2 Reasons WSPS Integrated Employee Recognition in SharePoint

by Elysha Ames on January 25, 2016

SharePoint connects disparate employees

Why WSPS Brought Employee Recognition into SharePoint Workplace Safety & Prevention Services (WSPS) is a dynamic $43-million organization that offers unparalleled health & safety expertise, insight and solutions for creating healthy work environments across Ontario, Canada. With 250 employees spread across the main office and multiple field locations, their SharePoint 2013 plays an important role in the organization’s internal communications.

Employee recognition was suffering

WSPS was launched in January 2010 out of a merger of the Farm Safety Association (FSA), Industrial Accident Prevention Association (IAPA) and Ontario Service Safety Alliance (OSSA) in order to better serve the health and safety needs of Ontario’s manufacturing, agriculture and service sector. Shortly after the merger it became clear that engagement of the workforce was going to require as much effort and attention as the administrative and technological aspects. The three organizations had overlapping mandates, differing goals and deeply rooted cultures. An initial employee survey revealed that employee recognition had suffered during the merger.

One distinction about WSPS is that the workload is divided nearly in half between employees who come to the main office every day and workers who conduct business in the field. This posed a challenge in terms of development of an effective, easy-to-administer recognition program.

Bringing recognition into SharePoint

Barb Burns, VP Organizational Excellence & Development at Workplace Safety & Prevention Services, was exploring options for a social recognition program when she received a tip from WSPS’ Director of IT, Chris Fraidakis who was looking for ways to drive adoption, offer more value to internal business parteners and to leverage their overall investment in SharePoint.

TemboSocial Recognition met two very important requirements for WSPS:

Seamless integration - it integrated seamlessly with their SharePoint 2013 intranet (“The Hub”).
Frictionless recognition - it made it easy for employees to recognize the contributions of their coworkers where they were already doing their work.

Two of the three partners that made up the new WSPS had had success with paper-based employee recognition programs in the past.

Working with TemboSocial Conversation Consultants, Burns and her team developed a strategy for using peer recognition as a tool to bring the different cultures within WSPS into a single conversation around achievement and accomplishment.

The result, less than one year later, was a 20% increase in employee engagement scores as well as material proof that employees were smarter about company business through their participation in the recognition program.

Read the full case study here.