ARUP Laboratories & Awardco

At A Glance

363% increase in employees receiving recognition

increased employee satisfaction with management

3X increase in program adoption across organization

Overview

What do you do when employees disregard their awards and feel marginalized by a 20-year old recognition program?

With such a large and dedicated workforce, ARUP found early on that they needed an employee recognition program in place to appreciate the important work their employees were doing. Soon after the company was founded ARUP had implemented a serviceable recognition solution. However, as their workforce grew and technology changed, ARUP discovered that their recognition program of over 20 years wasn’t providing what they needed.

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Using their antiquated system, ARUP found that their employees didn’t care for, or feel appreciated by, the limited catalog of items—or the huge markups. All too often retiring employees elected to forego their retirement gift as they didn’t need another gold watch or thank you service plaque.

In one particular instance a service award arrived from the vendor, but it was completely different than the one advertised in the catalog, and of a distinctly lower quality. The same item was then located on Amazon and for significantly less money, which the company then purchased and gave to the employee instead of the one sent by the vendor. Employees found themselves disappointed by lackluster service milestone awards and lack of recognition in general. Morale was stagnant, and tepid recognition programs were the culprit.

Taking things into their own hands.

Tasked with finding a different way to recognize, incentivize, and engage with employees, ARUP’s HR administrator took things into her own hands and formed a small task force to find a better way. After researching the options, Awardco stood out as the clear leader.

Cheryl Vincent, ARUP Talent Development manager, describes the benefits of using Awardco:

“There is never a good time to switch to a new system, but I also know that employees were eager for something new. Awardco has given us incredible power and flexibility with our recognition programs because of the millions of options to choose from, and the ability for employees to choose their own rewards has been a game changer. We know what we’re getting, we know we’re getting the best price, and our employees couldn’t be happier.”

More than just service awards.

ARUP found that Awardco was so successful in their organization with their initial implementation of service milestone awards that employees began asking to use the system for even more things like spot recognition.

“Soon after our implementation we created a financial recognition program through Awardco for managers and supervisors to recognize their employees for extra efforts,” Cheryl elaborated. “Now our managers and supervisors have their own budgeted amount to use at their discretion to award their employees at any time, and they don’t have to wait for approval to do so.”

From July 1, 2019 to May 31, 2020, ARUP saw spectacular benefits through using Awardco, and enjoyed an 18% boost in employee satisfaction with their managers and management team as rated by Glassdoor.

With over 2,300 spot recognitions through their Awardco employee recognition platform in just one year, ARUP began to realize the effectiveness of truly rewarding recognition, and solved their previous problems of lack of recognition, limited catalogs, and huge markups.