Improving Company Culture through Employee Recognition

Advisor Websites has one of the highest company-wide usage rates for the Bucketlist Recognition Software App, of between 85% to 95% monthly engagement. Spoiler, it wasn’t always like this!

A SaaS company, Advisor Websites creates websites and digital marketing solutions for financial professionals in North America. Going from one strength to the next since their inception in 2002, Advisor Websites has been recognized as one of Canada’s Fastest Growing Companies for the last three years (2017, 2018 and 2019) and their thriving team and culture received a 2020 Employee Recommended award.

Like most companies willing to take the dreaded internal deep-dive, Advisor Websites discovered there was more than one problem that needed improving. They also found that problems fed off each other.

#1 – In-house recognition program not being utilized

Advisor Websites understood the importance of recognition and tried to do it on their own, without third party software. Staff weren’t engaged or getting involved with recognition.

#2 – Working in silos

Departments were doing great work, but communication and collaboration between departments was low. The silo walls were high and opaque!

#3 – Adoption of new company core values

In 2016, they revamped the four core values to be more inline with the direction they wanted the company to grow. They wanted to bring core values to the forefront of everything the team does.

#4 – Negative Employee Net Promoter Score (ENPS)

Advisor Websites conducted an Employee Net Promoter Score (ENPS) survey, which resulted in a negative score. Findings from the ENPS revealed that staff were unhappy with product performance, goal alignment, communication between departments, and not feeling valued for their hard work.

In order to improve the four main pain points, Advisor Websites knew that recognition was going to be an essential tool in their arsenal. But they were already doing recognition and had poor uptake… so how could they get staff to participate in the recognition program? Here are the steps they conducted on their road to success.

Step 1: Find a platform to make recognition easy

Advisor Websites was referred to Bucketlist and they loved how it integrated with Slack; their main form of communication.

Step 2: Engrain new company core values

To provide united direction, every recognition is linked to a core value; own it, got your back, above and beyond, and impact tomorrow.

Step 3: Lead by example

To help company-wide uptake they knew they needed buy-in from the top.

With leadership support, recognition naturally filtered down to all staff.

Step 4: Public Recognition (Leaderboard functionality)

Recognition and points are non-monetized at Advisor Websites. They use the leaderboard to provide additional public recognition to staff who are living core values. The top 10 on the leaderboard get a verbal shoutout at the weekly company-wide meeting, with the top 5 people having their achievements announced.

Recognition has resulted in incredible success for Advisor Websites.

Recognition Uptake

Now, Advisor Websites have an average of 90% engagement with the recognition platform.

Advisor Websites staff have rated the Bucketlist recognition program 9.7/10 in terms of satisfaction

No more silos

The silo walls not only have broken down, but there is a lot of transparency between departments who now regularly work together to achieve company goals.

Recognition encourages people to help each other and has naturally improved communication. Transparency is also attributed to each department presenting their wins, struggles and showcasing their work  in the weekly meeting.

New company core values

This quote sums up these results:

It’s amazing, you can ask anyone in the company what the values are and people have them memorized. Our culture is alive and well and staff members are aligned and living our values on a daily basis.

–Alex

We’ve saved the best to last…

A positive ENPS

Advisor Websites conduct the ENPS survey quarterly. At the start of 2019 the score was a positive 10 (a huge increase from the negative score they had previously).

It doesn’t stop there! Throughout 2019 the score has continued to improve, with the latest survey results in Q2 2020 being a whopping positive 50!

We thought 40 was a good result at the start of 2020, but the following quarter it increased again to 50!

–Alex

In addition to recognition driving their ENPS success, Advisor Websites have focused on improving product performance and company-wide goal planning so they’re all focused in a united direction.

You can achieve results like this too.

Recognition is even part of their new staff induction process.

The details: how Advisor Websites use Bucketlist for Recognition

• Peer recognition program.
• Staff and managers can recognize one another for living core values and can hand out points with each recognition.
• The company also recognizes employees years of service (employee anniversaries) and offer other monetary rewards.
• The platform integrates into all of their key tools and software including Slack, Gmail, and BambooHR.

If you’d like to find out more about how the Bucketlist employee recognition software can help your business, contact us for a free demo.

We’d love to help you improve your company’s culture too!