Grow A Recognition Giving Mindset One Day At A Time

You hear a lot about mindfulness these days.

Mindfulness is a therapeutic technique for creating a conscious awareness of being in the present moment.

Now, if you couple mindfulness with employee recognition, you will have a greater awareness of the things people are doing around you that merit being acknowledged and appreciated.

By creating more empathetic feelings toward the people you work with you can also show more caring concern for the positive and negative life events that affect them and their families.

You can become better at acknowledging and accepting your own thoughts and feelings, having an environmental awareness, all in a non-judgmental way.

It only takes a few things each day to keep a recognition focus. (more…)

How to Make Recognition Giving a Part of Your DNA

You and I need to learn how to truly value people and their contributions.

When we respect and acknowledge people properly for the effort they make, giving recognition demonstrates our respect for them and shows they are truly worthy of our time.

I have written before how giving recognition does not take very much time to do. Yet, it is the number one reason, or barrier, for why people don’t give recognition.

Making recognition a part of your DNA – means following a consistent, systematic approach to how, and when, you give people recognition.

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Never Let Organizational Culture Eat Up Your Strategy

Many years ago the late business management guru, Peter Drucker, purportedly said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

While there is still debate as to whether Drucker actually said the line or not, it was attributed to him by Mark Fields in 2006, and he later became the chief executive of the Ford Motor Company.

At the time Drucker probably made this statement there was a lot of talk about business strategy in the Ivy League business schools.

His point was well taken that you should never neglect culture.

However, as the authors Boris Groysberg, Jeremiah Lee, Jesse Price and J. Yo-Jud Cheng, of the recent Harvard Business Review article on The Leader’s Guide to Corporate Culture, point out, a strong organizational culture can be detrimental when misaligned with strategy. (more…)

Recognition Tip #42: Take time to ask people for their recognition preferences.

Create an informal sit-down opportunity and learn about an individual’s goals and what motivates them at work. When the comfort level is present, ask them what they like and don’t like with the recognition they receive from you. Discover their preferred frequency of recognition and how they best like to be appreciated.

Taking a Good Look at the “V” Factors of Recognition Program Data

There’s one thing that online recognition programs can do for you over the regular, everyday interactive recognition practices.

Recognition programs produce data – lots of data.

And that’s why I want to highlight 3 factors around recognition data that all begin with the letter “V”.

Understanding them should help you see the benefit you can obtain from them if you’re not already drawing upon them. (more…)

Getting The Inside Scoop on Motivation

Whether an inside job or working from the outside in, motivation on the job is no easy task.

I have always loved the simple explanation for motivation that it is your “motive” to action.

This made me think of the sign I saw the other day that said, “I dream of a better world where chickens can cross the road without having their motives questioned.”

However, motivation from a scientific viewpoint, is always described as the psychological factors we all have such as needs, desires, wants, or drives within us that cause us to do the things we do each and every day.

The tricky part is applying this oft-misunderstood concept on the job. (more…)