What's New

We are excited to announce our new feature Birthdays in this release.

If you wish to recognise birthdays throughout your organisation, the Workstars ‘Birthdays’ feature has you covered.  This module is available across all feature sets and can be activated through a simple set up wizard at any time.  Here is an overview of the process:

Set-Up

Birthdays can be set up at any time via your administration portal.  Go to the ‘More’ tab to start the process.

There are the following configuration options:

1. Select from our standard messages or add you own (a message is randomly selected to go with the birthday post on the wall)
2. Select to use our standard image bank, or not use images (an image is randomly selected to go with the birthday post on the wall)
3. Add a reward.  This can be a financial reward or select up to 3 perks for the employee to choose from.  If a perk, you can choose to issue the perk 7 days prior to the employee’s birthday, ideal if you want to give the employee a day off for their birthday.
4. Do you allow contractors to be rewarded?

As soon as you confirm, birthdays are active in your programme.

Recognition

Upon registration the employee can optionally provide their day and month of birth, or if the employee has already registered, the next time they login, they can opt in:

The system then automatically manages the process. 

If you are giving a perk to an employee prior to their birthday, emails are sent to the employee and manager so they can redeem their perk before the big day. On the big day, emails are sent to the employee, their manager, and colleagues. And a post goes on the wall:

Reporting

The administration portal will log every birthday ever recognised:

You can view the recognition and if needed, it can be cancelled:

In this release we bring you the following new features and improvements:

Documents

We’ve improved the interface to add documentation making it easier to add documents and introducing the ability to include links to other websites.

In the administration system the document section has moved from the ‘More’ tab, into settings:

From here you can ‘Add Document’. This can either be a PDF document or an external link. We’ve removed the need to have a thumbnail image and description to make it easier.

Any existing documents you have will migrate to the new process so you don’t need to reload anything. The documents will still appear on the left next to the recognition wall, but simply show the name of the document or link:

In this release we bring you the following new features and improvements:

Recognition in Admin

We bring you a complete overhaul of how you manage recognition via your administration system, with updates pulling all configurations and settings into one location making set up and management easier, plus a new interface allowing you to give company, departmental and in global programmes, country recognitions.  Just in time for Employee Appreciation Day.

When you click on the ‘Recognition’ tab you will see a new table design of all recognitions that have happened:

You can filter the table by Date, Company Value Used, Reporting Group and the recognition Status:

Clicking on ‘View’ for each recognition gives you an improved interface where you can see everything about the recognition, including all social interactions and any reward issued.  You still have full control to edit the recognition:

To make management of recognition easier, we’ve moved all the configurations from the ‘Settings’ page into one place.  To access the settings, from the recognition list page you can click on cog icon:

In here you can manage your main settings, content, your Company Values and rewarding options:

Another big improvement is the introduction of large company wide recognitions.  Simple click on ‘Give Recognition’ to start the process:

You can still recognise one or multiple employees, but you now have the option to give a larger company, departmental or country recognition. Simply follow the wizard to issue a company recognition:

In this release we bring you the following new features and improvements:

Reactions and Auto-Comments

Our new feature makes our social wall even more interactive and engaging. Your employees can now react to recognitions on the wall.

They simply hover over the like symbol, to see a range of emoji’s they can select:

We also give the employee a list of comments they can choose from, or they can type their own message:

In this release we bring you the following new features and improvements:

Registration Updates

The registration process is something each of your employees are required to complete when they log into their recognition account for the first time. The process has been redesigned to ensure it captures all essential information.

Firstly they will need to add their avatar. Based on your system preferences, employees will be prompted to first add their avatar by either uploading their own photo or building their custom avatar character:

They will then move onto completing their profile details. This will typically be pre-populated with their name and email address. They can then adjust their timezone and create a system password (unless you have SSO enabled). One critical difference is that employees may now be asked to search and select who their manager is, if this hasn’t been pre-populated from your HR system during set up. If you currently ask managers to map their own teams then this change will ensure that new starters and unassigned employees are given the opportunity to select their manager. This is essential to ensure managers are receiving communications regarding their team and have access to a complete ‘My Team’ dashboard:

IMPORTANT – if you are running a programme that requires your managers to build and manage their own teams then you will need to ensure that you regularly review who is flagged as a people manager within your administration portal. Employees may not be able to find their manager and complete registration if you have not identified all of your managers correctly. If you have any questions about this, please contact your Account Manager.

