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At apexanalytix, employee recognition is free-flowing, bringing the organisation’s values to life each day.
Jessica Kozak, Chief Human Resources Officer, has been at the heart of this journey, including the implementation of a new platform that lets colleagues easily recognize one another in the flow of their work, formalize the company's recognition and reward process.
The new platform has been launched alongside four culture awards, with any employee able to celebrate a colleague who embodies the company's values:
Peak Performer recognizes individual contributors who consistently demonstrate exceptional performance.
Respect Champion recognizes individuals who consistently demonstrate a commitment to fostering inclusivity, teamwork, and a positive work environment.
Candor Communicator recognizes individuals who foster open communication, provide constructive feedback, and promote transparency.
Fun Ambassador recognizes individuals who bring positive energy, creativity, and engagement to the workplace.
Kozak joins the HR Grapevine Podcast to reveal how HR teams can foster a culture of recognition that is tailored to the needs and desires of their unique workforce, giving real-world examples from Apex’s journey to take recognition to the next level.
Host: Hello and welcome back to another episode of the HR grapevine podcast. I'm your host, Benjamin Broomfield, head of content for HR grapevine, and I'm joined today by Jessica Kozak, Chief Human Resources Officer at apexanalytix. Jessica leads Apex Global HR function, focusing on organization development, integrated talent management, leadership development and culture. She's a connective and collaborative leader with human capital strategy and transformation experience and has consistently been recognized for leading diverse teams, improving performance and cultivating productivity in highly competitive industries. Prior to joining apexanalytix, Jessica held senior HR leadership roles in the technology and consulting arena with Booz Allen Hamilton, H-E-B digital, Rackspace Technology, and Reynolds American. And today, she joins us to discuss how HR teams can foster a culture of recognition that is tailored to the needs and desires of their unique workforce, running us through how apex takes Recognition to the next level. Very warm. Welcome to the podcast, Jessica. And first and foremost, why is Recognition so important to your business and its culture?
Guest: Yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks and great to be here, Benjamin. Thanks for your time. So everything we do at Apex, in terms of our culture is really grounded in the apex way, which starts with our why. And if you go out to even Apex's public website, our why is front and center in the about us and our why is to positively impact the lives and careers of our associates, customers and partners. And everything we do, including recognition and rewards, is really grounded in the apex way. And what we've been doing over the years has been great. We've had a wonderful kind of recognition program whereby we're celebrating recognition of great performance and all of that through our newsletter on a on a monthly basis. And more recently, we wanted to take that to the next level. And, you know, just in terms of our apex way, you know, our apex way is again grounded in our why, our values of performance, respect, candor and fun, and our leadership behaviors of humble, hungry and smart. And so our recognition reward program has is again based on all of those values and behaviors. And so super important for us to live out our why to support each other as associates across the company, especially to support our customers and our partners. And again, everything we do is around, you know, the apex way. And if we if we're emulating all of that, we're demonstrating all of that. We're doing a great job for our customers. We're doing a wonderful job in terms of, you know, having a people first culture. Sure. And we're supporting our partners as well. So.
Host: Absolutely. Well, we've definitely got a good idea on the why it's so important for you, for your employees organization, your customers as well. And you've begun to sort of tease out a couple of the ways that that that approach comes to life within the organization. So there's going to be the big focus of our episode today. So perhaps there's a there's a platform you've got in place that that's a really big part of this. Maybe you could share a bit more about how you went about setting that up and implementing the platform, and some of the role that it's been playing.
Guest: Absolutely. So the platform that we've put in place called kudos has been in place just this year. And prior to that, again, I think we did a great job with recognition. We, you know, whether again, it be through our newsletter or within teams, you know, in each of the teams across the company might have their own awards that they would give out celebrating great performance and demonstrating our, you know, apex way our behaviors and that. And we would have recognition that would go out on, you know, whether it be a monthly basis or what have you. But it wasn't as dynamic as we wanted it to be. It wasn't every day where associates across the company could like or heart or respond or cheer people on or endorse. We wanted something more active and dynamic. And so we knew we wanted to put in place a platform, whereby every day, whether it be anniversaries, new hires, joining recognition and a rewards program that was across the company, not just within certain teams and, and that sort of thing. We wanted to put in place an actual awards program. We spent a lot of time across due diligence of a ton of vendors, and what we were looking for really was a vendor that, you know, there was some flexibility where we could fit everything. I've mentioned about our apex way and the way we wanted to roll this out. We wanted that flexibility and we decided on kudos. We went with kudos implementation. Super easy. Thankfully, it integrates with our HRIS. So as new hires join, new hires are automatically enrolled in the platform and receive a new hire. New hire points where they can go shopping. On our milestone anniversaries, employees receive those milestone anniversary gifts. And you know, from a recognition perspective, you can go out there anytime via the mobile app, via the platform, on your web browser and recognize and there's peer recognition, there's leader recognition. You know, there's just a ton of flexibility in terms of that platform and kind of why we went with it over some of the others.
