The Tug-of-War Between Recognition and Engagement

The incentive industry has been struggling with putting teeth into employee recognition programs for many years.  Most of the large performance improvement companies of today were founded to create and manage incentive programs to increase sales for their clients.  But in the last two or three decades, the entire landscape of the business awards industry changed.  Executives realized that if merchandise and travel awards could motivate their sales force as well as their channel partners to increase sales and profits, many of the same techniques and strategies could be used to motivate their non-sales personnel to better performance as well.

But for one simple reason, the incentive companies ran into a roadblock and it wasn’t as easy to sell these new programs (commonly referred to employee recognition).  Sales programs had a built-in a measurement and an ROI.  That isn’t true for the employee recognition efforts where the goal was more loosely defined and based on satisfaction levels, rather than clear cut bottom line performance.  And executives wanted to see more results they could take to the bank. Recognition budgets were a hard line budget item with no or little ROI.  Sales programs were implemented based on incremental performance, often without the constraints of the budgetary process. 

So now, over a half century after the large incentive houses were selling millions of dollars of sales incentive programs, the other award companies are competing to convince the C-suite to spend more and more on their non-sales personnel, and it seems to be working.  Now they have another interesting quandary, the recognition programs have been overtaken by the employee engagement programs.  And it appears that some of the same issues exist…how to justify the expense to senior management.

This  Recognition & Recognition Network article of the same title as this blog provides a comparison and insight into  the 

world of recognition / engagement and how it has changed and grown.  Essentially, all the employee performance gurus (read research, training, communications, employee satisfaction consultants) and everyone else who wants to have a piece of this pie have now taken over the recognition industry called it engagement and simply moved “recognition” out of it to stand alone as an integral piece. 

In reading the article, there are two perspectives we feel need further examination.  First, the three “industry leaders” as mentioned amount to only a fraction of the sales revenues of the top three full service performance improvement companies who that are still with us, and still selling “recognition programs” so the lines of “leaders” are blurred.  And second, the distinctions between recognition and engagement programs offered appear to be without any empirical evidence to justify the distinctions…and the lines between recognition are still somewhat blurred as well. 

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