Bp puts a smile on the faces of their frontline people with their incentives, recognition and reward platform

Bp’s service station business had run a recognition and reward programme for many years but with limited staff engagement, especially for those in customer-facing roles.

The largely offline programme covered bp’s 6,000 UK employees. Most of them were based in-store, together with some head office and regional employees. The reward programme could only reach as far as store managers, who then had no way to reward their in-store staff which led to a lack of engagement and motivation.

During the pandemic, bp took the opportunity to review its recognition and reward platform and focus on ‘what do we actually need?’ They relaunched the fully-digital programme, ‘Smile’, with a combination of incentives, recognition and rewards, which enables access to everyone in the business with a smartphone.

Remote staff can use the social timeline to stay connected and engage with each other through quizzes in monthly huddles, as well as through surveys and community groups, which include gamification and emoji badges. Managers can finally reward customer-facing people through pre-paid recognition cards and a voucher catalogue. This works particularly well for celebrating long service, which is automated to make the process quick and simple.

With a remarkable 92% registration rate on the platform, employee engagement has been turbo-charged and weekly activity on the social timeline runs into thousands of posts. Prior to the relaunch, engagement levels had been minimal and reward redemptions were low. From March 2021 to March 2022 the value of redemptions (and a proxy for engagement levels) increased by almost 2,000%.