Viva Engage for recognition feels limited, what are you all using?

Fancy running into another HR person here! This is a common complaint, you're not alone. The praise feature in Engage is fine in isolation but Engage itself is its own destination and most people aren't sitting in it unless they're already heavy community contributors or they are going out of their way to give praise to someone which feels a bit off. 

A few things that genuinely helped us before we changed approaches:

• Made it a meeting ritual. Last 5 minutes of the weekly all-hands was "shoutouts" and someone had to post one. Forced the habit until it stuck.
• Leadership modeling. Our CEO posted recognition once a week, visibly. Moved the needle on whether anyone else bothered.

We eventually went with something that connected both recognitions and the whole engagement side to our performance management process with goals and performance reviews, to bring the number of apps and platforms we use, down. We found "Teamflect" in the Teams app store (I'm sure there are other options out there too) and it did the job for us. The recognitions are exactly what we need and it even gave us the opportunity to explore adding a rewards program. Wasn't a huge fan of the leaderboards feature for recognitions but you can toggle it off.

Give it a look and please mark this as a solution if the answer was helpful :)