Review
Employee recognition programs are a longstanding feature of corporate workplaces. Most of us have seen these programs in action in some way, shape or form, and the purposes of these programs are apparent: to reward desired workplace behavior, to publicly acknowledge those behaviors and to encourage those behaviors in more employees. Market research performed by Bersin and Deloitte showed that in 2012, companies in the United States spent between 1-2% of their total payroll outlay on those programs, and additionally in this year, $46 billion was spent on those programs. Subsequent studies place 2013 spending at $77 billion and 2015 spending at $90 billion2 . Most of this spending goes toward items such as gift cards and merchandise. A 2015 study by the Incentive Federation found that in businesses using non-cash award types, gift cards and merchandise were the two most broadly used types of rewards, with almost 90% of businesses using gift cards and about three-quarters using merchandise in their various employee reward programs. Corporate spending on these categories is significant; however, that spend may not be effectively directed, resulting in waste. Let us look at both categories: gift card spend and merchandise. According to a marketing survey of Fortune 500 company employees, just over one third admitted that they had a company-issued gift card that they simply hadn’t used, either wholly or in part3 . Furthermore, according to the Tower Group, cards not redeemed within 60 days aren’t ever likely to be redeemed at all resulting in billions of dollars of purchased gift card value going unspent each year. It seems apparent that to some extent, both gift cards and corporate merchandise are sitting unused on shelves, in boxes or in dusty garages. In short, companies are spending 1-2% of payroll on programs that offer minimal or, in some cases, nonexistent return on investment. The system is extraordinarily wasteful and inefficient especially given how much money is being spent. However, due to that waste, there is also opportunity present.
Our solution leverages blockchain technology to magnify employee satisfaction while simultaneously minimizing employer cost and waste. The primary feature of our system is a virtual marketplace that allows employees to auction gifts while preserving the value of those gifts for later use and/or accumulation toward higher-value gifts. When an employee receives a gift or wins a prize, he can take it right then for himself or choose to auction it and receive cash (or alternatively, the employer can choose to credit employee with internal reward points or miles that have the equivalent value of cash and are redeemable for prizes off of a fixed-price prize menu. This system allows employees to exchange an otherwise undesirable gift for value to be spent on a desirable gift. Additionally, this marketplace liquidity adds perceived value to employee rewards by allowing the value of multiple smaller gifts to be combined and applied toward a future gift of greater value. Our system is intended to mitigate the chance of HR or management forcing upon an employee an inappropriate gift when an employee could instead make his or her own choice.
An additional benefit to a highly liquid marketplace is that the need to only give generic gifts is eliminated; management no longer needs to hand out gifts from an endless stack of Starbucks or Barnes and Noble gift cards. Because a notable feature of this system is its geographic and economic flexibility, vendors across the world will be able to enter the system, and the value of their gifts will be determined by marketplace demand. When an employee auctions off an unwanted gift voucher from, say, a noted Boston seafood restaurant, the URT Holders will determine the value of that voucher by means of their bids. Over time, employers will receive data about which prizes their employees are keeping versus auctioning; due to the fact that blockchain is a distributed ledger, they will also be able to see general demand for items that are auctioned, meaning that even if the employer misses the mark on giving an employee a suitable prize, at least they picked one that has maximal ”exchange” or ”trade-in” value for the employee. Access to this type of data will help employers and HR departments determine the viability of prizes (and prize vendors) and allow a much more accurate selection of gifts to be utilized as corporate rewards in the first place.
The functional goals are arranged as a hierarchically refined tree. Associated to the functional tree are quality goals and stakeholders to denote which functional goals they concern. shows the static architecture of the URT-system that is derived from the goal model. The additional aspect of the architecture model is inserted information-exchange elements that the goal model does not address. Finally, addresses the dynamic runtime behavior of the URT-system and the embedded utilization of blockchains. Functional goals of a system are depicted as parallelograms, ‘quality goals’ or non-functional requirements are clouds, and agents with specified roles that may be human or artificial are stick figures. The root element of a goal model is a ‘value proposition’ that is depicted as a functional goal. The value proposition denotes the overall systems goal based on which the rest of the model is hierarchically decomposed. Attached to functional goals are quality goals and roles that also hold for lower-level, refining functional goals. The central functional goal of model is labeled as Establish a liquid preference-matching recognition program. That way, we adhere to the solution put forward where the solution of the URT-system is mapped out. With respect to quality goals, most are associated to the value proposition root functional goal. Thus, these are quality goals that also affect all hierarchically refining functional goals below the main value proposition. We now turn to describing each quality goal at length.
