It was yesterday when I heard about an organization that had set up a formal award program called their CEO Award. The only problem was this formal award program was being undermined by other leaders and managers. Not very helpful.
Make a nominated formal award program a success right from the get-go. Look at the following factors and see what you can control for to make your award program a great one.
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One of the common decisions senior leaders make with length of service awards is their perception that they don’t produce any measurable return for the organization, is dropping them completely.
This rationale of career milestone awards not impacting performance numbers and results has been around for many years.
However, there is definitely an impact made when you give these awards. So, what benefits are there from continuing with milestone recognition? Should you keep going with length of service award programs?
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Awards are wonderful things.
They are the most valuable possessions in the world to the people who receive them.
Awards straddle between recognition and rewards in that they recognize an individual or team and may include a trophy and a reward. For what we will discuss here, they also provide a means to publicly honor the best of the best either through earned merit, length of service, or through an adjudication of a nomination.
People will dress up for award events. They may even take the day off to prepare. People look forward to awarding ceremonies for weeks ahead.
You should know by now that award presentations are a big deal and so you had better get them right. Here’s how to prepare to give an effective award presentation.
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Yes, the Oscars take place in Los Angeles as usual, but in two different locations. They will broadcast it from the Dolby Theatre, which is where it has been held since 2002, and at the Union Station, a transit hub for the city.
Winning an Oscars award is totally a numbers game. But the vote represents the endorsement of all your industry peers.
Membership in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is now well over the 10,000 mark, which increases the voting members into the 9600+ range since they announced last year that agents now get voting rights, too.
I will share with you exactly what happens in the selection of an Oscars Award winner.
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You must always remember one principle of recognition, and that is your organizational culture will drive recognition practices and recognition programs throughout your organization.
In like manner, it is the organization’s customary recognition practices and exemplary usage of your recognition programs that will drive your organizational culture.
No wonder so many organizations gear up their recognition programs to focus on recognizing people who live their values.
Look at the various ways in which you can tie recognition practices and programs to your organizational values.
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Here we are with another New Year and I want to share with you the Top 10 Posts for 2019.
I will reflect along with you on why perhaps you and many other readers read these more than other posts that didn’t quite make the top rankings.
In tenth position was the post How to Help a Leader Who’s Not a Good Recognizer. Obviously, this leadership focused article resonated with many of you who need some ideas and help with coaching the challenged leader to become a better recognizer of peers and staff.
Leaders are not always in their position for their people skills—although they certainly help—and for that reason they often have more left-brain, executive functioning and logical skills. Some, not all, need a helping hand to get the people skills down and realize how important recognition is to the people that work for them.
The topic in ninth position is How to Increase the Impact of Your Formal Award Programs, which I know many of you want desperately to improve and stand out. There are some basic steps you can follow, and I hope you can make them come alive in 2020.
Most organizations have some formal award programs going on. But few organizations set objectives for what they want to achieve from conducting nomination submissions and planning awards events.
I didn’t expect this post to rank as high as it did. It seems many of you wanted to learn how they select Oscar awards winners so How Oscar Awards Nominations Are Selected came in at number eight. Recognition professionals are always looking to benchmark against best practices, so I hope you gain some insights from this post.
The Oscars always share the public limelight on what people think an awards ceremony should look like. Understanding how the award winners are selected might help you raise or lower your own expectations on how you should determine your award recipients.
In seventh position we have a leadership focus again and this time it’s on feedback. What Makes Giving Feedback So Difficult for Leaders? provides you with some perspective and actions you can take to assist those having difficulty with this area.
I think we’re hitting on soft skills here and how they are not as easy as they seem. Giving meaningful feedback is something all of us can become better at.
For those of you who haven’t created a written recognition strategy document yet, our sixth ranked post of A Quick and Easy Recognition Strategy to Get You Going should help you out. It is better to have a basic document in place to guide you along than not having a strategy at all.
Make sure you become more intentional and strategic with your recognition practices and programs. This post’s ranking probably reflects the need for an easy way to write up a recognition strategy.
It seems some of us need pointers on overcoming our discomfort with giving recognition. In fact, our fifth post on Why Are We So Uncomfortable Giving Recognition to People? gives great reminders for why some of us find recognition giving an awkward experience.
