shows, in 2024, senior leaders were 50% more likely than they were in 2022 to strongly agree that senior leaders across their organization value employee recognition.
But it’s not just company leaders who should have access to the data and insights to understand recognition’s impact in real time. It’s your employees, too.
The impact of recognition comes from employee engagement in the recognition program, and from good, quality recognition being written by everyone across the organization. While leaders can educate employees on what meaningful recognition award messages look like, it’s important for employees to see the impact of recognition themselves – right in the moment they’re giving recognition.
Enter Workhuman iQ Snapshots.
By embedding Workhuman iQ insights directly into the recognition experience, every employee has access to the data that had previously only been available to leaders.
Let’s say, for example, a people manager wants to nominate Antonio for an award. When crafting the message, the manager views a snapshot of the qualities (safety, collaboration, and efficiency) that Antonio regularly demonstrates.
By better understanding the skills and behaviors Antonio is most frequently recognized for in award messages, the people manager can both consider the types of upcoming projects Antonio would be an ideal fit for and can better craft the award message in the moment.
Having this type of data democratized across the organization allows everyone to become a force for good, building an engaged, connected culture where one good turn leads to another.
Recognition Advisor
Having Workhuman iQ data and insights available when crafting a recognition message is one thing. But what about guidance on crafting an impactful recognition award in the first place?
If the AI Assistant was your sidekick, the Recognition Advisor is your coach. An intuitive AI tool that guides you to create authentic, meaningful, and personalized recognition in the moment, Recognition Advisor turns every “thank you” into a powerful expression of gratitude.
The way it works is simple: As you write your recognition award, Recognition Advisor offers guidance to level up the message. This includes:
- Practical advice on being more specific in your language: Instead of “thank you for your work on the quarterly report,” the Recognition Advisor suggests “Your work on the quarterly report was exceptional – the way you analyzed the data and presented it clearly made an impact.”
- Interactive tool to see relevant examples: The tool pulls in other similar examples of recognition done right so you can take your message from ordinary to extraordinary.
- Real-time message analysis: Recognition Advisor offers guiding prompts to improve message quality, saving you time and boosting confidence in delivering impactful recognition.
- Progress bar: A little encouragement goes a long way – the tool shows you how you’re progressing in your award message, and provides suggestions of how to make it better.
The end result?
At the individual level, Recognition Advisor ensures that employees are giving recognition that’s meaningful to the recipient, building a virtuous cycle across the organization.
On a broader scale, the tool builds more meaningful, data-rich recognition to fuel Human Intelligence. This, in turn, has a ripple effect on culture, as the richer the data within the recognition platform, the greater insight there is into employee skills, behaviors, performance, and more.
It’s a win-win for everyone across the organization.
Culture Hub
While Recognition Advisor helps employees across the organization craft high-quality recognition messages, Workhuman’s new, AI-powered recognition homepage provides a place for the awards to be featured dynamically.
Culture Hub is exactly that: an improved user interface and personalized experience that builds culture.
Tailored to each employee based on their Work Circles, the Culture Hub surfaces content that celebrates the goodness that comes from making work human. New babies and pets. Milestones reached at work. Expressions of gratitude that extend beyond the workplace and celebrate who employees are as people.
But the benefits of the Culture Hub extend beyond the individual employee. By surfacing content that’s uniquely relevant to the employee, the Culture Hub creates lasting impact within the recognition program overall.
Recognition isn’t an abstract concept – it’s a one-stop-shop delivered right to the employee, where the individual can draft, view, and add congratulations to award messages most meaningful to them.
A big part of the Culture Hub is Rewards Stories.
Remember the time you used your awards points to take your family to Disney World? Or the time you redeemed your points to buy your smoothie-loving spouse a new blender for the holidays?
These types of feel-good stories drive connection across your organization’s culture – they paint a picture of who you are as an individual, and they give you a window into the lives of your co-workers.
As with Recognition Advisor, the Culture Hub and Rewards Stories expand the reach and impact of your recognition program, providing even more data to fuel Human Intelligence.
That’s what we call a full-circle moment.
Final Thoughts
While change and uncertainty may remain a constant in the world of work, so too is the potential of your people – the brains, passion, and power of your organization.
Investing in your employees isn’t just the right thing to do for them – it’s the right thing to do for the overall business. With employee recognition and Human Intelligence from Workhuman, you get a dynamic tool to connect your employees and powerful insights to motivate, inspire, and engage your workforce, both today and into the
About the author
Stacy Thompson
Stacy Thompson is senior director of content strategy & activation at Workhuman. A lover of language, Stacy focuses on bringing company stories to life from ideation to execution. A Midwestern native, Stacy lives in Billerica, MA with her husband, two kids, and two cats – and spends her time outside of work running, skiing, writing, reading, and yoga-ing.