How Bupa Australia Pacific Uses its Boost Recognition Program to Boost Engagement

Transcript: "Glen Nesbit, I'm Head of Wellbeing, Engagement and Reward for Bupa Australia Pacific."

What was the process of choosing your recognition provider and what were you looking for? 

"We actually have quite a robust process when it comes to choosing any of our suppliers, so we actually have to put forward three different companies. We set the criteria that we'd like them to present on. With our procurement team, we then actually go through pitches and and look at what the responses are to those RFPs, and then we literally choose the ones that best fit our brief."

Why is it important to you to have a peer-to-peer recognition system like with your eCards program, Boost cards, in place? 

"Look, I think it's really important just to show that as an organisation that recognition is a huge part of our culture. We're very big on values and behaviours, and I think that starts from a grassroots, from our people. So, to enable them to have peer-to-peer recognition and that it's visible to everybody on the platform is hugely important. We know that actually money recognition is great, but actually people get more inspired by actually being recognised on a social platform."

What makes Boost cards powerful in fostering recognition, particularly without a direct monetary value attached? 

"Look, as we said, the monetary part is great and people like getting rewarded, from a money perspective, but what we have found is that getting recognition, especially from leaders too, not just your peers, is hugely important. So, we actually have our director of my division, customer and business operations, she plays a huge role on Boost and making sure that she is engaging with our people. But we also have other departments that love being able to recognise our teams for the work that they have done. So, it's really a cross-company culture that we're trying to spread of recognition and reward."

How have you creatively encouraged user adoption and what results have you seen? 

"Yeah, look we actively, every year, look at new ways that we can do campaigns in regards to recognition. Our most successful one happened in October last year, which was called Bupa Boost Boom. Bit of alliteration happening there! And that was all about if you received a Boost from somebody, we encouraged you to then pass that on and Boost somebody else. And so what we saw is normally we'd have probably around 1,700-1,800 Boosts sent every month, which is great recognition anyway. But in the month of October, we topped over 4,000, which was an incredible result seeing that 4,000 interactions of people just saying thank you for the work that they had done."

What advice would you give to other organisations out there considering a recognition program for the first time?

"That's probably twofold. One, I wouldn't put KPIs on it. I think originally what a lot of companies do is go, "we'd like to see X amount of people engaging on it," and what tends to happen then is you're not seeing consistent rewards or ones that actually aren't meaningful. It's like, "thanks for the cupcakes." What we tended to do then once we've moved past that was actually give examples of "these are great ways that you can actually promote and encourage people to do great work" and give specific examples. The power of it is where you have examples and people go, "oh, yeah somebody did that for me too," and so I'm going to send them an eCard to thank them for what they did."

Would you recommend Reward Gateway to other organisations?

"I would indeed. It's been a great partnership so far and the fact that we're really open to looking at different and new ways that we can create and encourage people to recognise. And, I think what we've managed to establish is that great working relationship where they know what we want and what we're all about from a values and behaviours perspective so that when we have a request for some new eCard or something creative, it's usually on the nose when everything we get is perfect."