Boston Beer Company Recognizes & Rewards Employees with WorkTango

The Boston Beer Company is a dynamic and innovative brewery enterprise renowned for its commitment to craft beer excellence. With a relentless focus on quality and taste, the Boston Beer Company has firmly established itself as a leader in the craft beer industry. For over 35 years, the company’s mission has remained the same: seek long-term profitable growth by offering the highest-quality product to the U.S. beer drinker.

Challenge

The Boston Beer Company, a leader in the brewing industry, has a strong history of creating a company culture in which employees live and breathe the company’s values. However, the Boston Beer Company’s leadership team realized that employee recognition plays a pivotal role in fostering an engaged and motivated workforce, and that it could do better when it came to consistently recognizing and rewarding both its corporate employees and its brewery-based employees for the great work they were doing. The company decided it needed to enhance its employee recognition program to better suit its dispersed teams. The Boston Beer Company sought a modern solution that could bridge physical divides, promote peer-to-peer recognition, and unify the company’s distributed workforce.

Solution

In order to build a workplace where recognition is at the forefront of the employee experience, the Boston Beer Company decided to implement WorkTango’s Recognition & Rewards software platform.

The Boston Beer Company now successfully uses WorkTango in a wide variety of ways, including for peer-to-peer recognition; to amplify its company values; to nominate coworkers for annual employee rewards; to reward employees for great work through Rewards Points redeemable for gift cards and merchandise; and to increase the impact and visibility of specific recognitions given to an employee across the entire organization.

The Boston Beer Company also associates Rewards Points with each Recognition given within the WorkTango platform as an additional thank you to the employees who are doing great work and living the company values. Once an employee saves up a certain amount of points, they can “cash in” the Rewards Points for gift cards, merchandise, home goods, and more.

To ensure their points-based Recognition system remains efficient, effective and within budget, the Boston Beer Company developed an annual budgeting strategy. The organization determined a total annual budget for Rewards and Points, and then divided their budget into four quarters. Initially, the beer company assumed that hourly production workers at the breweries might not heavily engage with the WorkTango platform, given that they work 12 hour shifts on the brewery floor and are not allowed access to their phones during their shifts. HR therefore allocated the majority of WorkTango points to the brewery supervisors, rather than to hourly production workers, so that their supervisors could use points to reward behaviors that led to safety and quality. However, HR’s initial assumption was soon proven to be incorrect: brewery production workers embraced WorkTango’s digital Recognition & Rewards platform just as enthusiastically as members of the Sales and corporate teams did, and wanted to be able to recognize coworkers with points. The Boston Beer Company quickly realized their mistake, and re-allocated points to brewery team members so that they too could partake in peer-to-peer recognition.

Each year, the Boston Beer Company also holds a corporate meeting attended by over 1,100 Sales and Corporate team members. As part of this annual four-day long meeting, the Boston Beer Company dedicates a full day to celebrating and recognizing employee achievements. Prior to the annual conference, The Boston Beer Company uses WorkTango’s Recognition & Rewards platform to share Award Nomination Forms with all employees. Employees nominate their co-workers for one of nine awards centered on company values that are given out at the live event. The Boston Beer Company’s executive team reads through all of the nominations, picks the finalists and winners for each award, and then recognizes the winners in person at the annual meeting with an award and by reading the peer nominations aloud that led them to their Winner decision. This past year, employees submitted over 2,800 nominations, accompanied by 400 personal emails explaining why a specific coworker deserved to win one of the awards.

Onsite at brewery locations, the Boston Beer Company holds additional quarterly town hall meetings where leadership recognizes outstanding employee behaviors related to safety and quality. These additional Awards and employee Recognitions are promptly shared within the WorkTango peer-to-peer Recognition & Rewards platform, which helps create a culture of appreciation that’s accessible to all co-workers regardless of if team members are based in an office, at a brewery, or if they work remotely. Employees can High Five Recognition posts or comment below a specific post to further amplify that Recognition within the company. The Boston Beer Company also utilizes digital television displays in offices and brewery locations to showcase employee Recognitions in real-time. And leaders pin featured Recognitions within their company Intranet, as well as highlight specific Recognitions at monthly meetings, so that employees feel celebrated and seen even outside of the WorkTango platform itself.

The Boston Beer Company plans to continue to use WorkTango’s robust reporting to provide its leadership teams with trend reports once a quarter that summarize department-by-department and team engagement spikes or dips. Furthermore, the company plans to use data to evaluate employee retention and identify platform power users, to be able to understand employee engagement even better in the future.

Results

As soon as the Boston Beer Company launched WorkTango, they were delighted to see widespread platform adoption and employee engagement levels that surpassed industry averages. Boston Beer Company achieved an 80% platform participation rate, and continues to build out enhancements to its program to keep employees engaged and excited about WorkTango.