Someone brought up a topic I have heard many times before in a presentation I gave this week.
How do you handle recognizing team members when there is a “rotten apple” of a team member on the team? You know what they’re talking about. They’re referring to the poor performer who is not pulling their weight on the team. Yet, they get included in the positive acknowledgments when the project is done.
The bottom-line? They don’t deserve the recognition lauded on the entire team. (more…)
There’s a big difference with how recognition is perceived by people in different parts of the world.
When I was working in India, for example, I found the people there had a preoccupation with getting tangible or monetary rewards. Why? This was mainly because the pay employees earned in India was so low their goal was to meet basic needs. If they could receive any additional money they would take it.
In France, they too found rewards more important than say verbal appreciation. However, this was not for economic reasons. For the majority of managers I dealt with there, they felt that recognition was too much of an “Americanized” rah, rah, exercise. They gave the “touchy-feely” complaint. I had to remind them that I was originally from England, and now a Canadian. I also told them that the recognition I had received, so far, actually felt pretty good.
The irony is, that in all fourteen countries, I’ve been to, including India and France, a majority of employees indicated through engagement surveys that they did not feel valued and appreciated for the work they did. They lacked recognition, beyond rewards and pay.
A subscriber, and manager, from South Africa, raised the concern of how senior leaders would not permit managers and staff to practice giving recognition to one another. They even had a hard time enlisting HR’s help with making real recognition happen in their organization.
What would you do in such a situation? Can one manager impact an organization to make recognition happen?
Following are some suggestions to consider when leaders get in the way of employee recognition. (more…)
What happens when your organization doesn’t even have a purpose for recognition? Why should you have a written mission statement for recognition?
That’s the dilemma one of your fellow subscribers submitted. For them, their biggest struggle is not having a formal company mission regarding recognition.
Too often, the focus for many organizations with recognition is limited to recognition programs. Recognition programs should be viewed as simply a tool to help people practice the more important, day-to-day practice of recognition giving.
That’s why your purpose for recognition should always include recognition practices as well as your recognition programs.
How can you create a recognition mission statement? (more…)
You’re excited about your recognition programs portal. You have everything you have asked for over several years of design and development.
Your recognition portal houses a recent peer-to-peer, social recognition program. You can easily access your career milestones program from here as well. The social news feed allows everyone to know about career and personal anniversaries and people can make comments, add replies, and like messages of praise, acknowledgment, and thanks for the great things happening at your company.
And, your supervisors and managers, have access to a performance-based reward and recognition program. Here they can give rewards accompanied by recognition to employees who go above and beyond in their work.
You launch your new all-access recognition portal. Then it’s crickets.
Your wish is to get more employees and managers involved in effectively using your recognition programs.
Is there anything you can do to invite greater participation with your recognition portal? What are some principles you can apply to make your site more engaging? (more…)
Whether you have a vendor designed social recognition program, or an enterprise social networking service like Yammer or Jive, learn to use them to their maximum recognition effectiveness.
The recommendation I am giving to you is the value of adding comments to your social news feed. (more…)
A challenge that one of our subscriber’s faces is keeping recognition in the forefront of people’s minds. Some of you likely experience the same problem.
You can find yourself asking questions of yourself, like:
We are going to explore ways to keep recognition alive and well in your organization. (more…)
In your role, as a leader or administrator of employee recognition programs and practices, you will often find yourself having to convince, and influence leaders, on recognition programs, budgets, and strategizing recognition.
Human resource leaders, as well as recognition professionals, have not necessarily helped the recognition cause along the way.
For too long, recognition professionals have been relegated to the position of party planners and balloon-blower-uppers, which instilled a negative perception of our role. Senior leaders often see recognition as just trinkets and trash, primarily because of the limited budgets they’ve allocated to recognition, which limits what is available for you to spend. Then there’s the persistent argument, that career milestone recognition is a waste of money because these programs don’t move performance and there’s no ROI from them.
How can you overcome these negative stereotypes? What can you do to convince your senior leaders otherwise? (more…)
Our companies have oodles of great employees who deserve red carpet treatment. We need to make sure we celebrate their achievements and recognize their hard work and contributions. Many of our employees quietly, and consistently, perform amazing work behind the scenes. Apply these Top 10 Ways and make your great employees feel like stars. (more…)
Organizations need to do a much better job of aligning recognition practices and programs with the great things their employees do.
The 2017 WorldatWork Trends in Employee Recognition Survey showed that above-and-beyond performance recognition programs were offered by 77 percent of the organizations surveyed. The challenge with above-and-beyond programs is that so few employees can ever be “above-and-beyond” at any one time. This leaves a lot of employees out in the cold, so to speak, from being recognized for positive actions.
WorldatWork results also revealed how only 51 percent of the companies offered programs to motivate specific behaviors.
In the past five years, recognition programs used to motivate specific behaviors, have risen from the fourth most used type of program to now being in the third position. However, even with this apparent popularity rise, behavioral type recognition programs only recognized 25 percent of employees, on average, in the past 12 months of the survey.
How can you, as a recognition program leader, use your recognition programs to consistently reinforce positive behaviors and lift workplace performance? (more…)