Finally, if you are using Perks as part of your reward offering then employees will be prompted to select their favourite perks as part of the final step of their registration. This ensures that perks given by managers are meaningful and valued by each employee by knowing their preferences:

In this release we bring you the following new features and improvements:

Recognition Enhancements

We’re excited to introduce pictures, emojis and animated GIFs to your recognitions. From today your employees can select to add an emoji when writing the reason for recognising their colleagues. Simply clicking on the smile icon within the recognition form will display all available emojis across numerous categories:

Alongside emojis, you have the option to enable GIFs and pictures. If you would like to give your employees the option to use GIFs or pictures you will need to log into the administration portal and click Settings > Recognition > Configuration. To enable GIFs change the field “Allow Gif Selection“ to “Yes”. To enable pictures change the field labelled “Allow Image Upload“ to “Yes”. You have the flexibility to choose one or the other, or enable both.

Important: to ensure the suitability of GIFs being used within your recognition programme, only “G” rated GIFs can be searched and selected within this feature.

Once enabled you will see the GIF and picture icon, which can be clicked on to search and select the relevant images:

GIFs are displayed in categories most appropriate to the theme of recognition, which includes “Clap”, “Dance”, “High Five”, “Handshake”, “Thank You”, “Mic Drop”, “Cheer”, “Excited”, “Proud”, “Well Done” and “Win”.

Pictures can be browsed and selected from the employee’s own device, where they feel that image suitably represents or enhances the recognition they are creating. They can only use one picture or one GIF within their recognition and either image will be re-sized to fit underneath their recognition reason and displayed on the wall:

If you have any questions about the use of these features or need any assistance enabling them for your programme, please don’t hesitate to contact your Account Manager.

In this release we bring you the following new features and improvements:

Company Awards – Voting

Earlier in the year we introduced our new Company Awards feature, which allowed your employees to nominate colleagues as part of your scheduled awards. We are pleased to now introduce a new version of company awards, which enables you as a business to select the award nominees and your employees to vote for the winners:

From your administration portal, you can run multiple company awards at any one time and they can be a combination of nominations and/or voting methods. Just choose which ever method is most suitable for the award type and the employees that you are asking to either nominate or vote (all awards can be targeted at specific departments within the business or the company as a whole). Follow the wizard to set up the award (nominees can only be chosen based on the recognitions given within the eligibility period):

Once your awards are set up and live, employees will received automated reminders to vote in the award. They will also see a voting panel within their account to ensure they can submit their vote at a click of a button.

Voting activity is posted onto the wall as a reminder to all colleagues to take part, but all votes are kept private:

Once voting ends, you will have full visibility of the vote results from your administration portal and you will be able to verify and announce the winners (prizes can be handled through the system or they can be allocated by yourselves, if you prefer).

If you have any questions at all about setting up Company Awards on your recognition system, please contact your Account Manager.

Manager and Team Performance Reports

The reporting suite accessed from the administration portal now includes two separate reports for manager and team performance (this was previously one quarterly manager report). The team performance report can now be ran monthly to analyse the performance of individual teams (e.g. current manager, number of employees in each team, how many have registered/logged in, number of recognitions the team has given/received, number of recognitions per employee, number of financial recognitions, etc.).

The new manager performance report can also now be ran monthly and this report can be used to analyse individual managers’ performance (e.g. have they registered and logged in recently, how many recognitions have they given, what social interactions have they made, etc.).

In this release we bring you the following new features and improvements:

Group Recognition

We are continuing to evolve the look and functionality of the main recognition wall. We are seeing more and more team recognitions being shared and this has prompted us to address how these types of recognitions are presented within your recognition system.

Each team or group recognition will now be posted on to the recognition wall as one entry, which lists all of the team members involved. This has the added benefit of allowing any likes or messages of congratulations to be shared with all of the recipients, rather than being written and populated on an individual basis.

This method for grouping the wall entries has also been applied to Service Awards, which will now be grouped by length. Where you have multiple awards in one day (e.g. 3 x 5 years and 2 x 10 years) they will be announced together on the wall and any messages of congratulations will be sent to all those who have received the same length of service award.

