Unlike cash or gift cards, experiential rewards actually feel rewarding. They celebrate employees as real people, creating strong relationships built on mutual gratitude and respect. And they generate conversations and shareable stories that build buzz and excitement around your recognition efforts.
When you integrate Blueboard with Slack, you can boost that buzz and excitement even more. At baseline, this integration enables you to broadcast Blueboard reward activities into any Slack channel for employees to access.
With this integration, you can also unlock access to our new Peer-to-Peer app. This flexible, easy-to-use, peer-to-peer recognition solution allows your employees to send and receive recognition anytime—right in Slack. This “always-on” recognition fosters a culture of gratitude and resilience—which is essential as employees and companies continue to navigate so much uncertainty.
In this post, we explore how to launch the integration and enable the Peer-to-Peer app.
Ignite recognition activity through our seamless Slack integration.
Step 1: Launch the Blueboard x Slack integration.
Here’s a high-level overview of the easy steps you can take within run.blueboard.com to launch this integration. If you have any questions, please reach out to your dedicated Account Manager, or email our general Support team at support@blueboard.com.
Then, start building buzz around reward activities.
Check out the reward activities you can push through Slack to any channel, and how they'll help you build program awareness, community, and afterglow.
1) Enable "Reward Received" activities and build program awareness and utilization.
Push out Slack notifications as rewards are received, with the ability to include the rewarded employee's “Achievement Message” and “Company Value” demonstrated (for accounts where Values are enabled). As rewards are received, the broader channel community can follow program adoption and build anticipation for participating themselves. The more employees become aware of your program's activity and impact, excitement and motivation builds, influencing redemption rates for their next reward.
As a best practice, encourage managers to jump into Slack once the reward goes out to build upon the Achievement note with added context, encouraging celebration and dialogue from the broader channel community—emojis commence! We made this easy, both Manager and the rewarded employee will be @mentioned in the post by default.
Recommended reading: Get inspiration for building buzz-worthy anniversary award programs from our Client Glaukos (read their success story here).
2) Enable "Reward Redeemed" activities and build a community of ambassadors and knowledge sharing.
Push out Slack notifications as rewards are redeemed, with the option to either show the reward experience name (i.e. Intro to Flying Trapeze), or more simply, the reward category (i.e. Relax & Unwind).
As rewards are redeemed, our top Clients are seeing past Blueboard recipients organically sharing their own best practices, stepping up as Blueboard ambassadors. They're cheering on others along the way, and serving as a go-to advisor as questions come up.
Sharing redemption activity helps to bond employees together through shared interests, who otherwise wouldn't have the opportunity to connect if sitting on separate teams or in distributed office locations. The Blueboard rewards we redeem reveal our own personal passions, interests and hobbies, building inclusivity and encouraging employees to bring their whole self to work.
3) Enable "Recognition Stories" activities and continue the afterglow
As employees go out and about on their Blueboard rewards, they come back with Instagram-worthy photos, videos and memories to share. Encourage employees to post this content back to the Slack community and as an Admin, you can also enable push notifications as new Recognition Stories are published. Recognition Stories are a great tool for building employer brand—our best Clients are leveraging employee-generated content across their careers pages, review sites like Glassdoor, and on company social feeds—reinforcing a culture of recognition.
As new Recognition Stories are created, consider cross-posting to other more commonly used water cooler channels like your company's version of #general to continue building program awareness.
Recommended reading: Learn more about how shareable recognition programs build employer brand in this eBook.
Don’t forget to enable the Blueboard Peer-to-Peer app!
Your people are doing small things worthy of recognition all the time—things a central leadership team may not always see. That’s why every employee should be empowered to share and receive appreciation at any time. And it’s why “always-on” peer-to-peer employee appreciation and recognition must be a key part of your holistic recognition strategy.
Fortunately, we’ve got an app for that! Talk to your Blueboard Account Manager today about how to enable the Blueboard Peer-to-Peer app in your organization’s Slack workspace and empower your people to start recognizing each other today.
Look out for more exciting product news, webinars, best practices and recognition planning guides here on our Resources page.
And if experiential rewards are on your mind and you're not yet a Blueboard Client, we'd love to connect and walk you through a personalized product demo. Feel free to request your best time to meet online here.
