Connecting Employees Through Recognition

Summary

Peaches Diaz is a HR manager of the Elberton Georgia plant. Using Guusto has enabled her to easily reward employees with gifts they always enjoy. Here's how flexible recognition increased performance and alignment at Pilgrim's.

The Challenge

Breakthru Beverage is a leading North American alcoholic beverage wholesaler, which handles distribution of a number of leading brands, including Smirnoff, Johnnie Walker, and Baileys. The company has over 7,000 employees working across different locations.

After reviewing the results of their annual engagement survey, the Canadian leadership team agreed that they needed to do more to improve employee recognition across teams at Breakthru.

Up until this point, recognition at the company was managed in-house, with little alignment across different teams and locations. According to VP of Human Resources Kermit Grant:

“My team likes that they are given a gift card and they can choose the merchant they want to use it at. Instead of buying items that they'll maybe use twice and will sit on their desk and look pretty, now they can have a tangible thing they can actually use like drink coffee, go to the grocery store, go shopping.

Another challenge was that employees had no way to recognize each other.

“There was no way for an employee who may want to give out a shoutout to another employee for doing something that helped them out in a problem, that supported them.

The Solution

How Breakthru Beverages ACE their Culture

Align

Create a consistent recognition program across all teams

Connect

Introduce peer-to-peer recognition for all employees

Empower

Equip managers with budgets for spot recognition

Kermit worked closely with Guusto’s Customer Success team to create a program that would meet their needs.

There was no way for an employee who may want to give out a shoutout to another employee for doing something that helped them out in a problem, that supported them.

Breakthru’s program combined monetary and non-monetary recognition. Managers were assigned budgets to send Guusto gifts for spot recognition while all team members were given access to Guusto’s Shoutouts feature to send non-monetary recognition to peers. This was particularly important in helping to create a real buzz about the new program across the organization.

That peer recognition piece, I think those have certainly created a lot of energy across the business.

The Results

Breakthru Beverage’s managers were excited about Guusto from the get-go.

Even when we launched it initially, managers, because they had the budget and so on, they were all over it and they said, ‘Oh my God, I really appreciate the company doing this’.

By May 2022, manager budget usage was tracking at 39%, and improved again to reach 50% in June.

Participation in Guusto’s peer-to-peer Shoutouts program didn’t explode overnight, however. As is often the case when rolling out a recognition program to a very large number of employees, getting people to try out the program and see its benefits isn’t always easy, and Shoutouts participation was tracking at just 8% in May, far short of Breakthru’s target to achieve 50% participation within the first 6 months.

Fortunately, Kermit and his team were able to put their heads together with Guusto to strategize some tactics to build excitement. One thing that had a huge impact was holding a ‘peer-to-peer recognition day’ to encourage people to try out the program.

In talking with Zsofia (Slamani, one of Guusto’s Customer Success Managers) at the time, we decided to kinda challenge our leaders. We’d just started to get back to having face-to-face meetings, and so the regions were having their sales meetings and I challenged them. I said, ‘You know, this is a perfect opportunity. Select a day, and let's designate that as a peer-to-peer recognition day.

And they did that and that's what kind of drove it. So by the end of June, we were at 34%. And, in another three weeks already at 44%. So, the momentum is there and it has continued.

Crucially, they also tied their Shoutouts program to their monetary program. Using Guusto’s Leaderboard feature, Breakthru now rewards the top 3 Shoutouts recipients and top 3 Shouts senders with Guusto gifts every quarter. This has been crucial in driving participation, creating healthy competition among employees and gamifying the program.

One important reason why Guusto has been so successful for Breakthru is that the rewards offered are valued by employees, who love the choice they have to redeem gift cards for something they really want:

Start in minutes, not months

Book a demoSign up for FREE