GWR spreads festive cheer throughout its peoplevalue rewards platform and boosts scheme engagement by more than 240%.

The challenge

GWR (Great Western Railway) is one of the UK’s largest train companies, with over 100 million customers a year and around 6,500 employees. It’s dedicated to being a great place to work and has been working closely with peoplevalue since December 2018 to deliver valuable ‘thank yous’ to its people using its reward & recognition programme – GWR Rewards. 

GWR Rewards leverages the very best of our technology to incorporate several different reward & recognition elements that align with the company’s unique values and culture. On the scheme’s social wall – a real-time feed of recognition, news, events and photos – GWR employees can thank their colleagues as well as ‘like’, share and comment on posts. They can also receive points for hard work and service milestones which they can exchange for a reward of their choice via the scheme’s integrated reward catalogue.

GWR delivered its festive thank-you campaign to recognise and reward its people by spreading Christmas cheer throughout the GWR Rewards platform. The flexibility of peoplevalue’s reward and recognition solution meant that we were able to update their scheme to support this campaign and help the team celebrate colleagues in a way that truly worked for them. 

The solution

Coinciding with a Christmas-themed brand update on the GWR Rewards website, including artwork designed by GWR colleagues, the campaign consisted of a daily prize draw in the run up to Christmas. 40 employees were picked at random on each day and awarded either £15, £30 or £50 worth of points – from a total prize pot of £12,000 – to spend on an item of their choice from the reward catalogue. 

A festive, branded email was sent to employees to launch the campaign which was followed by daily notification emails encouraging users to log on to the scheme and find out if they had been picked as a winner. When they logged onto the site, they were greeted with a themed homepage banner, a pop-up message about the campaign and, partway through the scheme, a Christmas thank you message from GWR Managing Director, Mark Hopwood. On the scheme’s social wall, daily news posts were uploaded by the admin account announcing that day’s winners which users could interact with. 

The results

Not only was the campaign successful in spreading business-wide Christmas cheer, but, creating a campaign whereby users could only find out if they’d won a prize by logging on to their scheme was a highly effective way to increase site traffic and scheme engagement. 

The campaign boosted scheme engagement by over 240%

On average, before the campaign, 857 GWR employees were logging into the scheme each 28-day period. During the period in which the campaign fell, the number of employees logging in to the scheme rose to an impressive 2,956 – which equates to 45% of the employee population. This is a huge 244% increase against the average for the same period.

There was also an incredible 137% increase in the number of thank yous sent during the period in which the campaign fell. With more users logging in each day to find out who had won, the average number of thank yous posted on the social wall across a 28-day period increased from 423 to a huge 1,132.

The campaign has also had an impact on long-term engagement with the scheme. The number of logins and thank you messages sent via the social wall have remained higher than average in the first few periods of 2022 and throughout GWR’s most recent campaign.

Commenting on the success of the campaign, GWR’s Account Manager at peoplevalue, James Hickling, said:

‘The uplift in system usage and activity levels during the campaign have far exceeded our expectations. We’re delighted with the results and are now looking forward to delivering the next element of our communications plan.’ 

All in all, these results show us the true impact of a successful employee engagement campaign. They demonstrate the importance of finding fun and creative ways to communicate with and focus users in order to boost engagement. We’re delighted to have been able to adapt the GWR Rewards scheme in such a way that made this campaign possible and has had a lasting impact on scheme engagement.