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

Most Recognition Programs Don’t Conform to Best Practices

According to a recent article from the RewardsRecognitionNetwork.com, nearly all attendees at the recent RRN Expo in Chicago agreed that most recognition programs fail to conform to the best practices revealed by almost 20 years of research from dozens of independent sources.

Since the 1970s and 1980s the Incentive Research Foundation and the Incentive Marketing Association have done a wide variety of studies on the effectiveness of properly designed recognition systems.  It appears most companies aren’t listening!  They have seemed to ignore the fundamental principles of effective design for these programs. Why?

Unfortunately, there is no way for RRN to obtain accurate data on this conclusion as most companies don’t publish their program design and most suppliers of these programs don’t either.  The evidence to support this conclusion came from “discussions with many incentive, recognition and loyalty company principals and their corporate clients, and reviewing the incentive, recognition, loyalty and promotional programs prevalent in the marketplace.”   

The two main culprits of this poor design that fly in the face of the research include:

• Focusing on only the 20% of participants to drive performance rather than the middle 60% of the organization
• Failing to integrate the many parts of engagement to actual behaviors and performance outcomes 

Having sold in this industry for many years, we might add a couple more:

• Poor industry training for companies to truly understand incentives
• Poorly educated industry salesforce who almost always take the path of least resistance in order to make the sale
• Competing vendors in the engagement industry are all vying for the same budget dollars diluting the message in favor of their own deliverable
• The recognition industry as well as clients chase the short term, quick fix profit goals ignoring more expensive designs that can lead to potentially greater long term results.

 Where actual hard dollar corporate investment is concerned, companies don’t feel the outcomes of engagement efforts can be accurately measured.  And that has been the problem for the recognition industry since inception.  Truth is that it can’t, there are just too many variables to definitively show management what they actually receive in terms of bottom line results from recognition.  It’s a soft dollar discussion.

This situation is not new.  Over 25 years ago the Industry Research Foundation did a study with the American Productivity and Quality Center that provided the best template for effective program design.  In that study there was a very enlightening yet relatively obscure fact that the overwhelming majority of clients were not using their vendors for anything but the fulfillment of awards; not measurement; not design; not analytics; not communications.  It would appear that not much has changed in the last 25 years.

Ultimate Choice contains leadership who has combined incentive & recognition experience approaching 100 years.  We also sell the single most sought after award in the industry….GIFT CARDS.  And will still provide at no charge the expertise to help you design programs that will conform to the best practices to help make them as successful as possible. 

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