Improve Employee Recognition with Swag Automation

Recognition that runs itself = more engaged employees = greater profits and reduced turnover rates. Sounds good to you? Building a recognition program at scale, with thousands of employees on the payroll, requires automation to prevent HR from becoming full-time swag managers. Setting up the system has never been easier.

Current state of employee recognition

According to a Gallup poll, only 22% of employees say they receive the right amount of recognition. I believe this is not from a lack of caring by HR and management but a lack of resources, infrastructure, and tools to support.

With some companies having thousands of employees across multiple offices in the US and abroad, swag recognition programs are nearly impossible to manage with a basic HRIS system alone. You create recognition programs, order swag, and then have to remember every time to send the gear when milestones are met.

Almost worse than no recognition at all is inconsistent recognition, knowing the swag exists. Only 26% of employees strongly agree they get about as much recognition as teammates performing at a similar level. Manual programs create favorites by accident. The employee whose anniversary falls during the week of the all-hands gets remembered. The one whose anniversary falls the week your HR coordinator is out sick does not. An automated trigger that fires off an HRIS field doesn't have good weeks and bad weeks.
chart
Right amount of recognition¹
Employees who say they receive the right amount of recognition
Recognition among peers
26%
Strongly agree they get about as much recognition as teammates performing at a similar level.²
*Remaining 78% of responses not listed within the Gallup-Workhuman report.
1. Gallup and Workhuman, The Human-Centered Workplace: Building Organizational Cultures That Thrive (Gallup, 2024), 5.
2. Ellyn Maese and Emily Wetherell, "Are You Playing Favorites With Employee Recognition?" Gallup, May 18, 2022, Are You Playing Favorites With Employee Recognition?.

How successful recognition programs affect performance

A few tools and automation can help manage your recognition program for you. At the end of the day, does missing a few work anniversaries matter?

Recognition drives engagement, and engagement shows up on the P&L. The 11th edition of Gallup's Q12 meta-analysis covers 183,806 business units across 53 industries and 90 countries. Comparing engagement from top-quarters to bottom-quarters, the median differences are 23% in profitability, 18% in productivity measured by sales, 78% in absenteeism, and 51% in turnover at organizations.

Engaged employees not only produce more profits, they save annual losses from turnover. According to a Gallup and Workhuman report, a 10,000 person company with an engaged workforce can save up to $16.1 million a year in turnover costs.

Which milestones are worth building a workflow around?

Now that we know recognition matters, both for employees and the bottom line, we need to decide which milestones to send swag on. Picking these up front makes it easier to standardize and automate the swag recognition later.

The best candidates are moments your HRIS already knows about, because the trigger data is sitting there waiting:

• Day one, triggered off their start date, with a welcome kit that lands before the first Monday

• 30 and 90-day marks, triggered off the same field with a delay step

• Work anniversaries, tiered so a five-year gift is different from a one-year gift

• Promotions and role changes, triggered off a job title or level field update

• Return from parental or medical leave, triggered off a leave status change

• Peer nominations, triggered off a form submission

• Project and launch completions, triggered off a project management tool

• Retirement and offboarding, because alumni talk

None of these require judgment in the moment. They're all knowable in advance from data that already exists, which is exactly what makes them automatable.

Automating your recognition with Zapier

Picking your trigger dates off your HRIS, you can send swag without checking your system daily with Kotis’ new Zapier integration.

Zapier acts as a middleman between thousands of popular apps and our Kotis platform. It takes triggers from your HRIS, like an employee’s work anniversary, and sends that information to the Kotis swag platform to do an action. Our platform will then process the order you designate ahead of time, shipping the gear to their address.

Automations run without any human intervention. It’s a set it and forget it solution that keeps your employee swag recognition programs consistent.
HRIS trigger to Zapier to Kotis

Trialing an automation setup with your HRIS

Automating your recognition might be new for your. It’s new for us as well! The connection works. What we're doing now is building and testing the actual workflows platform by platform with a handful of clients, so the templates are solid before we hand them to everyone. Some HRIS platforms will map cleanly on day one. Others will take a few rounds.

If you run recognition or onboarding at a company with more than 500 employees and there's a process you'd like to stop doing by hand, we'd like to help you build it. Beta partners help shape the workflow for their system, get it configured with our team, and run it before it's generally available.

The recognition math has been settled for years. What's changed is that acting on it consistently no longer has to be somebody's full-time job.