Streamlining recognition, reward, benefits and incentives

Partnering with Rippl in 2013, Asda has placed employee engagement at the centre of their People strategy for over 10 years. Evolving with the fast-moving landscape, Rippl pivoted Asda’s programme to deliver multi-dimensional engagement under one streamlined platform, ‘Asda Stars’. This placed recognition, reward and benefits in the pockets of their frontline, deskless teams across the UK. Since, ‘Asda Stars’ has continued to dynamically evolve in line with the needs of Asda’s growing colleague community, delivering tangible impact for the business and its people.

‘Asda Stars’ is built upon a core objective of delivering exceptional engagement, communication and support across Asda’s many diverse and deskless role capacities. The platform is designed to connect and empower colleagues at every level, from in-store employees to depot and delivery teams.

In an increasingly challenging climate, Asda wanted to ensure their People experience continued to meet and support the needs of their teams. To ensure their strategy did just this, Asda needed to smoothly collate employee feedback and ideas, alleviating manual processes behind their existing strategy. In addition, Asda were seeking innovative ways to better empower the brilliant people behind their brand – this included examining their current benefits offer alongside ways to take recognition to the next level.

Rippl seamlessly extended ‘Asda Stars’ to optimise their employee experience with new features:

• In-app benefits. Hosted previously on a separate site, Asda’s existing benefits are streamlined into a personalised hub on the site for employees to access at the touch of a button. By doing this, Asda could also extend their perks offer to include discounted retail vouchers, days out and gym memberships from Rippl’s digital catalogue for colleagues to redeem around the clock.
• Store incentive leagues. Aligned with key sales objectives, ‘Asda Stars’ configurable incentives cleverly enter stores into competitive league tables for colleagues to track their progress against in real time, with winning stores receiving national recognition and reward.
• ‘Asda Ideas’ hub. This extension amplifies voices, feedback and ideas across the business through the dedicated ‘Asda Ideas’ hub. Employees enter their submissions under various categories, with clever automation notifying relevant stakeholders who can then promptly rate and respond to all.

Streamlined alongside:

• Recognition. Enabled for both managers and peers, personalised recognition cards celebrate every triumph and are shared at store, regional or national level on a social timeline.
• Reward. Managers reward colleagues who demonstrate the company’s values with digital wallet points to spend at over 700 retail brands, on cinema trips, in-store or online at Asda, or donate to one of Asda’s charity partners. Reward can be furthered storewide through dedicated event booking.
• Award nominations. Colleagues nominate their peers for one of five monthly Service Superstar awards, with winners celebrated on a dedicated recognition wall.
• Knowledge zones. For colleagues to stay in-the-know around key news and updates, as well as familiarise with Asda’s values.
• Feedback loops. Polls and surveys are quickly and easily deployed across the business.
• Inclusion Network. A dedicated hub for peers to connect and engage around important topics in a safe space, with a resource library to boost learning.
• Reporting. Live data insights enable trackable programme impact and optimisation.

The initial success of ‘Asda Stars’ has continued to deliver tangible impact through a unique and adaptable programme.

Since 2020:

• 74% of colleagues are registered on the platform.
• 290,000 recognitions have been sent. That’s 1 recognition every 4 minutes!
• 78% of recognitions have been coupled with reward.
• A total of £5.7m in reward has been delivered, with an average of £2,650 redeemed by employees per day.
• 7,900 nominations received for the ‘Service Superstar’ awards.
• 35,000 responses received on platform polls, alongside 8,300 survey completions.
• 121,000 Asda news and updates have been read.

Latest platform innovations have delivered:

• 197,000 views of ‘Asda Stars’ benefits hub.
• An average of 65 employee ideas per month, 33% of which are being further explored by Asda stakeholders.