We have introduced some further updates to the look and feel of the wall, which include:

• The option to comment / add a message of congratulations will now show after you have ‘liked’ the recognition.
• Comments/congratulations will show in date order (newest first) no matter who commented (comments from your directors will no longer be highlighted).
• When viewing a recognition all colleagues (where applicable) will be shown the option to ‘Recognise Again’, rather than this option being reserved for managers. This has been updated to an icon rather than a button.
• All grouped entries will be shown as such when viewing the wall within Workstars TV or via your integrations (e.g. Chatter, Yammer, Teams).
• Any company posts (e.g. ‘service awards’ and ‘ad hoc rewards’ will now be displayed as coming from your CEO/MD rather than the company name.
• Wall entries more than 1 years old will be removed from the wall (this does not affect your system reporting).

Employee Profiles

As part of this release, an employee profile will be created for all employees and will be visible to colleagues when searching or clicking on the profile image of an individual. The layout of the employee profile page has been improved with clearer visibility of recognitions given and received, a timeline of events, and separate tabs for viewing use of company values and the network graph of recognition interactions.

Alongside the updates to employee profiles, we have also addressed the layout of key information across budgets, recognition history and action lists. Information displayed in ‘My Data’ and ‘Outstanding Actions’ have been given a clearer tabular layout:

Please note: Due to the nature of these improvements, we will need to implement the changes over a number of days to ensure that the wall data is migrated accurately. If the above changes are not yet visible on your platform, please don’t worry, as they will be coming soon. If you have any questions at all, please don’t hesitate to contact your Account Manager.

In this release we bring you the following new features and improvements:

Company Awards

It’s finally here….now you can now use your recognition platform to also run your Company Awards!

Setting up your Company Awards couldn’t be easier, as it’s already enabled in your administrator portal for you. Click on the More tab and select Company Awards. The online wizard will guide you through the set up.

As part of this initial version of company awards, employees will be asked to put forward the award nominations (based on recognition raised within a set eligibility period) and the business can then decide on and award the winners.

You can run multiple company awards at any one time. For each award you will need to add a descriptive name, select who is to be included (all employees or only certain company departments), set your eligibility period (nominees will have need to have received recognition in this period), and your nomination period:

You will then need to set your prizes and decide whether you will award these outside of the system or pay the prize amount directly into their recognition account (or you don’t need to award prizes at all if you prefer):

Creating a nomination is a simple, quick and easy process that sits along side recognition. Once you’ve selected the award, enter a reason for the nomination, tag colleagues who you would like to lend their support to the nominate and then hit the Nominate button:

All nominations and support comments are published on the wall within your recognition platform, giving colleagues across the business visibility of eligible nominations. They can then get involved, whether they are inspired to create their own nomination or offer support to those nominations already put forward:

Your administration portal gives you full visibility of the awards you’re running, with details of all of the nominations and support reasons they’ve attracted. You can download the details of the nominations to help aid you choose your winners, and when the nomination window closes and you are ready to select your winners you simply select each winner and make the announcement. If you have selected for the system to pay out your prizes then the funds will be credited to the winners’ balances.

If you have any questions at all about setting up Company Awards on your recognition system, please contact your Account Manager.

In this release we bring you the following new features and improvements:

Simplified Recognition Form

During our busy working days we want to ensure that giving recognition is as quick and straight forward as possible. That is why we continue to simplify and improve the recognition form, ensuring it captures all the essentials whilst also being streamlined and user friendly.

Following the same process, colleagues will need to click on the search icon to select who they would like to recognise:

This will open the new simplified recognition form, where they can add additional colleagues to recognise, free type their recognition reason and select the company value. There are new icons available for selecting to print the recognition, hide the reason, or tag anyone else who should know about the recognition:

Budget holders will be able to add reward to the recognition by clicking on the new Add Reward button and selecting the appropriate reward type:

Wall Filter

In addition to the existing wall filters (tabs to select country, reporting group, my colleagues, my recognition) we have also added a secondary filter to allow a filter against recognition and service awards (where you are using Service Awards):

What’s New

We are rolling out improvements and bug fixes on a weekly basis. For a full change log and details of all minor releases, please click on the ‘What’s New?’ link in the bottom black banner within your admin portal:

We hope you enjoy the changes. If you have any feedback or questions, please contact your Account Manager.