How To Get Ready To Educate People About Giving Recognition

When you think education and training is the next steps to take with making real recognition happen where you work, there are a few things to take into consideration first before planning the training program.

In fact, if you prepare yourself and the prospective learners properly, then they will better learn how to give more meaningful and effective recognition to those they work with.

Prior preparation also impacts those involved in designing and developing the learning curriculum and planning the right methods of delivery.

Let’s get ready to educate your employees about recognizing one another the right way.

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What Should You Do If Your Recognition Education Fails?

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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How To Transfer Recognition Skills Back on the Job

An area of concern when conducting workshops around learning recognition-giving skills is ensuring learners will apply the learned skills back on the job.

Below are my recommendations I use with participants in my learning sessions. 

Set up your workshop or seminar session so that attendees sit in table groups with fellow learners. Where possible, try to get a diversity of attendees at each table so they’re not sitting with everyone they know from their own department or work team.

Towards the end of the training session the final activity is choosing a realistic and manageable goal to implement a recognition specific skill or principle learned from the session over the next 30-days. The expectation is that you will follow up with each group’s participants to gather team results and compile a transfer of learning report.

This is the best way to get people to apply the recognition skills they learn in training into their jobs. Consider the following steps in making a transfer of learning a success.

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Showing Managers How To Give Great Recognition

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…)

5 Ways To Get Managers to Complete Recognition Training

It’s essential to educate your managers on giving real recognition the right way. If behaviors are going to change they need to learn how to do so.

You can provide great in-class workshop sessions or online learning courses on employee recognition and still not be able to get your managers on board in taking them – let alone completing them.

What can you do to get your managers to complete the recognition training you provide for them? (more…)

What Leaders Need, To Be a Positive Recognition Example

I was recently asked the question, “how do you get management involvement with recognition?” The individual posing the question was asking for ideas for gaining both personal involvement of leaders, as well as getting them to set the right, recognition giving example.

Unfortunately, not everyone in a management or leadership position is identified or hired for being a good “people” person with strong interpersonal skills. Many individuals are recruited or rise to these leadership positions based on their technical skills or professional competency.

Where we fail with leadership development is in holding individuals accountable for learning, practicing, and maintaining necessary people skills – like giving recognition. We rely on in-class leadership training, microlearning via a learning management system, or personal development through reading the latest leadership books. You can obtain new people skill knowledge this way but not the personal commitment for setting an example.

What can you do to instill leadership example for meaningful recognition giving? (more…)

How To Make Learning Stick Across the Generations

Educating employees from across the different generations in the workplace is no easy task.

Most adult learning methodology today focuses on learner-centered instruction versus the traditional instructor-centered style of the past.

You know the benefits of experiential learning methods and ways to generate reflective insights. This helps generalize principles and practices to job situations where learners can apply acquired skills, knowledge, and perspectives back in the workplace. (more…)

How To Guarantee Managers Use Recognition Skills

C-suite leaders are passionate about the financial success of the company. That’s why you had better produce measurable results for your training dollars as other department managers vie for the same monies. A lack of return or business impact from training is the biggest reason why training budgets get cut when money is tight. You have to prove you can make a difference to the bottom-line. (more…)