Enboarder’s Employee Recognition: Interview with Nyisha Hunt
Nyisha is the mind behind Enboarder’s employee recognition program
Reward and recognition programs aren’t one-size fits all solutions and building a program that fits for your team takes careful consideration and work! That’s why when the People Team at Enboarder® decided to redesign and launch an improved employee recognition program, we knew that Nyisha, our business program manager, was the perfect person to manage the project from start to launch.
Nyisha’s professional background includes a mix of industries from non-profit to sports and entertainment, then food and beverage to tech. The beauty of her experience is that she’s been able to leverage her expertise to enhance people-first cultures – particularly through the lens of the actual employee’s experience.
Under her care, the recognition program at Enboarder was built from the ground up with our values, our team, and our company goals in mind. We sat down with her to learn more about her approach and her advice for other companies looking to launch their own employee recognition programs.
The Architecture of Enboarder’s Employee Recognition Program
At Enboarder, we developed a monthly employee recognition program – the People’s Choice Award – that feeds into our annual program award – the League of Champions. We’ll break them down a little bit further to explain Nyisha’s brilliant architecture.
The Monthly People’s Choice Award
Using the Enboarder platform, we created a nomination form that is always open and accessible through a QR code. Any person in the company can use the code to nominate another team member for showcasing any of our company values.
Submitting a People’s Choice nomination is designed to be quick and easy. Once the QR code is scanned, the nominator just has to fill in their name, department, and then add their nominee’s name and department. After that, we ask what company value they’re showcasing and give an open text box for the nominator to explain why they’re nominating this peer. This open design provides us the opportunity to capture everything from huge accomplishments to smaller gestures between teammates that would otherwise go unnoticed!
From these nominations, a selection committee then chooses one winner each month. That winner is then eligible for our annual League of Champions award!
The League of Champions Award
At the end of the year we have 12 People’s Choice award winners and this group becomes the pool of potential winners for our League of Champions award. Instead of the selection committee choosing this annual winner, they make a recommendation to our leadership team who chooses the one annual winner.
The League of Champions award is presented at our annual company kickoff and we make a big deal out of celebrating the winner – because they’ve earned it!
Using Enboarder to Facilitate Employee Recognition
According to Nyisha, even though recognition programs exist in most organizations, using the Enboarder platform completely changes the experience for our program. We consider recognition to be a “moment that matters,” so we’ve embedded recognition to continuously build and nurture the human connections between our team members. Our program is a simple way to encourage employees to highlight the accomplishments of their peers – and it takes them less than one minute to do it.
Using Enboarder is a big enhancement to the programs that Nyisha built before! She specifically mentioned, “it’s fun, simple, and easy-to-use for our employees. But it also provides me with great insights to see things like the levels of engagement by region and departments. It’s so exciting to know that we’re going to continue growing insights as I continue to evolve the program!”
Advice for Building Out Employee Recognition Programs
Rather than building out an employee recognition program just for the sake of having one, Nyisha suggests that People and HR teams utilize their annual engagement surveys to ensure that they understand the needs of employees. The Enboarder People team pored through the engagement survey results and comments to understand what kind of recognition would be meaningful for every employee level, department, and region.
As the program continues to evolve, Nyisha is working to build out more automation within it. She’s particularly excited about the ability to showcase nominations throughout the business in an automated way by triggering specific notification series. “It’s so important to know that you or someone on your team is being recognized for their contributions and accomplishments in real time. I can’t wait to launch these extra automations because of the impact it will have on individual morale!”
In the end, every company’s culture is brought to life by the team members living out their values daily and employee recognition programs are a great way to memorialize those efforts among teams. Nyisha said it best in one of her final thoughts about employee recognition: “It may be a bit cliché but we do this really well at Enboarder! We’re an incredible team with amazing team members that do trailblazing work on a daily basis, and the opportunity to celebrate them is what makes me passionate about this work. Being spread across multiple countries can sometimes make it difficult to build human connections, but looking through our employee recognition nominations each month makes it clear that we’re doing this right.”
Want to learn more about how to facilitate human connections for your own employee recognition program using Enboarder? We’ve got you covered. Sign up to talk to one of our human connection experts here!