Do You Have a Culture of Recognition?

Recognition has always been the heart of employee engagement.  In fact it might even be the soul as well.  Nothing does more for an employee in the short term that recognizing their performance, either formally or informally....with any kind of physical award (either large of small).

The Internet lists the Top Ten  Employee Recognition Systems.  To name just a few, companies with such cute names as Motivosity, Guusto, Fond and Nectar all have the bells and whistles that will be a sure fire way in recognizing your employees to improve their performance and increase their engagement.  And our guess is that they will all work in one way or another.  They all tout a new and better way to improve your culture.  

What they won't do is instill a culture of "Thank You" within your company that comes as natural as breathing.  That has to come from executives above, the managers in the middle and the employees themselves throughout.  We can all feel a company who has this culture.  It permeates all that they do, we feel it when we do business with them.  We keep going back.

Saying "thank you" doesn't come naturally to people, it is something that has to be coached, it has to be repeated over and over again, and something that has to be sincere and be measured.  Employees and managers alike need to know when they are doing it, how well, and when they are not.

Take the test, spend a day watching interactions between your management and your employees and just count the times when a sincere recognition of performance or "thank you" takes place,  At the end of the day you'll know if you do or don't have a culture of recognition and to what degree.

Gift Cards Are Fun Money

 

The 2020 IRF Academic Review offers some interesting peer review research of articles found within the employee engagement industry regarding employee incentives and recognition programs.  Some of the significant points this year that could help inform you on the design and execution of successful programs include: 

• Gift cards have the potential to capture most – and perhaps all – of the well-known benefits of non-cash rewards. Program awardees categorize gift card awards as “fun money.” Many employers find gift cards easy to give and to administer compared to choosing specific tangible gifts or rewards. 
• The greater sense an employee has that a reward they receive is separate from their salary or wages, the greater improvement they showed in their performance. 
• Researchers found that workers classify non-cash, tangible rewards as distinct from monetary compensation, suggesting that delivering non-cash rewards is more likely than cash to result in improved performance.
• Gift cards continue to be widely used as awards, with median gift card amount remaining at $100 
• For many employees, it has become the soft rewards of work such as culture, relationships, trust, and purpose, education and direct management that matter most to them. 
• 94% of executives at top performing firms are strong supporters of incentive programs and consider them a competitive advantage 
• Companies conducting analysis on how programs change behavior increased to 44%, compared to 25% in 2019. 
• While it’s always difficult to establish direct casualty, most organizations measure results based on correlations. Metrics for tangible benefits include decreased staff turnover, increased productivity, sales, revenue, safety, market share, gains in customer satisfaction, and customer acquisition
• Even more difficult to measure, metrics for intangible benefits that include employee satisfaction, collaboration, and impact on company culture 
• Designers are structuring programs with a wider reach, with the goal of each participant receiving recognition or rewards of some kind, rather than exclusively rewarding just top performing program participants.