Host: Fantastic. So a little bit about the platform and the journey itself. And I suppose I'm interested to know how employees have responded throughout this. Obviously it's not just something you've been doing for the last year. It's a much broader initiative. And I think maybe the big the big frustration a lot of times is that, you know, you have, on the one hand, a group of employees who say, look, we want to recognize our, you know, our colleagues and we want that culture. We want that environment. And you've got a HR team that says, well, we've got all of these ways for you to do it, but it's not happening yet. So there have been any of those sort of adoption challenges or difficulties that you've had to work through in terms of just building that habit, getting employees used to engaging in that process of recognition?
Guest: Absolutely. And we're still a bit on that journey. We've had to get a little bit creative. So initially with of course, any rollout, you have a part of your population who is super excited getting out there, really engaging. Recognitions were, you know, were very active and then it, you know, kind of slowly just dipped a bit. And so we thought, okay, what can we do? We need to make sure engagement continues and we get folks out there. We also had a set of the population who hadn't even been out to the platform to register to build a profile and that sort of thing. So initially we did a kind of a kudos quiz or a scavenger hunt, and anyone who completed this quiz was put in for a drawing for points. And so we thought, well, let's, let's do that. That kind of our numbers went up, our profile, you know, individuals who have built their profile, the numbers went up. We've thought about an integration with outlook and teams. We didn't want to cause too much distraction in the business in terms of I'm getting more and more pings in teams. If I'm getting more and more coming through outlook, I already have a lot as it is. So one of our executive leaders who actually leads our IT and R&D group, it was his idea to as employees launch their web browser. It automatically goes to kudos from page and it's through our SSL. And so it comes up. You have to interact. You have to go there. You have to. And immediately within days, our numbers of individuals who had not even gone to the platform previously, that number dropped significantly. So now we have maybe less than fifty employees who are not registered, who have not built a profile. And so we're driving that adoption, we're driving that engagement, and we're continuing to think about creative ways to continue to do that. The other thing I've asked, as I've been meeting with, you know, each of our executives through our talent review process and that I've asked them to, you know, please go out and, you know, make sure you're out there and you're recognizing and, and associates, our employees will be out there if you're out there. One of our executives challenged his direct reports to every month Recognize a cross team member, somebody outside of the department. And so we have some of these, you know, really neat initiatives ongoing. And we'll continue to keep creative on these things. But ultimately we've already seen incredible kind of engagement. And, you know, just in a recognition, the next thing we want to do is really increase the number of awards. So we have an award process in place to that are called our culture awards. And so next we'll focus beyond recognition. With that have no points. We'll focus on cultural wars that do have points and a value to them.
Host: Fantastic. And you touching on that, that engagement that has had from employees and is a really powerful thing, I suppose over, over the past few years, there's this long term effort to drive recognition within the business. How have you seen that translating through into the engagement, the retention or any of those areas? Really, really some of the important metrics from a HR perspective. But perhaps also, as you mentioned at the top of the episode, some of the positive impacts, knock on effects. You then see for the business for customers as well. How has investing in this area of recognition and cementing it as a really important part of your of your values? How has that driven success for employees in the business?
Guest: Yeah, absolutely. I would mention a couple of things. I think, you know, through our satisfaction survey, even through our customers, you know, interactions with our associates. And then just through that sentiment, individuals, whether it be public or private, like to know what they do matters. And, you know, when we ground it in, you know, again, linking it back to our why, everybody likes to know that what I'm doing is connected to, you know, our strategy as a company. It's making a difference for our customers and what have you. And so we have seen in our satisfaction surveys and that data in, you know, other things we measure in terms of we do have an ownership, a broad based ownership program in place for all employees. So all employees at Apex are owners. And we gauge that feedback as well. In terms of do I feel like an owner? And part of feeling like an owner is, is really being in a place where you can have a voice and, you know, you lift each other up, you recognize each other, you're all one team. And so we have a culture of all kind of boats rise. And the more we lift each other up and the more we kind of recognize reward, but also just, you know, validate what we're doing. Uh, I think, you know, our culture benefits. So, you know, we've won some fantastic awards even as recent as this year and recognition publicly. And a lot of that is based on our employees feedback about, you know, apex is a great place to work. And a lot of that is, I think, related to the recognition, the way they feel, the way they're appreciated, and they know the impact that they're having is making a difference for business, for our associates and for our customers primarily.
Host: Absolutely. And you spoke a little bit about the culture Awards as well, and how that is hopefully a big part of their plans to continue building this culture of recognition. Apex. What do you envisage that that that that will typically entail? How will you know managers, leaders, employees engage with that approach and why sort of maybe looking to go down that route of awards from a cultural perspective?
