Employee recognition and rewards are essential for maintaining a positive and productive workplace. However, without proper budget planning, these programs may not be sustainable in the long run. In this article, we'll explore the importance of budget planning when it comes to employee recognition and rewards. Then we'll cover how you can manage your Points budget with Recognize.
For help getting started with general reward budgeting for your organization, check out our Employee Rewards Budget Calculator.
Use the below menu to jump to specific topics:
Budgeting Using the Point Allocations Feature
Enabling Point Allocations & Distributing Points
Budgeting Using Badge Sending Limits
Budgeting Best Practices
Understand Your Goals
Before you start budget planning, it's important to understand your goals for employee recognition and rewards. What do you hope to achieve with these programs? Are you trying to increase employee morale, boost productivity, or improve employee retention?
Once you have a clear understanding of your goals, you can begin to set a budget that aligns with them. For example, if you're trying to increase trust between leadership and employees, you will want to make sure to allocate enough budget towards manager recognition so that employees can feel appreciated by their direct leader.
Allocate Funds Wisely
Once you've set your goals, it's time to allocate funds wisely. This means taking a close look at your budget and determining how much you can realistically spend on employee recognition and rewards. It's best practice to assume that points awarded will be points spent.
It's also important to remember that employee recognition and rewards are not just about monetary compensation. Non-monetary Badges are great for building camaraderie and experiential rewards such as coffee with the boss, and additional time off can often be just as effective as monetary rewards.
Prioritize Programs
When it comes to employee recognition and rewards, not all programs are created equal. Some programs may be more effective than others, depending on your goals and the needs of your employees.
For example, if you're trying to improve employee morale, you may want to prioritize Badges that focus on team-building and employee engagement. On the other hand, if you're trying to boost productivity, you may want to prioritize Badges that reward employees for meeting specific performance goals.
Monitor Your Budget
Finally, it's important to monitor your budget regularly to ensure that you're staying on track. This means tracking your expenses and making adjustments as needed.
For example, if you find that you're overspending on monetary rewards, you may need to cut back on Badges with points and focus more on zero-point Badges. Alternatively, if you find that certain programs are not effective in the way that you hoped, you'll want to shift your budget towards more successful programs.
Ultimately, budget planning is essential for creating sustainable and effective employee recognition and rewards programs. By setting clear goals, allocating funds wisely, prioritizing programs, and monitoring your budget, you can create a workplace culture that values and rewards employee contributions and achievements without breaking the bank. So how exactly do you plan and manage a budget with Recognize? Read the section below for more information!
Managing a Budget with Recognize
Budgeting guardrails for Recognize are either based on how many Badges can be given out on an interval basis (by setting Badge sending limits,) or by using the Point Allocations feature to set a total number of points that can be given out through Badges.
Budgeting Using the Point Allocations Feature
Point Allocations limit a user's total points that can be sent via Recognitions. With Point Allocations, administrators have the ability to allocate points to all staff, as well as allocate additional points for users in specified Company Roles.
To see point allocation budgeting in action, watch the brief video: Point Allocation Budgeting
To assist in determining how many points to allocate to all staff, and users is specific Company Roles, while maintaining your desired budget, use the workbook below:
Point Allocation Budgeting Worksheet
The Point Allocation Budgeting Workbook offers two different budgeting strategies:
Strategy 1: This strategy allows you to start with a fixed budget, and allocate a percentage of that budget to groups of users to determine how many points each employee will get.
Strategy 2: This strategy allows you to start with the amount of points that you would like to allocate to all staff and each user in a specified Company Role, and the spreadsheet will calculate your spending based on the number of employees you have in each role.
Note: The workbook references a monthly budgeting interval, however, you can select your desired budgeting interval in your Recognize account.
Cell color guide:
Enter your organization's relevant data into the green cells.
The points in the blue cells will be entered into the Point Allocation tool in Recognize.
The white cells will populate according to the data entered into the green cells.
Enabling Point Allocations & Distributing Points
To learn how to allocate points in Recognize, follow the steps outlined below.
