13 Ideas to Make Your Applauz Program Fun and Engaging

Applauz is designed to help businesses drive engagement with recognition and appreciation. If you're reading this, you're likely starting your companies recognition journey with Applauz, or at perhaps considering it.

While the heart of Applauz is supporting companies with recognition and appreciation, many other engagement-boosting features live on Applauz.

Program success: A collaboration between HR and team managers

That said, both HR and company managers are responsible for leading and starting employee participation on the platform.

That's why it's helpful for both HR and managers to be aware of all the small and big ways you can use Applauz to its full potential.

In this article, we'll cover ideas and suggestions for both HR and managers so that your company can make the most out of Applauz.

Helpful Tip: If you work in HR, consider forwarding this article to company managers when you launch the program.

13 Ideas to Make Your Applauz Program Fun and Engaging

Ideas for HR

Turn on automatic birthday and anniversary celebrations:

Normally, an individual from the HR department is appointed as the Applauz Program Administrator. This is the single person responsible for setting up and managing the program. The administrator has access to the Applauz Program Settings.

Here, you can control the basic parameters of the Newsfeed. Namely, the automatic posts for birthdays and work anniversaries. We recommend these two features always be on. This way, if any company employees are celebrating a birthday or a work milestone, a celebration message automatically pops up on the Newsfeed, and colleagues can all get in on the celebration.

Make Applauz Points part of your program:

Applauz Points are the currency of recognition. They are virtual currency administrators can purchase and distribute to managers and employees. Managers use Points to award employees for a job well done. The Points can be saved up and then spent on the Applauz Rewards Marketplace for real rewards. Points make a recognition program more fun and engaging because it gives recognition real weight. And it also gives employees the flexibility and options to choose a reward they will love from the marketplace.

Create an employee Perks "store":

Employee Perks help a company create a great rewards program on any budget. With Perks, you can create your company's own unique rewards program and fill it with rewards employees will love, such as gift cards or company swag. Employees save up their earned Applauz Points, and they can redeem them for the unique Perks you've created. Applauz Perks is a great way to build a tailored employee rewards program on any budget.

Ensure every participant has a profile picture:

When rolling out your Applauz Program for the first time, there are a few things simple to be mindful of. These details are small but have a big impact. For example, ensuring that employees have all logged in at least once and uploaded a profile picture. Completing these actions will ensure the program gets started on a positive note. Following up with department managers to ensure that they speak with their teams and get them to take these first steps is critical.

Use the Newsfeed to announce company news and events:

As an HR professional, you realize that employees often "forget" to read emails from the HR department. In other words, if you want a message to get through to people, over-communication is usually your plan of action.

That’s why the Newsfeed is also an excellent tool for HR to make general announcements. HR can (and should!) post company news and noteworthy events to the Newsfeed. This way, company employees have a secondary channel of information. Because we all know how often HR emails get lost in the email inbox abyss.

Launch Pulse Survey:

Applauz Pulse Surveys is a tool that helps HR run anonymous employee surveys. The questions are pre-written and automatically sent by Applauz weekly. All you need to do to run Pulse Surveys is turn the feature on!

When Applauz releases a new survey on Mondays, your employees will receive an email notifying them. They will be provided with a link to log into Applauz. Ultimately, Pulse Surveys are great for HR because they allow you to collect precious feedback. But also, by using the feature, you'll be maximizing program engagement because turning on this feature encourages all your company's employees to be active on the platform. 

Use Company Polls:

Company Polls are a simple but powerful feature. This tool allows any HR employee to create a Poll and gain feedback from your entire company or a specific department. No topic is off-limits with company Polls. And all Poll responses are stored on the platform for the administrator to view at any time. Creating and sending out Polls helps get people involved and engaged with the platform. And most importantly, it lets employees know that their opinions are important!

Ideas for Managers

Customize your Badges to reflect department goals:

Applauz Badges should be awarded anytime a manager gives recognition to an employee or peers give each other recognition. Badges highlight what the employee did to merit recognition – such as "Top Quality" and "Thinking Bigger." We recommend that department managers also create their own custom Badges to better reflect your department's objectives and culture.

For example, if you manage a Customer Service team, you could create badges called "Crisis Prevention" or "Call Quality." Or for a sales team, you could create Badges called "Quota Star" or "Quality Demo."

Personalize birthday and work anniversary messages:

As mentioned at the top of this article, the Applauz Newsfeed will automatically post employee birthdays and work anniversaries. We recommend that Managers personalize the celebration message that goes along with that Newsfeed post. You can do this by modifying celebration posts before the employee's birthday or work anniversary, following these instructions. Doing this will create a more genuine and engaging experience for the employee's celebration day.

Inject humour into your recognition with images,
GIFs, and even video:

Recognition and appreciation exchanged on Applauz are not meant to be formal. You can inject personality and humour into your messages, and we encourage all Applauz participants to do so! You can do this by using GIFs or uploading images and videos to your recognition message. Taking this extra step will make recognition more personal and fun.

Create friendly competition with Goals:

Applauz Goals are designed to help managers track and reward all kinds of employee tasks. But Applauz Goals aren't limited to work-related tasks. You can also use Applauz Goals module to incite friendly competition. For example, by hosting a "cook-off" or another fun activity. The participants who complete the Goal are awarded Points automatically and can shop in the Applauz Rewards Marketplace for a reward of their choice.

Recognize at least half of your team once per month:

Regularly offering recognition is critical to get employees engaged at work and on the Applauz platform. Yet, it's important to remember that praise should be sincere. In other words, empty recognition, just for the sake of saying you did it, doesn't count. As a manager, your goal should be to recognize at least half of your team every month. Ultimately, when giving recognition, always focus on quality over quantity.

Give personalized recognition:

Lastly, supporting a strong recognition program starts with giving sincere and genuine recognition. Hearing a passive "great job" or "way to go" is not enough to incite genuine engagement and energy. Employees need genuine appreciation that shines a light on their unique skills and contributions. A general rule of thumb: the less often you recognize, the more personalized it should be.

All You Need to Know

Applauz is designed to help companies drive higher employee engagement with recognition and tools like Pulse Surveys, Goals, and Company Polls. In other words, there are many ways Applauz helps HR and company managers create a fun and engaging workplace.

Hopefully, the tips and ideas provided will give your workplace leaders a complete understanding of all of the tools available on Applauz. And most importantly, how they can use them to engage the employees in your company!