Automating Employee Recognition and Rewards Using HRIS Integrations

It’s no secret that the employee experience is critical to an organization’s ability to attract and retain talent—according to a 2023 SHRM survey, employee experience influences about 49% of all job satisfaction. To reduce employee turnover, organizations are increasingly investing in employee recognition and engagement software; but these tools are only effective if they’re frequently used. 

If you sell an employee engagement application that requires too much manual intervention, you run the risk of low employer adoption and customer churn. To maximize your product’s ROI, you need to make it as easy to use as possible—and the best way to do that is by automating employee recognition and rewards through HRIS integrations.

Benefits of automating employee recognition and rewards

Typically, employee recognition involves rewarding employees based on milestones (work anniversaries, birthdays), performance (meeting goals, promotions), and peer recognition. Employee engagement tools typically include basic automation tools that will send rewards to employees based on the data in the application (like automatically sending a digital gift card to an employee on their birthday or work anniversary). 

But this only works if the data in your application is up to date, which means the employer has to manually update the system constantly as employees are hired or terminated, promoted, reach quarterly or annual goals, and so on. At small companies where the HR team may be a single person, they likely don’t have the bandwidth for such work. And at enterprise companies, there are far too many employees to keep up with.

By integrating your application with your customers’ HRIS, you can enable the seamless flow of data from their source of truth to your application. Whenever the data in the HRIS is updated, it’s automatically updated in your application, creating a hands-off experience for employers and greatly increasing the value of your product.

Step-by-step: Automating employee recognition and rewards in your product

When you rely on data directly from a customer’s HRIS platform (their source of truth), you can ensure that your product contains accurate, up-to-date employee information and eliminate the need for manual updates.

1. Identify the required HR data

Depending on your application, you’ll need specific data from the HRIS. At a minimum, you’ll probably need the employee’s name, start date, birthday, and employment status.

You may also need the employee’s address (if sending gifts) and manager (if your rewards require manager approval). If your platform supports sending rewards or gifts for employee promotions, you’ll also need the employee’s current job title or level.

2. Access the HRIS data

One way for employers to get employee data into your product without an integration is through a bulk upload. They could extract data from their HRIS into a file (like a .csv), and you can build an upload tool that maps the fields in the file to the fields in your app. The uploader will need to recognize any changes, such as an employee status change from active to inactive or an employee promotion.

While a bulk upload is certainly faster than manual data entry, it’s still a multi-step process that needs to be repeated on a routine basis. Employers would need to create the extract from their HRIS and initiate an upload. Depending on the size of the company, this might be necessary quarterly, monthly, or even weekly.

Integrations between your product and the employer’s HRIS are the alternative. Integrations are mostly “hands-off” for the employer and automatically transfer data between two systems. 

3. Build HRIS integrations

Integrations between products can happen in several ways, but the most common are a Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), an integration platform as a service provider (iPaas), or APIs. 

SFTP

SFTP is a secure file transfer that automatically moves your customer’s extracted HRIS file to a specific location and ingests it into your product. However, SFTP integrations are often a source of friction for customers as they are very finicky and can cause errors. APIs are a more direct connection to send/receive data between two products. 

Either way, you need to build an integration. If you do this internally, it can require significant development resources. Ideally, your product supports multiple HRIS systems, and each integration will be unique. More than likely, you’d have to form relationships with the HRIS vendors to ensure your integration can “talk” to vendors.

iPaaS

Another option is an iPaaS provider, or Integration Platform as a Service. iPaaS solutions are low-code options that allow companies to build workflows to connect different products. iPaaS relies heavily on APIs.

While they’re designed to be low-code, iPaaS solutions still require development efforts to initiate connections to new HRIS providers, map data fields, and manage workflows and triggers, putting a strain on internal resources. iPaaS connections act like middlemen that require your team to instruct the tool on which data fields to pull from the HRIS and where to map them in your product, so you’ll need to take care to ensure that all the fields are accessible and mapped correctly. And you’ll need to maintain those integrations and workflows every time there’s a change in the underlying HRIS or when you want to partner with a new HRIS platform. 

PerkUp, an employee engagement platform to send gifts and swag to employees globally, considered using an iPaaS provider. However, PerkUp realized that creating and managing workflows would still burden internal resources, so they opted for a unified API instead.

APIs

APIs connect two systems using a set of standardized protocols. They offer users a seamless data exchange, refreshing your application with the employee data from the HRIS on a daily or weekly basis.

If you build API integrations internally, you’ll need to dedicate technical resources and plenty of monetary investment to the project. The work would be ongoing as you support additional HRIS platforms. For many companies, building and supporting APIs takes focus away from their core product—and by our estimates, a single integration can cost upwards of $187,000.

Alternatively, you could opt for a unified API. Unified APIs like Finch act as integration aggregators. By building one integration between your application and Finch, you can access seamless API integrations to hundreds of HRIS providers, ensuring you can offer a fully automated experience to any customer, regardless of the HRIS system they use.

You can also use Finch Flatfile, a solution for organizations with limited technical resources. Flatfile relies on existing integrations with HRIS providers to pull data from their systems in a standardized file. That file can then be delivered to an SFTP server, rather than building to the Finch Unified API. 

Let employers focus on retention, not data management

Much as employers may want to offer employee engagement tools, data might be a sticking point. They need a seamless integration that simply runs in the background, without any manual processes or difficult setup.

Finch is the way to scale—both for you and for your customers. With Finch’s Unified API or Finch Flatfile, your customers don’t need to put in any additional work to use your platform, even as they add more employees. And since Finch connects to more than 200 HRIS and payroll providers covering nearly 90% of U.S. employers, you’ll be able to offer your product to more customers and expand your market potential. 

By leveraging HRIS integration through Finch, your employee recognition platform becomes more efficient and valuable to your customers. It will allow them to truly take advantage of automated employee recognition.

To learn more about Finch, you can try it for free or schedule a call with our sales team.