How to Build a Better Approach to Employee Recognition with Bonusly

Today’s workforce is disengaged and disconnected, and companies are at a loss for how to turn the tide. 

What if we told you the solution is simple and straightforward?

Insert: employee recognition.

The workforce has evolved, and employees are motivated by new things. However, too many of today’s leaders use yesterday’s motivation methods. It’s not surprising that disengagement has reached record-low levels. 

The workplace has changed—AI, generational shifts, remote work, you name it— and effective recognition is essential to creating workplaces that drive results (with engaged employees, to boot). When done well, recognition fosters high performance, professional growth, and a company culture rooted in trust and respect. Talk about the ultimate dream team.

A deep dive into Bonusly employee recognition 

The Bonusly platform offers several key methods for giving recognition, each designed to creatively motivate and engage today’s workforce. These include:

• Celebrating your employees as people
• Highlighting core values brought to life
• Spotlighting skills and behaviors that drive results
• Encouraging professional growth opportunities 
• Adding key context to employee performance reviews
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Best yet: these recognition strategies are easy to execute and employees love them. Let’s discuss each in detail so you can get a full picture of how your company can use Bonusly.

Top-Down Recognition 

Employee recognition is traditionally given top-down, where an employee’s manager or leadership team witnesses their contributions or milestones and rewards them in some capacity. This type of recognition is a great place to begin; recognition builds an important relationship between employee and employer, fostering a sense of belonging and boosting productivity. Plus, if a company is new to adopting a recognition solution, top-down is a helpful starting point for seeing its tangible impact.

Bonusly provides several ways for managers and leaders to celebrate their staff—highlighting key employee moments, recognizing wins, and acknowledging employees as whole people. Let’s take a look.

Automated milestones

Automated milestones help HR teams keep track of important moments while fostering a sense of belonging for employees from day one.

Significant events—work anniversaries, birthdays, and first days—are automatically featured in the Bonusly recognition feed with preset redeemable points. These milestones are visible to the entire organization, encouraging others to join the celebration. The HRIS integration auto-populates every milestone and the Slack integration notifies employees of key milestones to ensure nobody’s special day is missed. 

These events are important to your employees. (Nobody likes working on their birthday, especially if your teammates have no idea what day it is.) Employees want to feel connected to their employer, and acknowledging these milestones goes a long way in showing your workers that they matter.

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Awards

Awards enable organizations to design company-funded recognitions for unique initiatives and achievements. Admins control who can give these awards, set budgets, and manage allowances, making it easier than ever to acknowledge the work that matters.

We’ve seen many great customer examples of Bonusly Awards. Some of our favorites include ones that encourage professional development. Considering that today’s employee cares deeply about their growth, awards that encourage career development will help keep your teams motivated and engaged.

For example, consider creating an award for employees who hone their mentorship skills by teaching the team something in a department-wide meeting. Or make an award for a teammate who utilizes their professional development stipend and reports back key learnings. 

Incentives

Incentives encourage and reward behaviors that matter to your company culture while strengthening the employee-employer relationship. By setting predefined allocations for recognition points, companies can boost participation in key initiatives while reducing administrative overhead.

Best yet: incentives drive productivity and performance. Companies can set up an incentive for reaching a weekly customer satisfaction score, closing a deal, renewing a client, providing product feedback—the list goes on. Incentives are fully customizable, so you can get creative around what behavior to incentivize—and how. 

If you incentivize productivity, performance, and compliance, employees will show up to the challenge. In doing so, they'll build muscle memory around behaviors you're hoping to scale. But that virtuous cycle of great work starts with recognition.

Peer-to-Peer Recognition 

Peer-to-peer recognition is when all employees, not just managers or leaders, acknowledge and celebrate each other’s contributions, achievements, and efforts. Peers are in a unique position to recognize a teammate's specific contributions and understand the immediate impact those contributions have—they’re working alongside one another, after all.

Peer-to-peer recognition is also a vital component of the modern workplace. Today’s workers often feel that their hard work goes unnoticed; Gen Z, which accounts for over a quarter of the workforce, is demanding more appreciation and acknowledgment. And those who feel undervalued? They’re twice as likely to quit. 

Recognition no longer feels like a nice-to-have, right?

You can flip that script with employee recognition. Bonusly’s peer-to-peer recognition solution is uniquely effective for many reasons. Here are a few key characteristics:

• Recognition is shared in a public feed that encourages commentary, spotlights important skills and behaviors, and gives managers visibility into team success they might not otherwise see. 
• Core values and company goals are attached to every recognition, bringing company culture to life while keeping objectives top of mind. 
• Points can be attached to each piece of recognition that can redeemed for a meaningful reward.
• Bonusly recognition happens in the flow of work thanks to common HRIS and chat integrations.
• Most importantly: Bonusly is an organic and fun way to drive meaningful connections across teams.

Effective recognition highlights unique skills, reinforces key company values, and shows the entire company what high performance looks like.

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Employee Performance 

Workforces that utilize employee recognition enjoy a benefit that every company strives for: high employee performance. Remember, recognition is a form of feedback, and frequent, specific public recognition helps managers get a better understanding of their employees’ strengths and contributions.

Bonusly offers a few effective ways to use recognition to up-level your team’s performance. 

1:1s

The Bonusly 1:1 agenda includes weekly employee recognition and feedback, seamlessly integrating wins and areas of improvement into regular and recurring check-ins. Now your managers can have full visibility into the work their employees are doing, which is especially helpful if you are a distributed or remote team. 

Plus, having feedback—both constructive and positive—front and center when hosting check-ins is crucial for promoting thoughtful conversions focused on growth. And effective feedback is non-negotiable for today’s workforce. The Bonusly 1:1 agenda encourages regular feedback and development conversations, a key component of high performance. 

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Performance Recaps

Performance recaps analyze relevant recognition and feedback to summarize employee contributions, identify skills, and display goal progress. 

We love this feature because it organizes real-time recognition and feedback into meaningful insights. Recaps provide managers with insights into contributions and skills they might otherwise miss, and help remove the otherwise burdensome and time-consuming task of writing performance reviews. In other words, the recap becomes the perfect antidote to broken performance management. 

For example, an employee regularly receiving recognition that highlights their facilitation and coaching skills signals they could be a great people manager. Or consider this: your direct report is continually recognized for producing competitor battle cards that your sales team leverages when closing deals. This skill shows that your employee has a knack for competitive research and cross-department collaboration. 

The takeaway

In today’s dynamic workforce, meaningful employee recognition goes beyond boosting morale—it serves as a strategic driver of engagement and performance. As employees increasingly want opportunities to feel connected and motivated in the new way of working, organizations must embrace practices that celebrate both achievements and the people behind them.

Recognition isn’t just a feel-good initiative—it’s a business strategy that drives success and strengthens the bottom line. Bonusly’s approach shows the impact recognition can have when done well. Get a demo and learn how Bonusly can transform your team.