1. Advantages of Building an Internal Tool: It incurs no incremental cost, aligns with company branding, integrates well with existing systems, and allows easy customization by internal teams.
2. Potential Challenges: Building and maintaining the tool requires significant resources and opportunity costs; it may lack flexibility, industry best practices, and a user-friendly experience.
3. Limitations in Choice and Convenience: Internal tools might not offer an optimal redemption experience or keep up with evolving needs, potentially reducing employee satisfaction.
4. Long-Term Considerations: While an internal tool may initially be cost-effective, its long-term sustainability and effectiveness might be questionable, especially compared to external solutions.
You can spare a few tech resources for six months to build your Internal Tool for Employee Rewards and Recognition program with different award types and a points-based reward system, especially if you are a large technology company!
You might also be able to include a redemption store with select products, such as company-branded merchandise and gift vouchers.
Your line managers could use the tool to reward their team members with points.
They can then redeem their points against the catalog of products they receive through a third-party delivery partner.
1. To start with, the tool seems to come at no incremental cost to the company
2. It has the company branding and the required custom workflows
3. It might integrate better with existing corporate systems and the intranet
4. Since the tool is managed by an internal team, making changes seems easy
1. Resources for building and maintaining internal tools might not be as easy to get, and they might come at some (opportunity) cost internally
2. Internal tools might lack the flexibility to make changes to future requirements
3. They might not incorporate best practices from the industry (and not improve over time)
4. Choice, convenience, and experience might not be up to the mark, especially when it comes to redemption
5. Also, it might take a lot of bandwidth from the HR team to manage the tool and the entire process in-house
Also read: Why Switch from In-house Employee Recognition Platforms?
In the short run, it might make sense to build your own employee rewards and recognition tool especially if you have the available resources, but in the long run, it might not turn out to be such a wise investment. You decide!
Lead author: Sagar Chaudhuri, the Co-Founder and CEO of HiFives. He is an HR Tech Evangelist with over 25 years of corporate and entrepreneurship experience. In the past, Sagar has worked in leadership roles at companies such as Genpact, Infosys, and ICICI Bank. He has an engineering degree from IIT Kharagpur and an MBA from IIM Lucknow. Connect on LinkedIn