New offering in employee recognition introduced

Globoforce, a leader in solutions related to recognizing employees across all industries for their work and contribution to a company’s bottom line, recently launched a unique take on the recognition program.

Talen Maps is the industry’s first solution that works to connect data related to employee recognition with performance data, which will help professionals in human resources and business leaders to witness and analyze how the workforce is performing. It also helps them accurately and efficiently dole out rewards and recognition based on their findings.

Many companies offer annual, and some semiannual, performance reviews for their employees as an opportunity to not only assess and inform the worker how they have been doing on the job but also to discuss possible promotions, raises, and other incentives and awards for positive workplace behaviors and production.

“Social recognition is the next big disruptor within HR,” said Grant Beckett, vice president of product for Globoforce. “Its high levels of adoption across an entire workforce make it the ideal way to evaluate employee performance and influence. With Talent Maps, we take this crowdsourced feedback data and plot it against performance appraisal ratings. Combining these two data points delivers a level of insight about a company’s talent that has never been available in an HR system before.”

A new report from Gartner titled the 2012 Strategic Road Map for Employee Performance Management revealed that social recognition programs can help enhance workplace performance without the need for executives and other higher ups constantly to look over the employee’s shoulder.

“Our recognition program with Globoforce is one of the critical programs we use to drive employee engagement and elevate business performance,” said Amy Montefinese, vice president, global total rewards and human resources operations at Premier Farnell. “Now, we will have a way to translate our recognition awards into actionable data to ensure our top performers and high potential employees are being recognized. By aligning recognition awards against performance review ratings, we will also be able to ensure our pay for performance philosophy is consistently executed across our global business.”

Employee recognition programs are also related to safety, with a new report from the Insurance Journal revealing that safety incentives can be negative as it could discourage some workers from reporting injuries or other mishaps in the workplace.