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.
Employee Recognition Programs can be an essential part of your companies engagement strategy, but are they business critical? Far from being just ‘feel-good’, these programs are becoming more robust and offer a number of aspects that have increased their importance far beyond recognition.
An effective program should be used to highlight many business critical functions in an organization, including:
Emphasizing core values: Core values are an essential focus for successful businesses. The companies who emphasize them and consistently recognize their employees who put them into practice, find dramatic cultural shifts taking place. The list is long and impressive, but here are a few that really stand out. Apple: ‘We don’t settle for anything less than excellence ‘. Zappos: ‘Deliver WOW Through Service’. Virgin: ‘Quality service by empowering our employees‘. Living these core values has separated these companies from their competitors and these values should be the force behind any well-thought out recognition program.
Creating a positive culture: It’s an undisputed fact that positive reinforcement fosters more positive activity. What you focus on becomes reality! Recognition programs should make it easy for employees to feel connected, involved, recognized and rewarded, all key factors in a healthy organization. There are everyday heroes in your workplace, and highlighting them in an open and transparent forum, not only feels good for the recipient, but is also inspiring to those around.
Highlight employee strengths and successes: What do your employees stand for? What are some of the strengths that separate them from each other? A good employee recognition program should highlight these strengths from both the perspective of managers and colleagues. Awards, success stories and strengths should be highlighted for all to see and provide a good overall view of who each of your employees are.
Employee Recognition Programs are not just an extra ‘feel-good’ extension of your company, they should be a driving force behind your culture, and identity. Companies that are buying into this philosophy are making waves, and are defining themselves as leaders in every industry. So what’s your opinion, is your company ready to take the next step?
Transparency, in corporate North America, is the new black. The recession – discussed ad nauseam – has forced corporations to “open the books” so to speak to appease stakeholders, clients, and government agencies and to ensure that current practices would enable a sustainable future. As Stephen Linaweaver put it in The Unintended Consequences of Corporate Transparency:*
…the importance of transparency, and how it involves developing knowledge, honing communication, and identifying why you are opening up, for whom, about what, and through which mediums. All of that is well and good and necessary in the fishbowl that is the modern marketplace. These actions should help companies improve or protect their brand reputation and build equity with customers, particularly in the event of a mishap…
Many organizations have developed internal measures to ensure that employees have all the relevant information at their disposal regarding the company’s direction, its goals, and the challenges it will face getting there.
Shouldn’t there exist a level of transparency when it relates to employee success in helping the organization reach its goals? Trust me, employees love to read about their colleagues’ victories. Even minor victories, communicated to the employee population, consistently, will add up to great big successes. Give it a try. But be sure that what is being shared and celebrated internally is directly linked to what is being communicated to the universe.
*Read Stephen’s article here.
Selling Recognition to the C-Suite
May 1, 2010
A successful employee recognition program can do much more than reward your best employees. Used properly, a solid recognition program can effectively promote your corporate values and quickly redirect focus to support your current strategy.
In The Conference Board Review – Beyond the Handshake, Dr. Carol Pletcher, Ph.D., demonstrates how a recognition program can ask employees to buy into the company’s efforts, to change what they are doing, to meet aggressive goals, to accelerate a project. It is the effective way that Executives have long sought to talk directly and quickly to employees – and to measure the effectiveness of your communications .
A well-run recognition program can be the catalyst for effective change that is so needed in today’s challenging environment. It can also help you uncover problem areas. For example:
Reading through peer-to-peer submissions for “Saving the Customer” can help you uncover and fix operational issues that are the cause of customer dissatisfaction.
Mining award nominations – not just winning entries – can help assess your organization’s capabilities and give an excellent overview of where your employees are focusing their efforts, discover innovation, emerging leaders, etc.
Dr. Pletcher provides three ideas to get your started:
- Ask those who review your corporate award submissions to map the achievements against the top five strategic challenges. The submission inventory is your success portfolio – what does it tell you?
- Review and reposition the criteria for the recognition program that involve the largest number of people. You can easily modify criteria to elicit behaviors, accomplishments, and achievements to reflect today’s tough challenges.
- Experiment with recognition in new ways. Use recognition to challenge that behind-schedule project team as a way to get back on track. Recognition programs broadcast what you value – are you using it to accelerate performance?
Much more than a dispenser of happy feelings, a well-managed recognition program can be your most effective employee communication tool.
Points Disbursement vs Recognition Enabler
March 6, 2010
There are two main types of program management tools: a reward distribution mechanism and a true recognition enabler. Which one does your organization really need?
A distribution tool will help you give out points to program participants for achieving pre-determined milestones, quotas or for being Employee of the Month, etc. It usually provides a selection of redemption options with fulfillment services. This type of program management tool is especially useful when you want to control spending and drop manual tracking.
A recognition enabler on the other hand makes it easy for anyone to highlight someone’s positive contribution, say thank you for a job well done, publicly recognize an exceptional manager for helping you learn and grow. Although you may choose to give out points or a special reward, the program isn’t built around the dishing out of points. The focus is primarily on people and their positive contribution.
The best systems provide both options. If you do want to create a culture of recognition, beware of systems that force you to give out points with every activity.
Employee Recognition – Is everyday awesomeness going unnoticed?
February 15, 2010
When your radar has been pointed at what might go wrong for so long, it’s easy to overlook everyday awesomeness.
Starting from the top, redirecting the focus on what is going right so you can encourage more of it, coaching your managers and discussing success specific to their teams can help build a true culture of recognition:
- What to look for; what positive actions look like
- The types of behaviours that are important to success
- The importance of involvement, transparency and fairness in building trust
- How telling stories of your own everyday heroes that include background, action and outcome can serve as powerful positive reinforcement.
Once your management team not only understands but buys-in to the importance of showing appreciation for what is right and wonderful within your organization, they will teach by example and involve their own teams in focusing on the positive.
Looking for the great stories and sharing them with everyone is an art, not a science. Everyone has it in them; you just need to nudge it out.
