RecognizeApp: The incredible journey of recognizing deserving employees

Humans have an intrinsic need to recognize and to feel needed, and recognize as a word captures that in a sophisticated way. And just like its meaning, Recognize – an employee recognition & staff rewards technology solution for medium-sized businesses – was born out of the idea that everyone deserves recognition.

Power of Positivity

Alex Grande, the Founder and CEO of Recognize, started out simply wanting to give recognition with a badge that symbolized the company value. His team knew the power of positivity within easy to access enterprise tools. And today, Alex sees themselves to not only retain top employees but also as a company value management tool. Communication, leaders, and HR can utilize Recognizes integrations and features to showcase company value stories across offices. All the while, recognizing and rewarding great work. At the same time, the company has always valued intrinsic motivation and non-monetary recognition. That’s why Recognize has company-fulfilled rewards or printable award certificates.

Some of the major features that Recognize provides include:

Employee rewards: Recognize offers many types of employee rewards. Staff can redeem with points at no additional cost. The company recommends experiential employee rewards, such as a parking spot, a conference, a half day off, rental of a fancy car, or a pizza party with their team. When employee rewards really show the company cares, you will retain and engage staff.

Manager & peer-to-peer employee recognition app: Recognize makes it easy to send and receive official positive feedback for both managers and peers. Recognize makes it easy to create recognition badges only certain people, such as managers or executives, can send to staff. Managers and peers can send employee recognition from the Recognize Chrome extension, Yammer, email, Sharepoint, mobile, Slack, and on any web browser.

Yammer + Sharepoint for employee recognition and awards: Recognize is the R&R program for Office 365. You can use the entire Recognize platform inside Sharepoint or inside Yammer. Use Recognize’s employee engagement strategy within your workflow.

Office 365 sign in to Recognize: If your company has Office 365 accounts for your staff, they can login to Recognize automatically. This is true for Office 365, Yammer, Google Apps, and Slack.

Combining Knowledge from All Walks of Life

In the early days of the foundation, customers wanted Recognize in the tools they already had. Therefore, Recognize decided to be dedicated to being in company’s ecosystem. That’s why the company has an award-winning Outlook Integration, Workplace by Facebook integration, mobile, Slack, Sharepoint, Office 365, and more. This enables staff to easily onboard and keep using Recognize compared to standalone solutions.

Alex has always loved technology even at a young age. He loved the idea of building things without any money. One can build apps and websites with only his hands and skill. Further, Alex really enjoyed working at companies that had a great culture. With earlier successes building apps for Android and making residual income from advertising, he wanted to try building a residual business in the enterprise social space.

Alex published psychology research in college in social cognition and knew the value of positive reinforcement. When he worked at Pop Agency in Seattle and saw a fantastic culture with an employee recognition program, Alex knew that every company could have a program too. Combining knowledge from psychology, gamification, and social best practices, Recognize was born. He relayed the idea to his colleague Peter Philips, CTO and cofounder, and asked him to join Alex on this project.

The Incredible Journey

It’s been six years since the foundation of the company and Alex considers this journey to be incredible. “We decided to grow slowly and bootstrap the company. The first four years were a lot of learning while we continued to do other consulting work. The last two have been full-time, busy building features and helping customers. I’ve learned a lot over the last number of years but the main thing that keeps coming up is grit. The most successful people are the ones who have the determination and open-mindedness to keep going,” Alex shared.

When asked about the moment he felt their hard work is starting to pay off, Alex replied, “Of course, the first customer that pays for your product validates everything before it. I used to say, you can’t give someone advice on business if you never built a product someone has paid for. When we got our first enterprise customer that was when I knew we had made it. When I knew we really made it was when I was finally able to give myself a salary and healthcare benefits to my team.”

Striving to Deliver A+ Quality Work

As a small team of 15 people, Recognize has its own set of company values. The team believes in always delivering A+ quality work or at least striving every time. They value looking for ways to automate work. Any process that can be automated should. Technology and engineering over sales and marketing is also valued at Recognize. Not that those aren’t super important aspects of the company, but Alex and the team believe great product, responsive customer service, and cutting-edge technology will sell and market itself.

Recognize is the only provider in the market where you can get started only promoting and sharing company values without any monetary component. That’s because Recognize believes in being flexible to every company and to start small and think big. Recognize is the only provider in Outlook, utilizes text messaging, and dedicated to being in the company’s ecosystem. Furthermore, Recognize is the only provider that’s primary goal is to communicate company values, while retaining top employees.

Going into next year, Recognize will add more information about employee retention. Improving employee retention and communicating company values for healthcare organizations is their goal, and the Recognize team is going to keep doing more and more within this space using the latest technologies.

For more information visit: recognizeapp.com