How AI helps teams make employee recognition more meaningful

It sounds counterintuitive, but as you look for ways to reinforce workplace connection, AI technology can help your team nurture a more authentic, streamlined culture of recognition. 

According to 40% of HR professionals and employees, effective employee experience considers your team members’ wants and needs before customizing your engagement strategy. 

Traditionally, this meant testing initiatives and surveying over time, before committing to a winning program. With the inclusion of AI in our workflows, people operations and HR teams can roll out optimized employee engagement initiatives more readily.

Think of AI as a microphone. HR teams bring their unique experience, industry knowledge and company history to the stage, and AI tools amplify it, giving HR teams the ability to extend their reach, communicate effectively and find what resonates with employees quickly.

Using the right prompts and processing more data sets, HR teams can work with AI insights to personalize recognition initiatives at scale.

AI amplifies the employee experience

AI is a natural fit for enhancing your employee recognition program. Employees are six times more likely to see financial benefits from AI when they personally experience value from it.

Using the latest tech to analyze employee engagement or performance metrics, your HR team can assess what recognition has the best impact, when to launch a new employee initiative or what internal communication nudges work best.

• AI strengthens teamwork and reinforces your company’s core values.
  Writing assistants and Generative AI tools can prompt users to develop impactful recognitions with best practices like timeliness or specificity in mind. They can also outline how a recognition story connects back to your company’s mission or core values. All of which feels more meaningful to the receiver and ties back into performance and business wins.
  
• AI analyzes historical and predictive data to develop optimal employee programming.
  AI tools can comb through employee engagement surveys and sentiments. By reviewing historical data and creating future analytics and scenarios, AI can help your team create a solution that pairs with your team’s feedback, whether it’s what dates work best for volunteering or participation in a new wellness benefit.
  

AI adoption gives organizations an opportunity to show employees how technology can enhance connection, rather than replace human intention. Whether it’s crafting impactful recognitions or summarizing data, AI is only as good as what we, as professionals, team members or leaders, bring to it. 

AI helps craft meaningful, detailed recognitions

AI can improve the quality of recognition and remove barriers to peer participation.

Even with good intentions, recognizing a peer or employee can sometimes feel hard to express. Recognition assistant tools, like ITA Group’s Cooleaf employee engagement technology, help team members craft recognitions that resonate. The technology helps the user go beyond generic praise. 

AI assistants can prompt the user for more information or use their first draft to produce a meaningful, behavior-based message. Users now have an enhanced version they can edit or send directly.

The more peers and leadership interact with AI assistants to craft recognition, the more they develop their skills in crafting these messages, tying their work to their purpose and strengthening their prompts with AI.

Manager recognition is often the most memorable, according to 28% of employees. AI helps leadership make the most of recognition. Using employee data for key moments, like work anniversaries or reaching the latest project milestones, automated prompts help leaders track when to recognize and what to highlight.

Related: 4 can’t-miss elements for a standout recognition culture

AI surfaces unseen employee wins

Each team member works differently. For example, one employee might be quick to jump in with ideas during a meeting, whereas another might prefer to take time to process before offering new insights. Both responses have an impact on the project, but we might initially assume that the immediate, outgoing employee was more prepared when it's really a difference in work styles. 

Remote or hybrid work can also make it a little more difficult for supervisors to get a full picture of work wins. Proximity bias tends to lead some managers to see extroverted online personalities or in-person employees with more favor.

AI can reduce this unconscious bias by recommending recognitions based on behavior, not personality or location. Natural language processing (NLP) can analyze existing recognitions, comments and employee engagement data to identify themes and patterns unseen in real time.

For example, a culture champion who routinely comments on your recognition platform might usually go unseen. Participating and staying up to date with company culture drives engagement rates and is an effort that should be recognized. Leadership can use NLP to surface key moments like these, the quiet, but still high-achieving contributors.

AI enables managers to recognize more timely and effectively

Many employees say they want recognition throughout the week (27%) or month (35%) from their managers. And high-quality, consistent manager recognition drives employee motivation and strengthens morale.

AI can help busy leaders make meaningful recognition a consistent habit. By using automated tools to process metrics, like sales, customer surveys or current project data, AI can call attention to key performance indicators that deserve a shoutout. 

Managers can then use these AI-generated summaries to recognize employee wins in a timely fashion, showing teams that leadership is engaged and invested in their success. It also lives out the organization’s values of prioritizing a more connected culture.

AI can also take recognition to the next level with data-driven predictions. Predictive analytics can identify teams at risk of disengagement, prompting proactive recognition or alternative support initiatives to re-engage an employee.

Related: How to reprioritize employee recognition

Strategic AI leads to powerful recognitions

When implemented with intention, AI doesn’t replace human appreciation. It amplifies it. 

Employee experience teams and HR leaders who embrace AI as a tool for empathy, personalization and timeliness will build stronger cultures of belonging and engagement.

Create a culture of recognition with our ebook, Driving employee behavior change through recognition.