Guest: Absolutely. So currently we have four awards in place so far, and we're building this out a little bit. We have, again, as I mentioned in our apex way, our values are performance, respect, candor and fun in that order. And in that importance level, you know, and order of importance, I should say performance on top. So we have a peak Performer award that really recognizes individual contributors who are consistently demonstrating, you know, exceptional performance. We have a Respect champion, which recognizes individuals who consistently demonstrate a commitment to fostering inclusivity, teamwork, positive work environment. We have a candor communicator. This recognizes individuals who foster open communication, provide constructive feedback and transparency. So we really avoid politics here because we can be candid and open in a very respectful way. And that's why respect comes, you know, before candor. And then our fun ambassador recognizes individuals who bring positive energy, creativity and engagement to the workplace. And so each of these has a point value performance has the highest point value fund has the lowest. But we are using these culture awards to really demonstrate and, you know, utilize this as this is what good looks like across, you know, the company The next award, the next two awards we're putting in place, one is a Be well at Apex Award recipients. So we do have a wellness program, a holistic wellness program called Be Well at Apex. There are six pillars across this program physical wellness, emotional wellness, financial, social, community and intellectual. And every month we are having events across all of those pillars. So we're really engaging holistically from a wellness perspective across those pillars. And so we'll have a be well award recipient who again is very engaged but helping to drive that. And we do a lot of community work. We you know, we really pour into our associates again across those pillars because not one of those pillars is going to speak to everybody. But I hope that for each individual, there's one that does resonate with them out of the six. And then finally the pinnacle award that we'll put in place by end of year will recognize. I think this is a very small percentage of the population. Each year that we recognize around our holiday parties is really the apex way role model. And this is an individual who is emulating and demonstrating the apex way in every interaction, every day with every individual from our why to our values to our, you know, behaviors. And this will be a big award with a big value. And so we'll, uh, we'll be rolling that out later this year.
Host: Wonderful. I don't know if it'd be better to win the Pinnacle Award or getting a title of Fun Ambassador as well. That would also.
Guest: Exactly. They're all awesome.
Host: Interested to know as well in terms of helping US culture come to life within the organization, uh, encouraging some of these behaviors within employees as well to go in and not just embody that culture, but also to recognize one another is really the role that managers and leaders play as well. Because I think if there isn't that support there, not just from the top down, but at all of those different levels within the business, it's going to be difficult to drive this approach forward. So what are some of the roles that your managers and leaders play at Apex, and how are you sort of helping them to help champion the culture that you're building?
Guest: Absolutely. So the leaders and managers play a huge part in this, and this is one of the other reasons that we took the recognition rewards program to the next level, to really engage our leaders of people in this program in a more robust way. We have a leadership training program that we run every month on a different topic, whether it be, you know, we've focused on emotional intelligence very recently as an example and vulnerability as a leader and that sort of thing. So in these sessions that we have with leaders across the whole company. We're regularly reminding leaders to go out to recognize, to use this platform, but also our culture awards the points and that sort of thing to really drive more of that, because I think you can always do a bit better and where we are. And so we're seeing an increase in engagement there for sure. And we have some role models. We have some leaders who are just incredibly, you know, amazing and natural at this. And we have others who I think like any company, you know, you're working with them more closely to, okay, you know, how can we get out there? How can we think about our star performers, our top performers, uh, what we've done, what we've done pretty recently through our talent review process is we've gone through and looked at our top performers across the company. And so we've encouraged those leaders to make use of not only your traditional, you know, performance increases, bonuses, but also leverage this program to really, again, recognize and reward those top performers especially. So we're getting there. I think it's an evolution. And we're working we're working through it.
Host: Fantastic. Well then perhaps just as a final question, looking forward, obviously, as you said, it's an ongoing journey. Any sort of final plans or ideas could be outside of the box, or just things you're excited about when it comes to again, driving that that culture of quality recognition forward or more broadly, driving a culture of performance and engagement forward within the organization? What's, uh, what's on the horizon for the next few months, next couple of years as well?
Guest: Yeah, yeah, I think, you know, it's a lot of, you know, how can we continue to build on the momentum of what we've put in place already? We are also building out an emerging leader program whereby before individuals even become people leaders. They're great individual contributors. They're doing incredibly well, you know, how are we engaging them as early as possible to develop the next generation of leaders? And so we'll embed this notion of, again, recognition rewards into that program to instill those behaviors and instill that mindset early. Of course, you know, I think it goes without saying, we are heavily leaning into AI. And as a company with our customers within what we call our People Solutions team or HR. And we are also, from a learning perspective, leaning heavily into, you know, development and training of our workforce to get ahead of that AI kind of evolution to ensure that skills are, you know, and across our workforce are keeping up with that technology so that everybody remains relevant and that we keep finding the, you know, the most effective ways and most efficient ways to do the business that you know, that we do and run the business that we run. But making sure our skills across our workforce are remaining relevant with the times. So those are big focus areas for us.
Host: Absolutely wonderful. Well, lots to look forward to and definitely all reached in this really strong culture. That's been fantastic to hear more about and how you've been bringing it to life and encouraging it. As I say, all levels of the business, supporting it through technology, supporting it through taking employees on that journey with you. It's been wonderful to hear all about it. So, Jessica, thank you so much again for taking the time to join us on the HR grapevine podcast. It's been wonderful to hear about everything you're doing at Apex.
Guest: Thank you. Benjamin, great to talk to you. Have a good one.
