Being recognized for a job well done is one of the most powerful motivators at work. But when that praise comes from your peers, it can feel more personal and rewarding. Especially if there’s a bonus attached. Now, more organizations are experimenting with peer to peer bonuses as an added extra to traditional bonus schemes. Peer to peer recognition has a direct link to your bottom-line. It improves employee performance, productivity and retention. A report by World at Work discovered that peer to peer recognition schemes have become the fifth most popular form of employee reward. Some 74% of companies considered these schemes to be fundamental to a positive work environment, high performance and a great culture. By combining peer to peer bonuses with other reward systems and culture building, you will reduce the risk of the program being abused. Negative feedback from employees centers on the likelihood of peer to peer bonuses becoming a popularity contest.

Bonusly is the fun and easy way to engage all of your employees and improve retention and productivity at every level of your organization. Bonusly helps you celebrate everyday contributions and key milestones, automate time-consuming HR admin processes, incentivize participation in company initiatives, and offer digital rewards your employees will love. With their efficient, effective, and enjoyable recognition and rewards solution, you can help people feel a greater sense of alignment and purpose, understand what it means to embody your company core values, and see how contributions of all kinds support your mission. In turn, you can pull actionable data about your employee experience from powerful people analytics tools. Bonusly delivers unique insights on individual, team, and company levels so you can make strategic decisions about culture, professional development, performance management, and retention. The company is headquartered in Boulder, CO, and has teams in Seattle, WA, and New York, NY.

Top-Down Recognition

At Bonusly, their work is focused on improving employee experience for companies around the world, and that can be a bit Meta sometimes. But it shows in the ongoing commitment to their team's experience! Their values aren't just nice-sounding words on a poster somewhere, but a succinct description of the culture and what it's like to work here. Diversity & Inclusion are priorities for Bonusly in the product, hiring practices, and throughout workplace. As of 2021, Bonusly is 50% non-male across the leadership team, people managers, and the entire company. They are also 35% non-white, with black and Latino populations making up 17% of the total employee population.

Recognition is traditionally given in a top-down system, where an employee’s supervisor, manager, or leadership team witnesses and appreciates their contributions. This is a great model for many reasons: since these leaders are typically in decision-making roles, their recognition often has monetary results, like a raise or promotion. These people are also in the best position to assist employees with their chosen career path or growth plans. However, giving frequent, real-time, and specific recognition isn't a simple proposition for management. It requires managers to witness, catalog, recognize, and reward countless contributions. In most cases, there are too many valuable contributions made on a daily basis for a solely top-down recognition approach to be effective. Most leaders just don’t have the bandwidth to keep track of everyone’s hard work. That’s why the most common form of top-down recognition is an employee’s annual review.

Peer Recognition

In a peer recognition system, managers as well as other co-workers are all empowered to recognize and reward the contributions of everyone else. It’s easy for managers to congratulate an employee on their general job performance, but their peers are working right beside them, day by day. They're in a much better position to recognize an employee's specific contributions and understand the immediate impact those contributions have. It's simple. You see a teammate do something valuable, and then praise them for it. Bonusly also can’t ignore the benefits of bottom-up recognition. Managers need appreciation, too! Recognition is motivating and insightful for everyone, even those in senior positions. With 360-degree style recognition, everybody in the company has a voice in how they want to express their feedback. Recognizing direct supervisors and leaders for the work they do isn’t brown-nosing––it’s a method of interpersonal communication that benefits everyone involved.

Raphael Crawford-Marks | Founder and CEO

Raphael Crawford-Marks is the Founder and CEO of Bonusly, an enterprise platform that helps companies creates a high-performance, high-engagement workplace. He is passionate about building products that help people connect with their work and each other in meaningful ways.

Prior to founding Bonusly, Raphael was an early employee at severalstartups, a Peace Corps volunteer in Honduras, and an instructor for Year Up. Raphael dropped out of high school to work as a software engineer in the mid-nineties, but did eventually earn his BA in Cognitive Science from Hampshire College, where he wrote his senior thesis on Artificial Intelligence.

"We are creative, smart, talented people who strive to make our company and platform a leader in culture and employee experience, creates meaningful connections at work, and helps our customers achieve success."