How to use the Simpplr Recognition Suite

Overview

Simpplr's Recognition is a peer-to-peer recognition system that lets any user select from a set of recognition awards to give to one or more users. The awards are set up and managed by Recognition managers. The Recognition managers for each organization can create and edit awards to match the needs of their own recognition programs. They also have access to raw recognition activity and a dashboard of recognition analytics to measure and adjust the success of their program goals. This is a paid add-on to your Simpplr environment. Contact your CSM for more information.

• App setup
• Create a peer-to-peer award
• Create a recurring award
  • Managing multiple Delegates in Recurring awards
• Create a Spot award
• Create a Milestone award
  • Work anniversary award with points
• Recognition tiles
• Manage awards
• Notifications
• Recognition activity and analytics
• Give recognition
• Profile badges
• Recognition hub

App setup

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Expertise in Simpplr

Once the license flag is enabled, an App manager needs to go into Manage > Application > Recognition and assign users the new Recognition manager role. The users with this role will have the full ability to set up and manage the recognition program.

Recognition setup

Users granted the Recognition management role can go to their User menu, then Manage > Recognition > Awards to see available awards. The Shoutout award is enabled by default. You can disable this award or leave it as one of the choices in your recognition program.

Create a peer-to-peer award

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To create a peer-to-peer award:

1. Go to User menu > Manage > Recognition > Awards. Click New and peer-to-peer award.

2. Enter a name for the award.

3. Enter a short description of the award's purpose or meaning. The description character limit is 500.

4. Select a badge for the award.

Create a recurring award

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Recurring awards are delegated to specified recognition managers to give out on a predetermined cadence. To create a new recurring award, select click New and Recurring award.

1. Enter an award name and description.
2. In award guidance, enter some guidelines or context for the recognition manager to consider when giving out this award.
3. Select an award badge. Click Next.
4. Select an award delegate and who can win this award. 
5. Choose an award process, frequency, and start date.

If recurring awards aren’t given out by the end of the cadence, it will be considered overdue. Overdue awards can still be given out until the end of the next cadence, when the next award is due.

Recurring award process

Recurring awards have two processes for choosing recipients: nominations and delegation. Selecting Nominations gives you the ability to choose who can nominate users for this award. Those chosen users can nominate recipients during the award cadence (i.e. monthly or quarterly). By default, nominator identities are Anonymous, and won’t be shown to the award delegate or recipient. 

Selecting Delegate-awarded means the delegate will choose the user to receive the award.

Delegates of recurring awards can upload a CSV of user emails that they want to give an instance of a recurring award to. This will support use cases where a larger number of people are the receivers of the award and where the list of receivers is generated off-platform (such as a salesperson of the quarter award determined by a Salesforce report of salespeople that have hit their quota).

Give a recurring award

You can nominate users for, or give them recurring awards by going to your user menu, then Recognition. Under Dashboard > Manage your awards, delegates can give a recurring award by clicking Award now.

Managing multiple Delegates in Recurring awards

The ability to assign multiple delegates has been added to the create/edit Recurring awards flow. This gives teams more flexibility in managing and presenting awards.

Adding multiple Delegates

• When creating or editing a recurring award, open the Select delegates field.

• Choose one or more users to act as delegates.

• Each delegate will have full access to:

  • View nominations

  • Manage the award

  • Present the award

Important notes on Delegates

• One award, shared access: Delegates do not receive separate copies of the award. Instead, they share responsibility for the same award.

• Single instance per cycle: Once the award is given for a specific cycle (e.g., monthly), no other delegate can give it again during that period.

• Example: For a monthly award, if one delegate presents the award in April, the other delegates will not be able to present it again until the next cycle in May.

Nomination participation window

Previously, nomination windows (the time nominations were open) was fixed. This caused issues for some organizations that required different windows of time to collect nominations. Now Recognition managers can set how long nominations are open for via this input in the create/edit Recurring award form.

For Monthly/Quarterly awards, the Recognition manager can select to have the nominations open from the start of the month/quarter through the close or select the number of days the nominations will be open.

Nominations close date

This new field is required so to know when the nominations will close (when not allowing nominations for the full cycle). For instance in the above example the nominations are open for 10 days but when in the month are those 10 days. This field sets that timeframe.

With this setting, the nominations would be open for 10 days and would close one day before the end of each month.