The status quo of corporate recognition can be described in the following user flow. Most companies define certain milestones to celebrate as part of their employee recognition programs (either internal or through a vendor). On these milestones, employees usually get a notification that they have been issued a reward. This happens either through an internal employee portal, email, in person, or through a connected dashboard hosted and maintained by a third party, external vendor. Participants of the Universal Recognition Marketplace interact with the network through the URM mobile app available on both iOS and Android devices. We describe each of these functions and more in detail in the below user and app flow diagram. Those wishing to participate in the Universal Recognition Marketplace are first required to download the iOS or Android version of the URT Wallet app from the Apple Store or Google Play Store respectively.
To meet the URT quality goals and become a universal, global, scalable and self-sufficient system, the URT network should have a built-in mechanism of value exchange. This mechanism should be based on an independent means of payment and be generic enough to accommodate for future system requirements and network growth. Strictly speaking, such a mechanism could use existing fiat payment rails or an existing blockchain-based crypto-currency. Still, using either of these would have technological and/or economical performance implications. For example, using fiat payment rails yields transactional inefficiencies. Transaction costs are likely to be high compared to the price of prizes. To guarantee higher flexibility, suitability and lower technological and economic coupling of the URT network with existing payment rails, it is highly desirable that the mechanism of value exchange is independent, system-specific and linked to the value of assets it transfers. To achieve these goals, we create a URT utility token issued on the blockchain solely for use in transactions on the URT network. URT removes transactional inefficiencies and is ultimately indirectly linked to the value of all the auctioned assets in the system. The URT network brings liquidity to the currently largely illiquid prize pools by means of matching prize auctioneers with a community of URT holders.
Given that it takes time to establish partnerships and a network, we use a value-based throughput throttling approach to prevent a flooding of the market with too many URT backed by too little inventory. A throughput throttling approach does not render an amount of URT permanently locked, or frozen, or impossible to exchange, or spend. Limited is the overall amount of URT acceptable by Network Operators as bids at a given point in time. If suddenly a high-demand spike occurs for prizes while Partners are not able to satisfy that demand, throughput throttling is activated. One option to implement throughput throttling is with a URT smart contract. Each partner and network operator in Figure 14 has a special account, or wallet to receive URT. Throughput thresholds are imposed on those accounts in that the total amount of tokens on all such accounts cannot exceed a threshold at any point in time. Any URT holder can still spend their tokens by bidding and winning prizes on a first-come-first-served basis until a threshold is hit.
The URT-system is confronted with several technical issues that require specific attention. The challenges we resolve by considering the use of blockchain technology such as smart contracts for addressing the requirements. Briefly, blockchain technology emerged with the first use-case of the peer-to-peer crypto-currency called Bitcoin. which technical solutions to choose for covering the respective architecture aspect. We assume that it is not realistic to have one single blockchain solution be able to cater for all diverse problems of the URT-system. Instead, each technical problem requires a study of available solutions that are carefully composed. The earlier discussed Ethereum platform is a potential candidate for the development of smart contracts that govern the URT-system. Unfortunately, a profound Ethereum bottleneck is the use a PoW algorithm that is a problem with respect to performance and scalability.
Current technology offers us the means to approach such issues substantively. Via our blockchain-based and smart contract-driven system, employers can know that employees who have been recognized for their achievements are receiving more meaningful recognition gifts – because the employees have chosen those gifts themselves. Also, by tracking transaction and bidding activities, employers and prize vendors can know what gifts are most sought-after by the market, can increase the supply of desirable items and either reduce or eliminate undesirable items from the marketplace. In addition, the Bersin study (cited earlier) found that employer with ”recognition-rich culture” and improved employee recognition programs experienced 31% lower rates of voluntary turnover compared with companies without those attributes.
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