3 Ways to Stop Hiding Recognition Training

Are you hiding your recognition training from your managers and employees?

Many managers sincerely want to do better at giving positive feedback and recognition to deserving employees.

You’ll often find many managers rose to their current position based upon demonstrating excellent technical or professionals skills versus any great people skills strength.

If they are lucky, the company might send them off to receive supervisory/ management, or leadership development training with courses they have in-house.

When I ask to see the curriculum to look at their recognition education and training, I often find it buried somewhere under performance management or perhaps motivation. And if you’re really lucky they might spend a whole half hour on addressing the topic of employee recognition.

Recognition training requires a much higher profile and more in-depth learning focus.

Check out these three ideas for bringing recognition learning front and centre.

1. Reveal Everything You’ve Got on Recognition: Your people want to know where they can go online and offline to find information, resources and education on the art and practice of giving recognition. Provide both a manager and employee resource section on your intranet with tips, guidelines and articles they can read on a variety of subjects relating to feedback, recognition and rewards. Make sure you have a business library stocked with authoritative business and social science books that will open people’s eyes to the intricacies and potential when recognition is done right.

2. Give The Expectations and Why of Recognition: You need to give people permission to give people recognition. It might sound corny but you’ll be amazed how many supervisors and managers don’t know what a company wants. They may also lack confidence with how to give recognition the right way. Others will want to know why they should be doing this and what difference will it make. You need to tell them why and give them the tools and education they need. Make sure all your recognition education has clear learning objectives. I have repeatedly seen from our research that managers who are taught how to give recognition properly have more positive relationships with their employees and in turn achieve higher performance results.

3. Show and Tell People How to Give Recognition: One of the reasons I got into the business of educating and consulting with leaders on giving recognition the right way, is because I saw the missing gap – a lack of education and training on employee recognition. Since recognition is both art and practice you must build in application of newly acquired skills. Education and training can be face-to-face through in class instruction, blended learning, or even online eLearning like our Vistance Learning offering, which provides practical bite-sized skills content. Goals should be expected of each learner to put into practice what they have learned and to hold them accountable for implementing and reporting back to their manager. Course completion is not finalized until they are successful in transferring the skills in their work practices and sharing what they have learned.

You and I can never be satisfied until all of our managers and employees are proficient in appreciating their people for who they are and recognizing them for what they do.

Let’s make recognition education and training much more open.

Question: What are you doing to prevent recognition learning from becoming hidden?

Roy is no longer writing new content for this site (he has retired!), but you can subscribe to Engage2Excel’s blog as Engage2Excel will be taking Roy’s place writing about similar topics on employee recognition and retention, leadership and strategy.