By Nathaniel Hart Engagement Strategy Director

How to make peer-to-peer recognition most effective.

Here’s the fastest way to kill your recognition program.

Develop a world-class peer-to-peer recognition (P2P) program, launch it to your people – and then sit back. It won’t take long before your program withers on the vine. That might seem like an obvious point, but it still surprises me to see how many organizations don’t give their programs the support they require to thrive.

Peer-to-peer programs represent the most effective way to make recognition part of everyday operations within an organization – and that “everyday” part is essential when you want to influence the behaviours that lead to better performance and better results. That’s the reason P2P has become so popular over the last decade – it gives everyone in the organization the opportunity to influence the outcomes of that organizations.

But rolling out a P2P program isn’t as simple as putting a new initiative in place – it’s actually about making a shift in your culture. You need your people to do something new as part of daily business, and that means you need to affect the way they think about recognition before they will actually perform recognition.

How do you do that? At Rideau, we look at a six-point plan:

1. Commit to “marketing.”
Don’t “communicate” your program, “market” it. That’s an important distinction – the first approach is “telling,” the second is selling. Because you’re trying to convince an audience to do something different, you need to sell them on the benefits of doing something different – and you need to keep selling them on those benefits. Think of selling your program the same way big time marketers like Apple sell their products. Write an annual marketing plan, editorial calendar and marketing calendar and ensure that you’re regularly staying top of mind.

2. Start with a bang.
Kick off your program (or kick off your year) with marketing communications that generate a specific, powerful buzz. Hold an event, put your brand on coffee mugs or wearables and advertise on your internal social media portal. When you give your program this kind of bang, you generate an initial wave of buzz.

3. Support your momentum with incentives and contests.
Your initial “bang” is going to get attention. It’s three months later – and how are you ensuring the success of your program? If it’s points based, putting points into accounts instantly generates or renews interest – a great help at launch or just a few weeks after launch.

Contests help peer-to-peer programs that don’t feature points. Think about what you want the contest to do – drive usage, offer qualitative feedback – and create a contest around your objective. Prizing can be a big determiner of contest usage. Try to go beyond a simple gift card and find a tangible object that is “hot” right now. There’s a real difference in activity between an iTunes gift card and a Brand New Smartwatch.

4. Keep leaders talking about your program.
When it comes to marketing to an internal audience, your “influencers” are part of your most valuable channel. People listen to other people – particularly if those other people are senior leaders within the organization. Choose a handful of those leaders and call them every few months to ensure that they’re encouraging others to use your program. Seed them with talking points. Give them spot incentives to provide to those who are using the program.

5. Stay visible...
What gets seen, gets acted upon. Our research has shown that high visibility marketing, such as a poster, gets a program remembered, and more importantly, drives audiences to use the program. Again, it helps if you think about your space the way an advertiser looks at the outside world. A poster, for example is the same as a billboard – serving as a reminder. Map out opportunities to stay visible, from tent cards in lunchrooms to seasonal stickers on clocks.

6. ... and fresh.
New ideas sustain your program’s marketing over the long term. Promotions, marketing campaigns, articles and advertising reminds your audience that you are still a vital part of the culture – just remember to tie them back to your objectives.

Peer-to-peer doesn’t mean that colleagues do all the work when it comes to your program. It means that colleagues take the final step – actually recognizing others. Your role is to get them to that last step, and ensure success for your program.