Recognition and rewards programs are a crucial piece to most employee engagement strategies, but what about culture?  Defining the link between the two isn’t always easy.  The chief issue is finding a way to translate it to the employees and intertwine it with the day-to-day activities of the worker.  That very conundrum faced HR professionals at Parkland Health and Hospital System not too long ago.

As part of the HR Tech Online Summit North America event schedule for June 11-12, Parkland Health’s chief experience officer and HR Tech speaker Vishal Bhalla will take a deeper dive into their solution for the problem they faced.

HR Tech links R&R with Culture

From the outset, Bhalla said there were certain challenges the organization needed to overcome.

“Consistency.  Making sure it’s consistent [the R&R program] across the board,” Bhalla said.  “We’re in a world where social media… you know, it’s not just important for the boss to recognize employees, but it’s important for everyone around.  We’re turning the corner in terms of how one wants to be recognized.”

Another piece of the puzzle, according to Bhalla, is “the employee feeling recognized.”

“In our employee engagement survey, one of the independent variables that we need to work on is that our employees feel motivated to go above and beyond,” Bhalla said.

Want to know more about HR technology?  Download our HR Tech Global Report 2019!

It’s for those reasons Parkland designed a solution that was driven by employees.

Bhalla described a scenario where an employee witnessed a fellow employee perform an act of kindness, say helping an elderly patient cross Parkland’s campus.  The witness would then, through a mobile app, submit a post praising the employee for his or her actions.  That post would be available not only for the employee to see, but also their department, their supervisor and anyone else “following” this person on the application, which also has a social media component.

“We’re instantly reinforcing positive behaviors that emulate our values in a very easy, simplistic manner,” Bhalla said.

That’s the employee-facing component of the technology.  On the back-end of the technology, Bhalla said Parkland can track the recognition for every employee.  From there, they will be able to reward employees in various ways based on the recognition received.

By Employees, For Employees

For Parkland Health, their technology solution needed to be created not just for the employee, but by the employee. 

“It has to be that way, otherwise it is meaningless,” Bhalla said.

It was for that reason the project was given to the organization’s employee engagement task force.  Bhalla created the volunteer group with membership being directly tied to discipline and hierarchy ratios within the Parkland workforce.

While Bhalla’s team handled some of the initial issues with the creation of the app, the task force took on the brunt of the work.

“The task force built this.  They came up with it,” Bhalla said.  “I wanted to ensure we had our values embedded as the anchors.  The vendor had some ideas, but the actual final look and feel was decided by the task force.” 

HR Technology Online Summit North America

Vishal Bhalla is the chief experience officer for Parkland Health and Hospital System and a speaker for the HR Tech Online Summit North America event set for June 11-12.  He will go into much more detail about the platform and how it works during his presentation. 

Key themes for the online event include:

• Creating an HR department more strategy-focused and less transactional with automation and RPA
• How to integrate AI into your overall strategy to remain agile, relevant and competitive
• Effectively using recruitment technologies to find the best talent available for your organization to sustain business growth and survival
• Becoming proficient at understanding and using data through effective application of people analytics
• Consolidating your employee experience strategy to increase engagement, development and retention
• Leveraging video, social media, gamification and microlearning to increase employee engagement

To register for the free-to-attend event, click here.