A Good Reason for Peer to Peer Employee Recognition

Current incentive research shows that over 80% of businesses use rewards to overcome business challenges.  According to Gallup 57% of baby boomers, 76% of gen Xer’s, and 81% of millennials say that receiving recognition better connects them to their organization’s products and services.

Employees today want to work at companies where they are recognized for their performance.  And it’s not just management to employee recognition that is important.  Incentive research also shows that 80% of millennials say that the act of giving someone else recognition makes them want to stay at a company longer when the company cares about and invests in their employees.

Take the time to look through your organization for award opportunities to increase engagement.  Get your employees to become more engaged in company initiatives, like taking a company survey, signing up for a service, or joining a committee.

Show appreciation and build a company culture where employees and customers feel valued. When you do you will have a workforce that is more likely to feel good about where and for whom they work.

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

The Confusion Surrounding Employee Engagement

“Employee Engagement” as a term (and now culture) has been around a long time. Before that it was called “Employee Satisfaction.”  Not to oversimplify it, but employee satisfaction had little or no connection to performance.  With major changes in industry and more emphasis on service, there began a more pronounced link between HR and the “service-profit” chain and Employee Engagement was born. 

We googled “employee engagement” in preparation for this post and were rewarded with over 83 million answers.  HR consulting firms, training consultants, research companies, statistical analysis firms and even the award industry each define it in relation to their own revenue.  Is it any wonder why executives seem to be a little chagrined by the entire subject?  A simple concept it isn’t.  From 1996 to 2012, nearly 25 million employees in almost 3 million workgroups from 195 countries have completed Gallup's Q12®survey…the father of the statistics used in the design of how best to measure EE. This does everything except answer the one question everyone wanted to know…why.

You can readily see how things became confusing when the major HR consulting firms jumped onto the employee-engagement fray with their own, branded, proprietary, employee-engagement surveys, also based on statistical analysis. Even the academic community is confused by the term “employee engagement” because it was developed by consulting firms outside of the normal channels of academic research. 

The award industry hangs their hat on seemingly general concurrence that employee recognition helps promote employee satisfaction, which in turn is an important fundamental of employee engagement.  This was reinforced by the Conference Board and the Harvard Business School with a meta-analysis that compared the main employee-engagement approaches side-by-side.  

This meta-analysis concluded that “employee engagement” boils down to an emotional and intellectual connection between employees and their employers that results in improved performance.  

This was reconfirmed by two academic researchers, Nitin Nohria, the dean of the Harvard Business School, and Paul Lawrence, an organizational-behavior pioneer, in their books “Driven,” and “Driven to Lead.” These books built a new 4-drive motivational model of Employee Motivation.  This model created the emotional connection discovered by the meta-analysis…when these universal drives are satisfied; employees experience emotional pleasure and feel engaged.  Employee recognition helps to drive that emotional pleasure.

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

Do Your Employees Feel Respected?

“Respect is like air. As long as it’s present, nobody thinks about it. But if you take it away, it’s all that people can think about.”

                                                            “Crucial Conversations” by Ron McMillan

In research of nearly 20,000 employees worldwide conducted by Christine Porath, respondents ranked respect as the most important leadership behavior.  Yet many surveys also report that over half of employees claim that they don’t regularly get respect.  What’s the disconnect?  One answer may be that leaders may simply be unaware of the problem.  While those employees who aren’t shown respect are keenly aware of its absence, others, especially those in managerial or other high-status jobs don’t think about it very much. But there are other issues to consider.

Respect and Recognition Go hand-in-hand

Do leaders have a good understanding of what constitutes workplace respect?  If not, even well-meaning efforts to provide a respectful workplace may fall short.  With the ‘PC” nature of today’s culture, it’s hard to imagine a workplace where respect isn’t accorded equally to all members of a work group or the organization; it meets the universal need to make them all feel included. It should be standard practice.  We have no doubt that management consistently affirms that respect is owed to all personnel.  But when employees display valued qualities or behaviors that exceed expectations they are not just owed standard respect they have earned the respect that should be confirmed with recognition, and at times formal recognition. 

In fact some research by Arizona State shows…

“When the standard owed respect and earned respect is not in balance it can create frustration for workers. Workplaces with lots of owed respect but little earned respect can make individual achievement a low priority for employees, because they perceive that everyone will be treated the same regardless of performance. By contrast, workplaces with low owed respect but high earned respect can encourage excessive competition among employees…possibly good for some environments (sales force) but can hinder people from sharing critical knowledge about their successes and failures, and it often promotes cutthroat, zero-sum behavior”

Respect in any organization is important because it is a great feedback mechanism and provides the building blocks for growth.  So too, recognizing the respect earned through achievement helps to solidify that respect in the organization. This will bring tremendous benefits to the company.  It is no secret that employees who say they feel respected are more satisfied with their jobs and more grateful for—and loyal to—their companies.

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

Is Cash Still the King of Incentive Awards?

As has always been the case, cash is the reason we come to work.  We have to support ourselves and our families.  It is the way we exist in modern times. Without cash, the lives that we live would not be the same.  We would have to revert to feudal times where the noble class had all the money and the majority of workers had little but a place to live and food to eat. 

Reflecting on our experiences in the non-cash incentive awards industry for over forty years, it seems that the prevalent current view on what award works best is based on what employee survey you are reading today….

”Majority of employees and job seekers say money is more important than intangible rewards” or “workers care just as much—and sometimes more—about intangible recognition for a job well-done as they do about earning higher pay or receiving bonuses.”

One of the initial problems when planning any kind of employee improvement process is what award (if any) to use to motivate the performance? As cash has always been the medium we all work for, it is the first award considered.  All too often the process never goes much further and cash is chosen. With all the research and studies done over the years on the subject, there is no real empirical evidence to support using one or the other.  If the objectives are important and can result in higher profits, the awards are higher and are usually cash.  If the goals are more subjective, with less clarity on how they are measured, the awards per person are lessened and usually more non cash.

Frankly it always gets down to budget. And how much you can get from the C-suite will depend on how much value the executives place on achieving the objectives and consequently how much they are willing to spend to get it done.  Frankly this is the absolute number one problem with employee incentives and recognition programs today.  They are always (well nearly always) underfunded to get the job done, and consequently many don’t produce results.  Even worse, the program planners rarely do a complete analysis before, during and after the program to determine if successful, why, and if not, why not. 

So, during this planning conundrum, you can always find some current study or research to support using the award and budget you want.  It may work, it may not.  We wish we had the magic wand to wave over the problem and give you the perfect program but that doesn’t exist.  All we can recommend is that you get all the data you can on your own situation analyze it before, during (as often as possible) the program and at the end to know what happened.  Then, as necessary, revise, relaunch, and keep going with new and better data.  You can get it right.

If you want to throw some confusion into the mix, consider that money is the contract that gets us to go to work.  It doesn’t necessarily motivate us to work well, or the attitude we have while we are at work.  Factor that thought into your planning.

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