Some countries had physical thank you cards and monetary vouchers to recognise employees, but this process was highly manual and time-consuming. As more teams grew internationally, they found it near-impossible to ‘publicly’ recognise or reward each other for outstanding contributions.

For a company becoming more globally connected, they decided it was time to create a group-wide unified recognition and reward platform to reach all their people, everywhere.

From customisable digital recognition cards and peer-to-peer nomination campaigns to the social timeline and news feed, Bravo provides a one-stop-shop for employees to feel valued, informed and connected. Most importantly, the platform is accessible via a mobile-enabled app, meaning their frontline employees have the same access as ‘desked’ employees.

There is a vast complexity to distributing rewards globally due to cost of living differences, but the platform manages this seamlessly. Rewards in Bravo are distributed in points, and bespoke calculations are made in the voucher catalogue to account for variances by country, meaning a Mexican employee receives the same value from their reward as an American employee. This functionality highlights the true effort from the organisation to move away from the long-forgotten local approach to recognition and reward, adopting a consistent and fair approach.

Computacenter has invested in the Rippl platform with the “Bravo Stars Award Programme” to continuously improve their centralised strategy. This global nomination initiative allows colleagues to nominate each other for a bronze, silver or gold award; each with a significant monetary reward. To highlight outstanding Computacenter employees, nominations go through an approval process with several managers, ensuring that only the most exceptional contributions are rewarded.

We’ve highlighted a significant correlation between recognition and Computacenter’s employee retention rate by analysing Bravo’s activity data alongside employee turnover data. Whilst we can’t attribute retention totally to Bravo recognition, we can draw some strong correlations between recognition, employee engagement and retention.

We could see the employee retention rate was significantly higher for those who received recognition with reward added in comparison to when no recognition is received. Whilst we cannot show full evidence that this effect is only driven by recognition with reward, we do see a clear impact of recognition on Computacenter’s leaver rate.

Industry research from Oxford Economics states that a leaver can cost a business anywhere between £3,874 and £6,630. When taking this into consideration, Computacenter is likely benefitting from substantial cost savings in increasing staff retention.

When analysing managers’ response to the programme, the average number of quarterly manager awards has increased by 38% in 2021, and award card allocation being used has increased from 61.7% in 2020 (during the first year) to 67.6% in 2021.

Nearly all activity has increased year on year (such as the average number of employee recognitions rising from 1.2k in Q2 2020 to 1.5k in Q2 2021), so we only expect engagement to grow further.

The Top Employers Institute recently recognised Computacenter out of 1,700 certified German employers for demonstrating best practice in driving engagement with a modern recognition and reward platform.