employeerecognitionComing from a difficult economic situation in the recent years, it’s no wonder that new studies by AON are showing that employee engagement in business organizations is at all-time low since 2008. The economic situation is North America is definitely improving but the trend continues to be a challenge for HR practitioners and management alike.

Overall, highly engaged employees mean a better teamwork, better productivity and better total output for an organization. Unengaged employees spell unproductive hours, sub-standard work and a stressful working environment for all involved.

To help companies combat declining employee engagement levels, MeritShare has introduced the concept of online peer-to-peer recognition. The idea of this concept is to allow colleagues to recognize the good work of a fellow co-worker. Recognition could be in the form of praise, thank you notes or even awards.

From over 400 companies who’ve enrolled in MeritShare’s program, six were given awards for the most number of employee participants using their employee recognition software.. The organizations who had the most number of employees giving their co-workers some good feedback won.

In all, six organizations were given the “Best People To Work With” Awards:  Beachmint, First Rehab Life, Green Hasson Janks, SchoolSpring, Trophies2go, and Zumobi.

The awardees were all really happy to get the honour. They recognize that getting an award for high peer engagement can help in talent retention, talent recruitment, company culture, work quality and overall employee happiness.

Peer recognition is a way to foster positive involvement in a team. It gives every person in the organization the power to make a good impact, making it a strong way to improve engagement. It can even highlight certain values or attitudes in the organization’s culture that management may want to promote. For example, one of the winners, Green Hasson Janks, encourages their employees to give out “Encourage New Idea” awards. This promotes attitudes of creativity and out-of-the-box thinking.

From their June program enrollees, MeritShare plans to announce the next set of winners by July. For those who’d like to try using MeritShare to measure employee engagement levels in their organizations, they can try the program for 30 days for free. Companies can log on to http://www.meritshare.com to sign-up. And individuals can go to https://www.meritshare.com/pages/the-new-way-to-say-thanks-at-work to try employee recognition software for free.

By Techwacky

Editor-in-Chef of TechWacky.com