Overdue date

Previously, a delegate was given from the fixed close of nomination until the end of the cycle to give an award before it became overdue. While awards could still be given in an overdue state it did cause some confusion. To help organizations that have specific due/overdue requirements, Recognition managers can now set an overdue date for the award. This date is when the award will transition to overdue. It still can be given in this state, just like before but now Recognition managers have finer control over when it happens, or if it happens at all.

Recognition managers can select to have the award overdue continue to be at the close of the cycle, to not have the award ever become overdue, or to set a custom amount of days after the cycle for the award to become overdue. Int he above example 5 days after the close of the month this award will become overdue for the delegate(s).

No more missed date

Previously, an award instance would become 'missed' if the next instance of the award closed. Once 'missed' it was not possible to give out. This caused some issues for organizations that wanted to announce award winners at a later time. With 25.10, there is no longer a concept of missed. All awards will stay in due or overdue status until given or marked as skipped by a delegate.

Creating or editing mid-cycle

Recognition managers can now create or edit recurring awards mid cycle. Previously you could only create awards that started in the next cycle (month/quarter) and edits would only affect future cycles. Now Recognition managers can choose to create and launch in the same cycle (month/quarter) or edit the current cycle.

Create a Spot award

Spot awards, like all others, have a name, description, and badge. Suggested company values can be added as well.

Spot awards are meant to fill in many of the use cases not supported by Peer recognition or Recurring awards. Peer recognitions are open to any user to give to any user at any time. Recurring awards are delegated to a specific user and have a specified cadence they have to be awarded in.

Spot awards are meant to fill the gaps between these two existing award types to allow for any number of use cases to be achieved.

Choose when this award can be given. The two options are:

• Indefinitely (default) 
• During a specific period

This allows for use cases where the award should only be active for a specific time. Selecting this will allow the award to be auto-enabled and disabled on the selected dates without a Recognition manager having to manually do so on the given days (example use case would be the Season of Gratitude award Simpplr does may be auto enabled on November 1st and auto-disabled on December 31st.

Next, control the maximum frequency the award can be given out. Unlike Recurring awards that have a required cadence, Spot awards can be given an unlimited amount of times, or a maximum in a period can be selected to make them more rare. This would allow for awards that are only able to be given once a month, twice a week, etc.

Finally, you can input an optional guidance description, educating users on the conditions under which they should give out this type of award.

Create a Milestone award

Celebrating tenure at an organization is a core function of most recognition platforms. Simpplr previously supported a celebrations tile, this enhances work anniversary celebrations with a fully configurable award that automatically posts at 9am local time on a user's tenure anniversary.

The first milestone award is the Work anniversary award. To set it up and start it, a Recognition manager must edit it.

The award can then be set up to run in any number of ways. The top selections will be the defaults for each instance of the Work anniversary award but each instance can also be customized.

Recognition managers can also control the frequency of the award. This will determine which anniversaries are celebrated. Choose to celebrate all work anniversaries or select specific milestone years (1 year, 5 years, 10 years, etc.).

Once enabled, this award will start acting passively, celebrating work anniversaries from that point forward using the hire date for the user. If the user has set a timezone the award will automatically post at 9am on their anniversary date otherwise it will post at 9am UTC on that date.

Work anniversary awards with points

Work anniversary awards can now be personalized by adding custom point amounts. This enhancement ensures employees receive not only recognition for their service milestones but also a meaningful reward that reflects their dedication and contribution.

How It Works

• Recognition managers can set a point value for each work anniversary milestone (e.g., 1 year, 5 years, 10 years).

• When an employee reaches the milestone, the award is triggered automatically along with the assigned points.

• Employees receive both the recognition and the points as part of their award experience.

Usage and setup

For any organization that has Rewards enabled, a Recognition manager can add points to Work anniversary awards. Points can be added to all, some, or have specific amounts for specific years of service.

Points can be added by editing the Work anniversary award under Manage >> Recognition >> Milestones.

A new section with a toggle will now show in the edit form allowing the Recognition manager to enable points for the Work anniversary awards and to set a default amount if desired. This default will apply to all instances/years of the award but can be overridden on any specific instance later. To have only specific instances/years have points, make this enabled but have 0 points as the default.

To override a specific instance/years default amount, a Recognition manager will click to edit the desired year (like they were customizing any other field) and they will see a new option to customize the points.

Once clicked they can change the amount, or even disable reward points for the given instance/year.

Points on a Work anniversary award will not be visible to any user beyond the standard Reciever, receiver's

Recognition tiles

In addition to the ways shown above, users can also nominate others and hand out recognition through two new tiles added to both Home and Site dashboards.

