Employee rewards and recognition for a hybrid workforce

There’s a brilliant scene in the UK comedy The IT Crowd where a jubilant CEO throws a party to celebrate the success of a major IT project. Amid cheers and high-fives, he thanks the legal team, the accountants, and even the bathroom cleaners while ignoring the real heroes – the IT team. 

Confined to their windowless den in the office basement, Jen, Roy and Maurice are forgotten because they’re out of sight to the executives upstairs. While newbie Jen is appalled by this mistreatment, her colleagues explain that they’ve been marginalised and ignored year after year. The same lack of visibility can occur in a hybrid working environment. The risk is that office-based employees working under their managers’ noses enjoy all the rewards and recognition while their remote colleagues are forgotten.  Without the right tools or recognition systems in place, managers are flying blind. 

Why is recognition of remote workers an issue?

It’s not just about the disappointment involved in missing out on a public ‘Thank You’ from the boss. Being seen as an employee who can consistently deliver on tasks and projects is essential for career progression opportunities. This issue is compounded when a colleague, intentionally or not, receives the credit for somebody else’s hard work. 

Other impacts include:

• Employee disengagement leading to lower productivity and higher turnover. McKinsey found that 54% of surveyed employees who quit their jobs felt that their employers didn’t value them.
• The opportunity cost when companies fail to recognise, nurture and promote high performers or future leaders. 
• The creation of an “us vs them” culture between in-office and remote workers. 
• An unwillingness to go above and beyond or take on extra responsibilities if there is a feeling that efforts will go unrecognised. 
• Potential hesitation for workers to embrace the remote working trend if they believe it may put future promotion opportunities at risk. 
• Employees feeling that their hard work is only seen when they come into the office and falling off-radar when working remotely. 

Developing a reward and recognition strategy for every employee

So, what can be done to ensure equal reward and recognition between in-office and remote workers? Develop a strategy that enhances visibility, promotes fairness and brings reward and recognition into the digital, hybrid era.

Consider how to create better visibility of milestones and accomplishments in a hybrid environment. Some managers prefer to recognise the team as a group to help build team cohesion, while others will single out individuals for their excellent work to ensure people get the credit they deserve. Every organisation is different, but there are some proven strategies to increase the visibility of high achievers and ensuring the right people, remote or otherwise, get the credit for their efforts.

Track project milestones

Using a workflow management system (WMS) such as Monday or Asana makes it easy to see who accomplished what over a given time period. This has the added benefit of automation: alerts can be set up so when an employee marks a task as “done”, their manager is informed. 

Build a culture of peer recognition

Ask employees to nominate their colleagues’ great work. Avoid turning yourself (as the manager) into a bottleneck for recognition. 

Encourage self-advocacy

While natural self-promoters are adept at making sure their efforts do not go unseen, quiet achievers may need a little extra help to ensure they are recognised no matter where they’re working. Provide advice and coaching on speaking up in meetings, volunteering for high-visibility projects, representing teams and finding ways to demonstrate expertise. 

Gamify reward and recognition

For some organisations, implementing a points-based reward system can incentivise employees to make sure all their efforts are recorded. You may be surprised by how engaging features like digital badges and leaderboards can be. But be mindful not to let a little friendly competition turn your workplace into a toxic, competitive and hostile work environment.

Centralise reward and recognition

One of the challenges of the office/remote divide is that in-office verbal recognition is invisible to remote colleagues. Keep recognising workers verbally, but try to do it in all-hands meetings, and be sure to post a brief note online as well so everyone can see it. This has the added benefit of creating a permanent written record of great work that might otherwise be lost or forgotten. Invest in a single source of truth to avoid spreading recognition across multiple platforms.

Where should you recognise colleagues online? It’s up to you. Emails are effective (if a little old-fashioned). Perhaps you might have a group messaging app that everyone uses, or a dedicated channel on your online collaboration tool. For a more sophisticated solution, there are dozens (if not hundreds) of employee recognition platforms and apps on the market. Other options include internal social media/intranet or external sites such as LinkedIn and its “Kudos” feature – so long as everyone is using it. Be sure to check if your existing systems (whether it’s an enterprise tool or a tech stack) already has reward and recognition capability.  

Ensure remote employees have equal opportunity for promotion and leadership

Perhaps the biggest indicator of the “out of sight, out of mind” challenge for people who work remotely is when they are unfairly passed over for promotion or other development opportunities. Despite consistent delivery and strong leadership potential, the remote worker is left to languish while those who show up at the office get ahead. This may be due to the persistent stigma in some companies that disengaged workers prefer remote work, but it’s more likely caused by the same issue: a lack of visibility hampering recognition and reward. 

Employee Value Propositions, or EVPs, need to evolve fast because there’s no question that remote workers will continue to be important amid the ongoing talent shortage. This includes providing proof that every worker, no matter where they are based, will be offered a genuine career path. Create success stories by promoting your top remote workers into leadership roles and give them the tools they need to manage a team. After all, the pandemic showed us that it’s possible for effective leaders to successfully manage hundreds of employees from the comfort of their home office. 

Consider creating blog articles or video interviews with fully or predominantly-remote leaders about their career journey to help attract remote talent. As we often discuss in the D&I space, the key is representation. The aim is to create content that will one day lead a talented candidate who wants to work remotely but is also highly ambitious to think to themselves: “That could be me.”

Recognition will always be a human process

Take care not to over-automate as you digitise reward and recognition. It would be possible, for example, to set up an automated workflow where an employee marking a task as “done” generates a congratulatory message on the company intranet but being recognised by an algorithm will lack meaning compared with acknowledgment from a human manager or colleague. There are plenty of software solutions available in a fast-growing market, but engaged managers know that this is one part of their job that should never be fully outsourced or automated. Sometimes there is just no substitute for a manager directly acknowledging the efforts of a star performer, wherever they may be located.