A Good Checklist for Successful Employee Recognition Programs

Following is a collection of ideas that we pulled from HR sources over the last few years.  We feel it contains a good framework for anyone attempting to implement formal employee recognition in your organization and help you avoid potential problems that may come as you recognize people in your workplace.

Determine what you want your outcomes to be

At face value this may appear to be an obvious step, but too many companies don’t start with this.  When you put serious thought into this step, you will increase the chance that your program will be successful and produce results.  Recognition should reinforce behaviors that lead to successful conclusions

Emphasize fairness and be consistent

Anyone who contributes should have an equal likelihood of receiving recognition for their efforts.

Recognition is not just for the top 10%

Except for the poor performers who need to be dealt with in other ways, your entire workforce can be motivated to improve performance.  Make sure you look for all the opportunities to recognize the things that are important to you.  Recognizing only the highest performer will defeat or dissatisfy all of your other contributors. 

Set guidelines so leaders can acknowledge equivalent and similar contributions

Monitor the performance of your managers to ensure fairness to all your workers. 

Employee recognition approaches and content must also be inconsistent 

Contradictory? No, not really. You should do what is necessary to make sure your employee recognition efforts do not become expectations or entitlements.

Be as specific as you can in telling the individual exactly why he is receiving the recognition

The purpose of feedback is to reinforce what you’d like to see the employee do more of; the purpose of employee recognition is the same. In fact, employee recognition is one of the most powerful forms of feedback that you can provide.

Avoid “Employees of the Month” type programs

The most overused employee recognition system is the “Employee of Month”.  If you want to build a strong culture of engagement, you should always be looking for ways to recognize your employees!  You shouldn’t be meeting once a month to try to find just the right one.  Having a recognition culture that recognizes and rewards on an often basis, even using diminimous awards to save budget dollars, will provide a great deal more engagement and employee satisfaction than an Employee of the Month program. 

Offer employee recognition as close to the event you are recognizing as possible

When a person performs positively, provide recognition and a thank you immediately.  This will positively affect the employee’s confidence and ability to do well in your organization.

Remember that employee recognition is viewed differently by different employees

Each individual has a preference for what he finds rewarding and how that recognition is most effective for him. One person may enjoy public recognition at a staff meeting; another prefers a private note in her personnel file. The best way to determine what an employee finds rewarding is to ask.

Recognition programs are about changing behavior

Any time you reinforce employee performance with recognition, you are in the process of changing behavior.  Tangible reinforcement (an award) can go a long way to changing this behavior into a habit.  Awards do not have to be expensive to be appreciated.  Whenever possible, allow the employees to choose what they want instead of giving them something you want them to have.

For more information on Ultimate Choice Inc.’s products or services or other white papers please contact us at Ultimatechoiceinfo@cox.net

Why Is Employee Recognition So Scarce?

Time is an often-stated reason why employee recognition is scarce and admittedly, employee recognition does take time. But is that really an excuse?

Even with the best of intentions for a successful program, employee recognition can fail for a variety of reasons and a combination of several factors.  Among them are:

• Managers don't know how to provide employee recognition effectively, so when they have bad experiences they are reluctant to do it again. 
• Managers assume that one size recognition fits all but it doesn’t, and it can often backfire if not understood and implemented properly.
• Managers think too narrowly about what people will find rewarding.
• Not all managers are comfortable in saying Thank You to their employees.
• Some programs are designed with too much complexity and managers don’t want to be bothered with all the rules and regulations.  A random “good job” or “well done” is usually better than no recognition at all.
• Some managers still don’t see recognition and engagement as a strategic tool but rather as a process and they fail to put the long term importance on it that it deserves. 

When the span of control in an organization is too great, there may not be enough time to recognize performance as often as desired.  In those cases be sure to put some of that recognition into the hands of peers.  They often know who are the most deserving anyway.

Employee recognition training is rarely offered to managers.  The ones who don’t understand it rarely use it and then only for the very few in the top of their work unit.  Many of the most deserving never get the recognition they should. 

Here’s an interesting quote from Dr. Paul Marciano, a leading authority on employee engagement and retention:

“I know of no other strategy in all of management that yields a higher return on investment. In my estimate, the ROI is 1:100. In other words, for every minute spent on reinforcing behavior you can expect a hundred minutes of initiative in return,”

For more information on Ultimate Choice Inc.’s products or services or other white papers please contact us at Ultimatechoiceinfo@cox.net

Oscar Speeches and Customer Satisfaction

Have you ever heard an Oscar speech start with… I really don’t need to thank anyone, I did this all by myself, even mom and dad didn’t help.”  No you probably haven’t, because in just about every situation where you find people on the top they’ll always tell you about the other people in their life along the way, those who helped them become a success.  Nobody does it alone.

The same thing holds true for businesses that achieve a great deal of success.  In every one of them they are acutely aware of how their employees impact the satisfaction of their customers.  And they make sure to thank those employees and recognize them at every opportunity. 

A way to get the most out of your employees is to give them an emotional connection to the success. An easy technique to do that is to ensure they receive tangible recognition for their efforts.  By doing that you are essentially establishing a sense of ownership.  Often times this can lead to promotion into management and a true piece of the profits. They become satisfied employees who grow satisfied customers who become loyal customers. 

 “The Forum: Business Results Through People” found…

“a direct relationship between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction and loyalty. By motivating and rewarding achievement, you provide incentive for employees to go above and beyond. This not only fosters improvement in communication between employees and management, but also between employees and customers.” 

This is a fact that you can’t afford to ignore.  If you have satisfied employees they will make a priority to ensure they have satisfied customers. 

For more information on Ultimate Choice Inc.’s products or services or other white papers please contact us at Ultimatechoiceinfo@cox.net

The #1 Rewards Mistake Made 85% of the time.

This blog post is based on an article of the same title published recently in Incentive magazine by the editor, Bruce Bolger.  We’ve been reading articles by Bruce for years and he is often right on and has always seemed to have a good pulse of the industry.  However this one is a bit misleading. 

While we have no doubt that many organizations “employ little or no personalization in their loyalty, sales, dealer and employee awards presentations” it is certainly not as high as 85%, probably not even close.  This number comes from an informal survey of the leading rewards and recognition wholesalers who “found that no more than 15% of the packages they fulfill leave the warehouse with any kind of personalization.”  That would seem to assume that those same recognition wholesalers provide 100% of all the awards issued in any of the loyalty, sales, dealer and employee awards programs.  Again that’s not even close.

In addition, based on figures consistently presented in Incentive magazine regarding the various types of rewards used in these programs, merchandise supplied does not even make up 50%.  Without empirical evidence at our disposal we would venture to guess that when you added gift cards and travel to the award mix, merchandise might not even equal 25%.

We should also not forget that most reward programs found in business have a communication component and there is a great deal of budget dollars spent on the presentation of awards.  Many of the ways to personalize the presentation have already been done within these communication components.  Maybe to add additional notes or letters within the packaging of the item might be a nice touch?  Certainly it should be considered when no communications of the kind comes from within the program.  But to say that 85% are not shown this courtesy in our opinion is as mentioned somewhat misleading.

For more information on Ultimate Choice Inc.’s products or services or other white papers please contact us at Ultimatechoiceinfo@cox.net