- Select 'Menu' up in the top right corner of the screen
- Select 'Company Admin' from the drop-down menu
- Select 'Points' from the left side menu
- Select 'Allocation' from the top right menu bar
- Toggle this on to enable point allocations
- This is the interval in which your point allocations will be allotted. To change the allocation interval, select 'change interval'. This will route you to the settings page where you can set the interval to daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly.
- Enter in the amount of points you want to allocate to each user per selected interval, and click 'Save'
- To distribute additional points to a select group of users, select the 'Company Role' you would like to allocate too, enter the amount of additional points you would like to give to the group of users, and click 'add'
NOTE: The points you allocate here will be added to the points allocated to 'all staff'. For example: If all staff gets 50 pointer per quarter, and you add an additional 50 points per quarter for all users with the Company Role of 'Manager', This means that users with the Manager Role get a total of 100 point per quarter. To learn more about setting up 'Company Roles', visit How to Add Company Roles in Recognize
- Your organizations maximum budget shown here is determined by your 'all staff' allocation (multiplied by the total number of active and pending users) added to any additional points allocated to specified 'Company Roles' (multiplied by the number of users with that Company Role)
- To change the currency the budget is shown in, select the desired currency catalog from the drop down menu
- Users will see their total and remaining points (per selected interval) on the stream page, above the announcements section
- Users can also see their total and remaining points (per selected interval) on the Recognition page
NOTE: The users points graph will adjust based on the badge and recipient(s) that are chosen so that users can see the total points they will be spending on that Recognition.
- Additionally, users can view their sendable points from within their profile - start by clicking on your profile in the top right corner of the screen
- Select the 'Points' tab to view point totals
- In the module to the right, you'll see a total for 'Sendable Points'
Budgeting Using Badge Sending Limits
To help you manage budget and combat abuse, Recognize allows you to limit how often an individual employee can send a Badge within a specific time interval and/or cap the total number of points a user can give out. In fact, there are a few ways to restrict recognition sending within your Recognize account, which are outlined below.
Use the below menu to jump to specific topics:
Setting Individual Badge Limits
Setting Global Badge Sending Limits
Setting Individual Badge Limits
After you've determined how many Badges you have budget for and how many each person can send, you can begin adjusting the points for your Badges. To do this:
- Click 'Menu' in the upper right-hand corner of your screen
- Select 'Company Admin' from the drop-down menu
- Select the 'Custom badges' section from the left side navigation menu
- Click the 'Details' tab for the Badge you wish to edit or click 'Create Badge' to create a new badge for budgeting (see our help article on how to create a badge)
- Choose the points, sending limits, and the roles that can send each Badge to determine your budget
NOTE: Leave sending limit blank if there will be no limit. If no roles are added, all employees will be able to send the badge and will be included in budgeting.
- If Rewards are enabled in your settings, you'll be able to see your budget for that Badge populate on the right side of your Badge settings
NOTE: You can change the interval at which this table calculates (ex. monthly, quarterly, yearly) within the 'Settings' tab in the left menu.
- You can also take further control of your budget by requiring approval for certain Badges or point intervals to be sent
- If requiring approval for a Badge to be sent, you can set certain point variants to require approval or leave blank to cover all variants, and you can also assign an Approver based on your created Roles (See our help article for how to create Roles).
- Make sure to save any changes you make by clicking the 'Save' button at the bottom of the screen
NOTE: You can change the interval at which this calculates within the 'Settings.' See below section 'Interval Settings' for details.
Setting Global Badge Sending Limits
- Select the 'Menu' button in the top right-hand corner of your screen
- Select 'Company Admin' from the drop-down menu
- Select 'Custom Badges' in the navigation menu to the far left
- Select the 'Settings' tab in the far right upper corner tertiary menu
- In the text box under 'Global', input the number of times each user can send any of your Badges in a specified time frame. To be clear, this limits the total number of recognitions a user can send, regardless of the individual Badge settings on the 'Custom Badges' page. If you have already set Badge limits on your 'Custom Badges' page, this setting will override those limits
- In the dropdown menu next to the 'Global' number, select the desired time interval which determines when limits will start over
- Don't forget to save your changes by clicking 'Save badge limits'