You’ve had several demos and many conversations with your potential recognition and reward platform vendor. Great. But now it’s come to finding (and spending) a budget and you need to build a compelling business case for delivering recognition and reward technology to stakeholders.

Recognition and reward’s contribution to employee engagement can’t be ignored. In some cases, recognition is flagged by employees as their primary reason for feeling engaged and valued.

When properly planned and executed, recognition and reward can significantly impact a business and it’s your job to demonstrate that in a carefully considered business case. We’ve collated six top tips to consider when creating your business case, or you can download our business case PowerPoint template to share with your internal stakeholders.

1. Set out your key performance indicators

You shouldn’t enter into a new software venture without understanding the key performance indicators that you’ll measure to evaluate whether the investment has been successful or not.

Having established clear challenges at the beginning of your business case for delivering recognition and reward, you should then be able to outline the improvements you’d like to see and at what scale.

For instance, if low employee satisfaction is an issue, you could mark this as a KPI and set a goal to increase satisfaction by 5% by the following employee engagement survey. Reflecting back on KPIs like this will allow you to measure return on investment much accessible, helping you to renew contracts if things are successful.

Other KPIs to consider for recognition and reward platforms include staff retention/turnover, revenue, productivity, employee wellbeing/happiness, NPS, customer satisfaction, growth, average employee tenure, engagement scores and sales performance.

2. Conduct a value assessment

A value assessment enables you to assign appropriate scores to different project criteria to quantify and determine the potential value (or lack of value) that a new platform could offer to the business.

First, come up with a list of criteria or areas that the new recognition and reward platform might impact. Then, set different value scores depending on the severity of its impact on the business. Once you’ve assigned a value score to each area, total the scores to see whether the project has high, medium or low value to the business. Here’s an example below.

This exercise is crucial because it will allow senior stakeholders to compare multiple projects side by side to determine which one should be given priority.

3. Assess the risks

In the same way you conduct a value assessment, you should also consider a risk assessment. This is where you explore the potential risks associated with implementing the new platform and the level of impact of the potential risk.

Risks could include associated costs, profit contribution, months to complete the implementation, training/resources required, number of team members involved and number of geographic sites impacted.

4. Gather key stakeholders

Depending on the platform you’re choosing, there could be quite a lot of stakeholders to consider as part of the buying process. You don’t want to get to the end of the line and realise you’ve left out Gary from HR or Sue from IT, so be sure to sit down and work out who might need to share their opinion on a new potential platform.

Once you have your list, describe their responsibilities as part of the proposed project. For instance, do they just need a demo and to sign off the project, or will they be a key stakeholder during implementation and needed for testing?

5. Evaluate all options

If you just present your chosen platform to the decision-makers, we can guarantee the first thing they will ask is: “Have you thought of X?” or “What about Y?”

You need to demonstrate to your senior stakeholders that you have already considered every possible option and explain why that option has been eliminated.

Other options could include – not doing anything at all (and the risks associated with that), other vendors, using existing software/tools or building something in-house.

6. Weigh up the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ benefits

Rather than focusing on the platform’s features and what it could enable your business to do, it’s better to concentrate on the overall benefits it could offer.

We recommend splitting this into hard and soft benefits. Hard benefits usually refer to the clear financial benefits if the platform was to be implemented, for example, cost savings from lowered employee turnover.

Soft benefits can include legal/regulatory compliance, impact on operations and infrastructure, impact on your customers and how it could help HR.

Summary
There is much more to building a business case outside of the tips outlined here, but it should give you a good start to getting the important information together. To make things even easier for you, we’ve created a downloadable business case PowerPoint template which does the legwork and enables you to build a clear and compelling business case for delivering recognition and reward technology to pitch to budget holders.