The reality of this post’s ranking is the human tendency that expressing emotions and validating the great things people around us do is more difficult than we think.
There are probably many organizations that would enjoy our fourth ranked post on How to Get Employees to Use Your Recognition Programs. It takes constant effort to communicate, educate, and exemplify great program usage to have employees follow in our footsteps.
The whole preparation and planning required to make recognition programs successful is not something a lot of organizations do well. Everyone wants to get more employees using their programs more frequently.
I am so glad my post on Why Being Specific Increases the Value of Recognition made it to third place. It validates for me that many of you see the importance and need for recognition specificity. Put this into practice and teach others to do the same and recognition will go a long way to becoming improved.
Recognition specificity is one of my favorite topics around recognition giving. Intuitively, many of you know it is important but just want to know how to do it better.
Second on the ranking list was the post on What Your Leaders Can Do to Lead Recognition. It tires many of you to fight the recognition battles alone. You need leaders to step up to the plate and make a strategic pitch for the cause of employee recognition.
A bit of a surprise for me was seeing this post in number two position. But it paints a picture that we desperately need leadership around employee recognition.
And the top-ranked post for 2019 was… How To Improve Recognition With A Great Learning Curriculum. This shows the need from many of you to have ongoing learning and development on recognition practices and using programs properly.
Be constantly learning the essential recognition skills and behaviors to give meaningful recognition. Understand the importance of your recognition programs and humanize your interaction with the programs to better connect with and value your employees.
Happy New Year to everyone. Become a better real recognition giver this year.
Recognition Reflection: What insights can you gain from the usage of your recognition programs over the past year?
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.
Most organizations have a formal awards program that is their “best-of-the-best” academy awards event. These formal award programs are truly the best performance ranking, or earned award, such as the top salesperson, or they are nomination based and selected by a judging committee.
Often the selected jurors are previous award recipients because they know the standard required to become an award winner.
But does using previous award winners as jurors who are peers of potential award candidates lead to bias in selecting winners?
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What impact are your formal recognition programs having on your people and their performance? Are you designing your best-of-the-best and above-and-beyond award programs to make a difference?
According to the World at Work 2017 Trends in Employee Recognition Survey, 77% of organizations have above-and-beyond performance programs, and only 17% of them have what they termed as formal programs. They did not delineate or define well what they meant by formal recognition.
The Conference Board of Canada in their 2017 report on recognition found that 50% of corporations have formal company-wide recognition programs in place. Organizations that have these programs recognize outstanding individual achievement as their main purpose and organize large-scale celebration events to accompany these awards.
But neither study pursued whether these formal award programs had achieved their objectives or if they considered the award programs effective or not.
Look at the following seven ideas for building greater impact into your existing formal award programs.
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Most organizations have a formal award programs that are their pinnacle of excellence for all their employees to aspire to.
You might have these kinds of formal programs where you work, too. They’re often called by a prestigious leadership position the company wants to associate with the award. You’ll hear awards named the President’s Award, Chairman’s or CEO’s Award. Or they may go for a more branded name appeal such as Bravo Award, Excellence Award, or Pinnacle Award.
Both position title or brand named awards, are usually appended with various award categories the company wants people to focus on. They attach qualities or values like Leadership, Innovation, Customer Service, or Citizenship, etc. to the award name.
But for all the time, effort, and energy put into these formal award programs you are likely only awarding around 1% to 2% of your employee base. In larger organizations this percentage is even less.
What can you do to elevate the quality of your existing formal award programs?
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It’s Oscar Awards season.
They have submitted a full list of nominees, along with best picture nominees by over 6,000 voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
They sent in those nominations during the month of December. Members made their selection for which movie and which artists they felt merit being this year’s Oscar winners.
Each voting member belongs to just one of the seventeen branches of the Academy such as actors, casting directors, costumer designers, producers, and many others involved in the magic of the movies.
But who judges the nominations? How are Oscar Awards nominations evaluated?
I will open the curtain on the process for you right now so you’ll be ready for the Academy Awards night. You’ll know when the presenter reads the envelope, announcing, “And the winner is…” exactly what it took to get to that special moment. (more…)