TL;DR
- HP's recognition process was buried in email chains — nominations sat for 3 weeks before reaching anyone.
- We built an SPFx nomination web part on the intranet homepage, visible to all managers daily.
- A 3-stage Power Automate flow with auto-escalation and department-level batching cut average processing to 2 days.
- Nominations tripled in the first quarter — from 47 to 156 — without any additional HR effort.
Before we built anything, we asked HP's HR team one question: "Why don't employees nominate their colleagues for recognition right now?" The answer was immediate. "Because nobody can find the form, and even if they do, they don't know what happens to it after they submit it."
That told us everything we needed to know. The problem wasn't awareness of the recognition program. It wasn't that managers didn't care. It was friction and opacity. Fix those two things, nominations go up. We had a hypothesis. We had 6 weeks. Here's what we did.
The State of Recognition Before
Recognition was handled by email. A manager who wanted to nominate someone wrote an email to HR. HR tracked nominations in a shared spreadsheet. Nominations sat in inboxes, sometimes for days, before anyone acted on them.
The approval chain looked like this: direct manager sends nomination to HR, HR routes to department head, department head forwards to recognition committee, committee meets to decide. Four separate email threads. Four separate inboxes. No shared visibility at any point.
Average time from submission to the employee actually being recognised: 3 weeks. Nominations per quarter before we started: 47 nominations across 8,000 employees. That's 0.6% participation from people who could nominate. Something was clearly broken.
The original recognition journey: 4 separate approvers, 4 separate email inboxes, no shared visibility, average 3 weeks to outcome.
What We Designed
The core insight was placement. HP's intranet had an HR section where the nomination form had lived. Nobody opened the HR section unless they had an HR problem. We moved the SPFx nomination web part to the intranet homepage — the page that every employee sees every morning.
A manager sees it when they arrive at their desk. One click to start a nomination. That framing matters. Recognition isn't something you go looking for — it should be in your peripheral vision when you're doing your normal work.
The form captures four things: nominee (People Picker pulling from Azure AD, so you type a name and get the right person), achievement type (dropdown: Innovation, Client Impact, Team Support, Operational Excellence), impact description (free text, 500 character limit — short enough to not feel like homework), and supporting evidence (optional file upload). That's it.
On submission, the nominator gets an instant acknowledgement email with a link to track their nomination in SharePoint. No more wondering whether it went anywhere. That single change — the confirmation email with tracking link — reduced the "did it go through?" calls to HR from approximately 15 per month to zero within the first two weeks.
The 3-Stage Power Automate Flow
Stage 1 is the line manager review. The moment a nomination is submitted, Power Automate sends an Adaptive Card to the nominator's line manager in Teams. The card shows the nominee, the achievement type, and the impact description. Three response options: Approve, Reject, or Request More Information. No navigating to SharePoint. Everything in Teams.
If the manager doesn't respond within 24 hours, an automated reminder goes out. If they still haven't responded at 48 hours, the flow escalates to their manager with a note that the original approver hasn't responded. This escalation path alone resolved a problem HR had complained about for years: approvals dying silently in someone's inbox while they were travelling.
Stage 2 is the department head review. Here's where the design got interesting. Department heads don't receive one card per nomination. They receive a single weekly batched card that shows all approved nominations for their department in a table. One approval action covers the batch, or they can select individual items to query. This decision came directly from talking to department heads before we built. Three of them said, in almost identical words, "If you send me a Teams notification for every single nomination, I will turn them off."
Stage 3 is the recognition committee. They receive the final batch each week with all nominations that have passed Stages 1 and 2. The card shows nominee, department, achievement type, and a shortlist/award/defer option per record. All decisions write back to the SharePoint list. Full audit trail, complete record.
Stage 1 handles individual line manager review with escalation. Stage 2 batches approvals for department heads. Stage 3 gives the recognition committee a final decision interface.
The Critical Design Decision: Batching at Stage 2
This is worth dwelling on because it's where the project could have failed. Before we built, we asked HP's HR team: "How many nominations are you expecting per week once this is running?" Their estimate ranged from 50 to 200, depending on the department and time of year.
If we sent a Teams Adaptive Card for every single nomination to every department head, some of them would have been receiving 15 to 20 Teams notifications per week from this one process alone. That's the threshold where people start turning off notification channels. Once they turn it off for one flow, they tend to miss everything from that channel.
The batching solution works like this: a scheduled Power Automate flow runs every Monday morning. It queries the SharePoint list for all nominations that are in "Stage 2 Pending" status, groups them by department, and for each department head generates a single Adaptive Card with all their department's nominations in a table. One notification. One decision context. Total time from a department head to process 10 nominations: about 3 minutes.
Talk to the people who will receive the notifications before you build the notification logic. Not HR who designed the process — the actual approvers in the middle of the chain. They'll tell you exactly how much they can handle, and you'll design a better flow because of it.
Results After One Quarter
The first quarter data came back clear. Nominations didn't just go up — they went up significantly, without any additional campaign or communication from HR. The system's placement on the homepage did the work.
HR reported that their overhead on managing the recognition program dropped by roughly 6 hours per week. Previously someone was manually chasing approvals, updating the spreadsheet, and sending status updates. All of that is now automated.
What Made This Work (and What Usually Doesn't)
Placement mattered. The recognition web part is on the intranet homepage. Not the HR page, not a separate recognition portal, not a link in a monthly HR newsletter. The homepage. Every morning. That's where nomination intent gets converted into actual nominations.
Immediacy mattered. The nominator gets a confirmation within seconds. Before, the typical question was "did my email even reach the right person?" Now there's no question. The acknowledgement email and the SharePoint tracking link removed uncertainty from the submitter's experience.
Visibility mattered. Nominators can see the status of their nomination in SharePoint at any time. "In Stage 2 Review" is a meaningful status. It closes the loop. People who know what happens to their nominations are more likely to submit another one.
Simplicity mattered. The form is 4 fields. The original HR team wanted 12 fields. We pushed back hard on every field that wasn't strictly necessary. Every additional field is a point of abandonment. Keep recognition forms short enough to complete in under 2 minutes.
Key Takeaways
Placement on the intranet homepage — not a separate HR portal — was the single biggest driver of tripling nomination rates. Visibility creates behaviour.
Batching Stage 2 approvals into a weekly summary card prevented notification fatigue for department heads and kept the entire approval chain functioning.
Automated escalation after 48 hours eliminated the silent inbox failure mode that had killed nominations in the old email process.