The Recent activity tile allows users to see all relevant award activity from the last 30 days, as well as give recognition directly from the tile. The tile shows either "all activity" or recent (last 30 days) relevant activity for a user, where relevant scoring looks like this:

• Awards the user has received > Awards given to or by direct reports > Awards given to or by peers (same manager) > Awards given to or by direct manager > Awards given or received in the user's department
• The "All activity" option highlights all recognition activity from across the org

The Nominate colleagues tile does just that; allows users to nominate colleagues for upcoming recurring awards.

The recognition tile has no site awareness, meaning it will display the same data regardless where it is placed (i.e., site dashboard or home dashboard). For each individual user that sees it, they will see recognition that should have some recent relevance to them, like recognition they have received, recognition their team has received (direct reports, people with the same manager, or the team manager), recognition to people in the same department, and recognition to people in the same location.

Manage awards

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In the Awards section of Manage > Recognition, Recognition managers can:

• View and filter all awards by Peer or Recurring, active or inactive
• Create and edit badges
• Enable/deactivate awards
• Create new awards
• Edit the name or the description of awards

There has also been a Recognition smart block added to the Employee Newsletter feature. This smart block allows you to attach recognition activity to your newsletters. For more information on Employee Newsletter, check out this article. 

Notifications

As of the 24.03 release, users will receive email notifications related to any recognition activity they're a part of. These notifications can be configured or disabled in each user's settings, or App managers can disable any of them in Manage > Application > Defaults. The emails include:

• Recipient of recognition: Get notified when you receive recognition. (This notification is always sent immediately)
• Recipient of award: Get notified when you receive an award. (This notification is always sent immediately)
• Recognition of direct reports: Get notified when your direct reports receive recognition. (This notification is always sent immediately
• Managed awards: Get notified of updates on awards you manage. (This notification is always sent immediately)

Recognition activity and analytics

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Recognition managers have access to both an analytics dashboard for health and activity metrics, and an activity feed that can be exported as a CSV. 

The  Manage > Recognition has a link to Activity & analytics, where Recognition managers can view raw award data like award name, award giver, award receiver(s), and date awarded. This dashboard provides a birds eye view into the health and activity of the organization's recognition program.

Award trend line and counts

Recognition managers can also view the general trends in their award activity, including the total number of awards given by date and the count of each award given.

Recognition managers can also access the analytics dashboard by going to Analytics > Recognition.

There are three tabs: Activity, Company values and Participation. 

Activity is a true count of all activity over a designation period.

Activity shows:

• Total recognition posts
• Total received
• Average recognition per post

Recognition activity shows all recognition-related activity across the intranet.

The Company values tab is relevant to orgs who tie in their company values to recognition, and displays a breakdown of how many values were tied to different recognition posts,  as well as general usage.

Participation shows activity as of that day. The Leaderboard shows the top users who have given or received the most or least (>=1) awards. This can be filtered by department, location, and manager.

Give recognition

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Recognition can be given in any feed or on a user's profile. Once configured, all users will see a new Recognition option when creating a feed post. When this option is selected, the user will be prompted to select one or more colleagues to recognize, grant an award, and write a post to go with the award.

Once posted, the post will notify users and appear in the feed just like any other post.

Colleagues can interact with the award through "cheering" or commenting on it. These cheers and comments will reflect everywhere the award can be seen.

Attach a video

With the 23.12 release, orgs using the Simpplr Native video product will be able to record and attach videos to their recognition. Simply select Record video in your recognition to bring up the record modal. The video will be saved in the applicable site file folder, as well as the Recognition hub. The recipient, as well as other users who see the recognition will be able to watch the video. The maximum time limit for a video attached to a recognition post is 10 minutes.

Profile badges

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Once a user is recognized, an award badge will appear on their profile. A new section for recognition badges will appear just below a user's About info showing awards they've been granted. From this section, the user can also be recognized and it will be posted to the home feed.

Clicking on the award badge will open a detailed view of the user's awards, and allow the viewer to click to find the original post in the feed with all likes and comments.

Recognition hub

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To access the recognition hub, go to your user profile, then Recognition. The hub is where all users can manage their recognition activities. You can even give recognition here by clicking Give recognition. 

The hub you see activity from across the org of who gave out peer-to-peer awards, and if applicable, nominate other users for a recurring award. Recognition managers can also delete any recognition or comments left on recognition from the hub, even if it's not theirs.