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As one of the nation’s largest not-for-profit health insurers, EmblemHealthOpens in a new tab has been delivering high quality, affordable healthcare to more than three million people in New York City and the tri-state area for more than 80 years. Securing the health of a cultural mecca is no small feat, but EmblemHealth has New York’s heart and soul covered.
With a bold company vision to create healthier futures for its customers and communities, EmblemHealth needed to find a way to bring employees together to live out the values of the organization. And this meant building healthy culture from within the organization through a dedicated employee recognition program.
Research has found that employee recognition can significantly improve employee engagement and wellbeing when it’s authentic, personalized, and embedded in the company culture.
EmblemHealth understood the critical role employee recognition can play in building company culture, yet faced the challenge of having disparate recognition systems.
EmblemHealth needed a solution that would create moments of gratitude and recognition visible to everyone across the organization.
They also wanted a program that could reinforce the company’s values and create behaviors that would lead to improvements not just in culture, but in productivity, engagement, and efficiencies that would contribute to meeting corporate goals and key objectives.
When EmblemHealth decided that a new prescription was in order, it looked to Workhuman® for critical care.
In April of 2021, EmblemHealth partnered with Workhuman to launch the company’s first, custom- designed, fully comprehensive employee recognition program, BRAVO! The program leveraged Workhuman’s platform and industry leading product, Social Recognition®, and used EmblemHealth’s own company values – Empower, Deliver, and Do it Together – as a foundation upon which to build and evolve its culture.
When Workhuman came on board, we were able to harmonize our program and allow all employees to recognize any level of the organization.
EmblemHealth’s employees quickly embraced BRAVO!, as evidenced by an 82% participation rate in post- launch engagement surveys. Employees also quickly adopted the new program design that connected recognition to company values, resulting in a visually engaging company feed that highlighted how individual achievements contributed to enterprisewide goals.The simple, intuitive interface made it easy for team members to view recognition moments and post their own congratulations, leading to a constant flurry of social activity.
As the program began to take hold in EmblemHealth’s daily workflow, new, more advanced features soon followed. Service Milestones® took employee work anniversaries from forgettable mentions to meaningful moments of gratitude and connection. And Inclusion Advisor, Workhuman’s AI powered micro-coaching software, introduced a new way to foster cultural sensitivity and inclusion across the organization. Inclusion Advisor, which uses natural language processing to review language used in recognition messages, opened up opportunities for honest, authentic learning, helping to raise individual awareness that carried over into everyday communication.
In its first year, EmblemHealth’s BRAVO! program generated 23,940 moments of recognition. To give context to that number, individuals at EmblemHealth are seen, recognized, and celebrated every 26 minutes.
BRAVO!’s impact has been particularly noticeable in manager-to-employee relationships: 79% of managers are actively using the program and 68% of managers regularly recognize their direct reports.The culture that is born out of these moments is what keeps employees motivated and what enables EmblemHealth to maintain a vibrant, healthy, and engaged employee population.
At EmblemHealth, recognition is key to our company culture. Our employee recognition program, BRAVO!, is a testament to our commitment to ensuring employees feel valued for their contributions, feel inspired to succeed, and live out the values of our organization.
Workhuman’s partnership with EmblemHealth continues to thrive today in large part because of the recognition platform’s powerful analysis and reporting tools, which provide EmblemHealth with deep insights into how the program is being used, as well as opportunities for improvement and refinement over time.
For employees of EmblemHealth, BRAVO! has been a culture game-changer.
With stronger employee bonds and well-earned rewards through Workhuman’s state-of-the-art e-commerce redemption center – colloquially known as The Store – the employee experience at EmblemHealth ensures that wellbeing is strong, the culture is resilient, and the company’s workforce is well taken care of. And when this is the case, the employees of EmblemHealth can stay focused on their mission to create healthier futures for the people of New York and the tri-state area.
Customer Snapshot: How PepsiCo Ties Behaviors to Business Impact
Before PepsiCo partnered with Workhuman®, the food and beverage leader’s employee feedback scores for recognition and reward were lagging. The team realized their former recognition vendor wasn’t driving results, and they needed to make a change. Now, PepsiCo uses both Social Recognition® and Community Celebrations®, which have significantly improved both employee engagement and connection across the organization.
