Overview
About Alera Group
Alera Group was founded in 2017 and is a growing leader, reimagining the complex risk management, insurance, and financial services delivery experience through intentional collaboration connecting clients to holistic solutions that protect and grow all they value most. Working collaboratively across specialties and across the country, Alera Group’s team of more than 4,400 colleagues offer unique solutions, personalized services, and proactive insights to help ensure each client’s business and personal success.
Two years after its founding, Alera Group launched “The Collaborative Way” as its central values to cement what it would take for such a geographically diversified workforce to create unified success:
- Listening Generously
- Speaking Straight
- Being for Each Other
- Honoring Commitments
- Acknowledgement & Appreciation
The Challenge
Embedding “The Collaborative Way” Across Alera Group
With such a distributed workforce across Alera Group, the HR and transformation teams behind “The Collaborative Way” knew they were beginning a long but critical journey. This began with company-wide communications and training and evolved into ongoing value callouts and all-colleague workshops to continually reinforce value adoption.
As awareness grew across the organization, leaders increasingly shifted beyond awareness to adoption and behavior change.
“We launched our The Collaborative Way initiative with a half-day workshop for all colleagues, facilitated by internal Collaborative Way Champions that traveled from office to office. We would do these engaging workshops across the company, and leaders would ask us, ‘Now that colleagues have completed the workshop, how do we keep these principles front and center?’ While we developed other standalone follow-ups, it was only when we implemented Awardco that we truly felt like we had a compelling, daily solution to that question.”
Kristie White, AVP Change Strategy & Organizational Development
The Solution
Shifting from Recognition to Appreciation
In 2024, Alera Group partnered with Awardco to standardize its colleague recognition programs across the company. With this, they shifted their branding of “recognition” to “appreciation” in order to emphasize The Collaborative Way principles. The organizational development team paired this program with its ongoing workshops.
Overall, Alera Group implemented the following programs:
- Peer-to-Peer Appreciation (tied to “The Collaborative Way” values)
- Manager-to-Peer Appreciation (managers are given 25 dollars a month to include in colleague recognitions)
- Service Awards (monetary recognition at major tenure milestones)
- Birthday Shoutouts (non-monetary and platform-driven)
- Employee Appreciation Day (monetary recognition for all colleagues)
- Onboarding (new colleagues are given points to use on company swag)
- Company Store (Awardco helped Alera Group to provide a set of high-quality company swag options)
The Results
Driving Improved Colleague Retention
The Collaborative Way principles embrace meaningful and positive communication, recognizing the contributions of every Alera Group colleague and factoring the needs of others into decisions and actions. These can be especially challenging in regionally diversified and decentralized workforces. Leveraging Awardco programs has become an antidote to these challenges by making it easy for any colleague to show appreciation for the work of others—Awardco is one of very few systems that every single colleague truly has access to.
The results of the programs’ success so far have been telling. One of the biggest insights has been the impact of Awardco program participation on attrition rates and risk. High program participants, those who have gotten at least 4 recognitions, have experienced a 43% decrease in attrition risk relative to those not participating in the program. Colleagues receiving at least two recognitions also have seen a 9% higher overall retention rate than those receiving none. This provides a clear signal to managers and leaders on the importance of recognition and ensuring that every colleague is recognized for the positive things they are doing.
Accelerating The Collaborative Way Momentum
In the first wave of implementing Awardco programs, Alera Group experienced strong initial adoption, but they wanted to keep the momentum going. One recent enhancement was providing managers an additional monthly budget to be able to attach points to more recognitions. Not only has this helped increase the volume of recognitions, with manager recognitions increasing by 188%, but it has also had a downstream impact on individual contributor recognition activity.
Colleagues who were receiving recognitions began seeing increased numbers of recognitions given by non-managers. 70% of colleagues feel they receive appropriate recognition for their efforts. More tenured colleagues are more likely to send recognitions, suggesting program stickiness and momentum. In addition, colleagues receiving recognitions have become 3X more likely to give recognitions themselves, regardless of tenures. This flywheel of appreciation is driving exponential growth of Awardco adoption and, as a byproduct, will be creating a growing impact on retention across all 4,400+ colleagues.
Improving Alera Group Brand Adoption
Historically, Alera Group had not shipped a lot of company swag and saw Awardco as a great opportunity to increase brand pride and adoption amongst the dispersed employee base. By partnering with Awardco, they created a curated list of items that they really hoped would get more colleagues embracing the Alera Group brand and showing pride in where they work.
The results have been strong so far. Not only does Alera Group see high brand redemption among new colleagues, who are given points and encouraged to get company items, but they see that 9% of all redemptions overall are being spent in the swag store. This number is 80% higher than companies of similar size to Alera Group and great evidence that momentum continues to be going in the right direction for the company’s overall initiative to unify the company through its core values and brand.
