Recognizing your employees is about filling a universal emotional need for connection to the work that we all do. There’s more to life than work and pay; this will be true for as long as human beings do the job.

So, employee recognition matters, and it will always matter. But how do you factor it into the workspace in the modern remote work system? We’ve got five apps to help you, but first, let’s look at why it matters so much.

Why is Employee Recognition so Important?

Employee recognition is the social reward that fills in everything missing in the financial one written in everybody’s contracts. While work can be left at work, the emotional effects of that work bleed into people’s lives and, consequently, back into their work the next day.

Recognition is simply about acknowledging that employees are more than just mindless workers. Still, it can be easier said than done, especially in a remote work environment when you can’t have any one-to-ones in person.

The good news is that plenty of Slack apps facilitate this, and we’ll come to those shortly. But, before we do, it’s essential to discuss the many ways in which employee recognition will help your teams:

Workplace and Team Culture

Recognition doesn’t always have to come from the top. When it does, it’s a great facilitator of engagement vertically, and we’ll discuss that next, but when it comes from within, it’s also a powerful bonding tool that brings teams together.

A Global Culture Report suggests appreciation as one of six elements that define a healthy and thriving company culture. It makes workers feel valued for their work and inspires them to take their role as part of a team, aligning their goals with those of the company.

Workplace culture should be designed and infused from the top down, but peers should also maintain good culture. This makes recognition in remote spaces challenging since teams are often spread out and sometimes even on different schedules. However, recognizing good work is key to instilling this culture and promoting engagement.

Employee Engagement

Leaders who appreciate are appreciated back, which ties into all those benefits listed above, in which a healthy workplace culture requires appreciation. The reason for this comes down to engagement. While engagement isn’t enough on its own, it is one of the divergent metrics associated with high productivity.

Though it isn’t black and white, engaged employees typically produce better work that more closely aligns with what’s desired by the company. As a result, they’re more motivated to take part and more loyal, which has implications for their retention too.

Employee recognition can significantly boost this engagement, making it a powerful tool for retention and enhanced productivity when channeled correctly. This is true that 37% of employees consider it the single most important thing an employer can do to help them succeed in their work.

Team Morale

Morale has many well-known benefits to everything we’ve already discussed, and it’s part of an overall sense of well-being that supports the team’s progress. Happy employees are more productive, there’s no doubt, and fostering team morale plays a significant role in this.

There are many ways to work on team morale, including employee engagement and team culture. Team morale improves when teams have common goals and receive recognition as a group.

When teams receive rewards for their deliverables, team morale improves again, and the deliverables are likely to be as good, if not better, than before. There’s no magic to it: teams and people need to be treated with respect and gratitude for their efforts. When this happens, the organism as a whole thrives.

Meetings

Even meetings can benefit from better workplace recognition. Not only that, they’re a great place to express it and to seed all the positive benefits we’ve covered so far. Both one-on-one and group meetings are the perfect time to show gratitude for your employees and your teams and encourage them to recognize one another.

But all of these impacts can be tricky to accomplish in the workplace and between remote teams. Moreover, the distances between people and the asynchronous nature of the work can require adaptive processes for employing and facilitating employee recognition.

Slack is the primary venue for most companies working with hybrid or remote environments. As a result, it puts a lot of work into facilitating all the things that would otherwise be lacking from teams split by time and space. There are countless apps designed to help fill in the gaps that appear when working with remote teams, and some even capitalize on that dynamic to bring in new advantages.

We’ve compiled a short list of five apps that can help with this. Let’s take a look.

Top Slack Employee Recognition Apps

Consider these five apps for implementing your employee recognition practices both from the top-down and peer-to-peer. Of course, some also have additional features worth checking out, but we’ve focused on their employee recognition strengths for this list.

CultureBot

CultureBot is designed explicitly for Slack and provides many features that help with recognition from afar. The app’s designed to promote a positive culture of well-being from inside the Slack platform. It accomplishes this by fostering engagement, healthy work-life balance, and positive reinforcement.

This last part is what makes it so good at approaching recognition. With the bot’s ability to generate micro-moments, it strives to make employees feel valued. Here are some of the vital recognition features:

• Anniversary and Birthday celebrations – These are the little acknowledgments that show you care, and you’re paying attention.
• Shoutouts – For more specific, outcome-related recognition, some shoutouts acknowledge particular things people have done well.
• Peer rewards – Shoutouts combined with the reward points system that you assign to a benefits program of your design.

These little gestures of employee recognition show your team you appreciate their effort and help positively reinforce their good work. Be sure to check out our demo here or install CultureBot using the button below.

Disco

Disco has a wealth of recognition features to draw upon for your teams. It’s possible to configure the values that apply to each group and implement recognition within these too.

Disco Nominations allow employees to tell a story to be up with the chance for an employee of the month nomination from the leadership teams. If you’re looking to offer rewards in place of monetary compensation, Disco allows employees to earn raffle tickets for giving or receiving kudos. This encourages peer recognition and rewards it with the bonuses you set up when the winners are announced each month.

Trello

While Trello is well known for its organizational strengths with projects, only a few people realize its use as a facilitator of employee recognition. You can set up a board specifically for recognition using the same system that’s so good for project management.

Trello also provides onboarding templates that can be infused with various power-ups to aid recognition. For example, kudos offer the chance to praise achievements between employees or from leadership to new hires. Then, there are integrations with Trello from third-party apps like Appreiz.

Karma

Karma allows you to set goals, track performance toward those goals, and then reward the performance of your teams too. This is a good app for tracking performance with a points system, both for individuals and teams, and offers a tiered system of karma points based on the significance of the effort.

For small gestures of engagement, there’s micro-karma. For example, daily accomplishments and teamwork can be rewarded with regular karma. Finally, Channel karma can be distributed to the whole team for substantial chunks of work that’s done well.

Tokens of appreciation can also be personalized and tailored using cute animations if you want to go that extra mile.

PeerFives

With PeerFives, you get to be present for your teams’ smaller and larger wins. In addition, peer recognition is shared in the #general channel to create a public domain of appreciation and further inspire your employees’ engagement and sense of well-being by being thanked for what they do.

Rewards can be automated and attached to skills being learned on the job, which helps to stimulate an enthusiasm specifically for learning and improving in the roles. You can also set team challenges involving common objectives and reward the successes from the same app.

Check out these handy Slack apps to help facilitate your employee recognition practices with remote teams. You’ll quickly see benefits to the workplace and team culture, employee engagement, and morale, among many others.