Employee Recognition: Can You Look Your CEO in the Eye?
December 6, 2011
Sure, it’s nice to provide employees with web-based tools to send each other kudos, and even better when managers also participate actively. A focus on the positive can be a welcome change as we strive to emerge from troubled times and retain our best talent.
Unfortunately, you’ll always be faced with skeptics who view employee recognition as yet another fluffy HR initiative unless you can clearly demonstrate that its effect is much deeper. All this recognition stuff is admirable but it doesn’t matter one bit if it doesn’t move the needle for your company.
Your employee recognition program becomes a strategic initiative and wins over the C-Suite when it:
1) consistently reinforces the behaviors required to achieve corporate objectives;
2) provides employees with a solid understanding of how company aspirations translate into their daily work;
3) reveals insights into the living forces that bolster your culture, and identifies gaps;
4) promotes innovation, speed, flexibility, spontaneity and cultural vitality;
5) exposes and rewards role models; employees who may not always be the most visible but are often highly engaged;
6) results in increased employee satisfaction, which increases customer satisfaction, retention and revenue.
Can you look your CEO in the eye and tell her your recognition program is a strategic imperative if all you have to show for it are 140-character platitudes like Great job! You rock! Couldn’t have done it without you!? Can you really pretend these are tied to your core values?
Here are additional tips on creating a highly successful and long-lasting employee recognition program.
December 6, 2011 at 5:53 pm
Johane….Good points, providing everyone in the organization is on the same page. All too often upper management is not enforcing or even aware of what the corporate philosophy is/should be.
In these situations it becomes even more difficult to develop and successfully administer an employee incentive program that motivates employees.
I always encourage managers to involve upper management in their incentive programs, whether it’s to get initial input or help deliver the rewards. It helps to get the organization focused and doesn’t hurt the managers image either!
December 6, 2011 at 6:26 pm
You’re absolutely right, Ed. We like to say that where the head goes, the body follows. If it doesn’t matter to the C-Suite, it doesn’t matter.
We see it time and again: the involvement of upper management in the recognition program, and especially that of the CEO, all but guarantees that everyone else will participate.
It’s truly mystifying when the Exec team shows little interest in the everyday successes of the organization and yet blather on about Our Employees Are Our Greatest Assets.