Tag Archives: Managers

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Why It Is Okay To Have Manager Approvals for Rewards

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You and I know that recognition and reward programs have to be designed with the right business rules to make their use fair and equitable.

This is especially the case where performance-based recognition and reward programs exist. Such programs have their own rules for who is eligible to give and receive rewards. 

Reward programs where peers nominate someone to receive a reward may even require that a manager approve of whether the desired recipient should receive the reward. 

And yet there are some organizations who say they don’t want a manager’s approval at all. This takes too much time to approve a reward nomination. How will it look to employees? 

However, I am here to tell you it is okay to have managers approve reward nominations. 

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How To Use SMS To Remind People To Give Recognition

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Do your employees feel valued and appreciated for their work contributions? If not, is it because recognition is not top of mind for your leaders and managers? What if you could remind your leaders and managers to recognize more often? Are there ways that technology can help? 

There is a way to nudge your leaders and managers into giving more frequent and better day-to-day recognition to their direct reports, and others. You can create triggers for your leaders and managers to give more meaningful and consistent recognition to people. This will guarantee affecting the overall employee experience and improve performance, too.  

How do you do this? Listen up!

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How To Hold People Accountable for Giving Better Recognition

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Holding people accountable for giving effective and meaningful recognition brings together something good—recognition—with something uncomfortable, like, accountability.

It takes courage to deal with the conflict of holding people accountable. And courage is exactly what good management requires.

Follow these accountability steps to move the dial on recognition giving.

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How to Deal with Managers Who Don’t See a Need to Change

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We’ve all seen them in action. Some of us even report to one.

These are the managers who don’t seem to want to change their behavior. In our recognition scenario, these are the managers who don’t recognize their direct reports, let alone anyone else working around them.

How are you supposed to get a manager like this to change? 

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What Employees Think of Recognition From Their Leaders

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You and I know that there are many employees who are not getting recognized enough. 

To give people the right recognition, it would also be helpful to know the best person to make this happen. Who do your employees prefer most to be recognized by? Is it by your leaders, by their immediate supervisor or manager, or by their peers?

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What Should You Do If Your Recognition Education Fails?

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Most corporate training and education programs work very well. But now and then you get an educational program, whether in-class, online, blended, or via one of the many learning delivery methods, that ends up being a failure.

If you were following the Kirkpatrick Model and the levels of training evaluation, you might do a Level 3 evaluation to examine participant’s behaviors after the training. You want to find out the degree participants are now actively applying what they learned in the training sessions back on the job. 

You conduct a survey to find out what learning participants are doing or not doing with giving employee recognition. Now you find out that a majority of the learners are not doing much with the skills and principles they were taught.

What can you do to correct this problem? How would you handle the fact that your recognition education failed?

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Taking a Quick Look at Career Milestone Awards

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How are your career milestone or service award programs doing these days?

It seems the majority of organizations have tenure or long service award programs. According to WorldatWork’s 2017 Trends in Employee Recognition, length of service recognition remains the top ranked recognition program with 85 percent of organizations. 

Historically, and especially within the public sector, career milestone years were only acknowledged when an employee reached 25 years or longer. Today, most progressive organizations commence with at least 5 years and then celebrate every 5-year increment thereafter.

But when you look at the US Bureau of Labor Statistics the average tenure for salaried employees is 4.2 years. That average drops to 2.8 years for the mobile 25 to 34 year old employees.

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How to Recognize Offline Employees When You Have Recognition Programs

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You are grateful that your company has these great, online recognition programs, to send important and worthy messages of recognition to people.

Now you can send branded eCards to one another when someone is seen living your corporate values or achieving a strategic priority. You can even send messages of appreciation and recognition via a social newsfeed on your social recognition program. Peers can like these comments about their colleagues and add their own words of commendation and praise. And, your managers, can nominate employees for an award or actually reward them with points for going above and beyond.

That is, as long as employees have an email address, a computer or an electronic device, and can receive notifications from any of the above vehicles of recognition.

But, if many of your employees are offline and have no company email address, and also no electronic device on the job, how do you get frontline supervisors and managers to embrace online recognition programs? (more…)

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Getting Managers to be Proactive with Recognition Giving

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Some of you manage an array of different employee recognition programs and work hard to maintain them and promote them.

While I have written about the need for recognition to be multi-directional in origin and not be owned by managers and supervisors alone, it is still very important to enlist management support.

Your goal should be to get managers excited about expressing recognition to employees and help them prepare to give it face-to-face and online. If you can help them to anticipate when recognition should occur in an employee’s life then they will become eager to give recognition.

Think about the following trigger points to help managers be proactive with recognition giving. (more…)

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Showing Managers How To Give Great Recognition

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It’s the reason I started my company in educating and training managers over twenty years ago. I saw that no one was showing managers how to give meaningful and effective recognition to their employees.

Oh, there were a lot of memos and mandates from on high. Senior leaders would always tell managers to say “thank you” more often. This was always triggered following the latest employee satisfaction or engagement survey revealing low scores with employee recognition.

You probably know the proverb from the Chinese philosopher, Confucius that states, “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”

This has been the catalyst for why managers can have a hard time giving recognition. Followed through to the end it is also the key solution. (more…)