With so many employees up and down the country in various job capacities (such as shop workers, depot staff and delivery drivers), implementing a consistent and shared recognition programme was a challenge in itself.

The majority of Asda’s employees didn’t have access to a company phone or computer, meaning head office found it impossible to reliably communicate important information to colleagues. Couple this with the lack of peer-to-peer recognition, Asda was in need of a platform to help bring its culture to life.

With a significant cost to recruit and replace employees in an industry where staff turnover is traditionally very high, another consideration was using recognition and reward as a means to keep turnover low; essential for the delivery of a consistent customer experience.

Having been successful with the tender, Rippl migrated Asda from their existing employee engagement software to an all-in-one platform, named “Our Asda”.

Rippl has everything in one place, accessed via single sign-on, enabling colleagues to easily navigate to the ‘recognition wall’ – where digital ‘thank yous’, ‘well dones’ etc are posted. Reward ‘wallets’ enable managers to reward high performers without the friction of a lengthy reward sign-off process, whilst social peer-to-peer recognition without reward allows recognition to be free-flowing and abundant, spreading a culture of appreciation across the business.

Colleagues earning rewards in their ‘wallet’ can spend hard-earned ‘Star Points’ on hundreds of digital vouchers, and a dedicated digital hub hosting all employee benefits offers items such as discounted gym membership, BUPA health care, kids’ tutoring and money off holidays, shopping and days out.

We can look into this engagement data to measure the impact it has on Asda. Analysis shows that staff turnover for employees who are recognised and rewarded is under a third of the overall employee turnover rate, highlighting a positive correlation between engaged employees and staff retention. We can also see in the time period studied that the turnover for colleagues recognised and rewarded at Asda tends to be more stable than those who are disengaged in the ‘Our Asda’ platform.

Based on Asda’s evidence that it costs approximately £3,000 to replace an employee, the business could potentially save up to £10 million per month if all 140,000 employees are recognised and rewarded. This calculation is based on the highest staff turnover rate (shown as ‘disengaged employee’ in the graph) applied to the whole business.

To put this into perspective, each one of Asda’s 800 stores would have the potential to save £12,500 per month if all employees were recognised and rewarded. Naturally, there will always be some staff churn, but even a marginal decrease in staff turnover can generate considerable cost savings for an organisation this size.

Whilst reward budgets are shared with managers across the business, they are saved for outstanding examples of colleagues demonstrating Asda’s values. With the option to redeem reward against Asda and George shopping, spend often stays within the company.

Asda’s initial purpose for their chosen recognition and reward platform was to ‘find, share and celebrate’ the great things happening in every team throughout the Asda network. This objective has never been more important and the Rippl platform has been successful in bringing together an otherwise disparate workforce.