Points-based recognition

The model

Every employee gets an allowance of points each month. Recognising a colleague means writing a message and attaching some of those points. The recipient banks them and, when enough have built up, spends them in a catalogue of gift cards, merchandise and experiences. The employer funds the redemptions and pays the vendor a per-seat fee for running it.

The design has obvious advantages. Every act of recognition has a number, so it can be summed, charted and compared across teams. The budget is predictable, because the allowance caps it. And the catalogue offers something for everyone, in a way that a single fixed reward never can.

Where it came from

Points programs are the descendants of sales incentive schemes and airline loyalty programs, adapted for the whole workforce by vendors in the 2000s. The logic was borrowed intact: behaviour earns currency, currency buys things, people do more of the behaviour. For selling insurance this held up reasonably well. For saying thank you it turned out to be more complicated.

What tends to happen

The first quarter usually looks good. Usage is high, the feed is busy, and the numbers go up. The drift begins after that.

Messages shorten. Once everybody knows that 100 points needs a message, the message becomes whatever is shortest. The recognition, which was the point, gets crowded out by the points.

Allowances get dumped. Points that expire unused are spent in the last two days of the month, on whoever is nearest, and the pattern is visible in any program’s timestamps.

Reciprocity creeps in. Two colleagues who thank each other on the same afternoon each month are not doing anything wrong, and they are also not recognising anything. The page on recognition fatigue describes where this ends up.

The cost surprises people. A modest allowance across a few hundred staff is a large annual redemption bill, on top of the platform. When the finance team asks what it bought, the answer has to be something other than a busy feed.

Alternatives

The main alternative is to remove the exchange rate. Some platforms attach a symbolic unit to each recognition, a badge or a tree, that has meaning without having a price and therefore cannot be traded. Others attach nothing at all and rely on visibility. Both keep the message as the thing being given, which is what points were always meant to be a vehicle for.