Award Employees

The following ideas on praising and recognizing employees were stolen shamelessly from this post on CBS Money Watch written by Jeff Haden.  Jeff has ghost written many non-fiction books for some of the smartest CEOs in business and we believe has a prescient understanding of employee engagement and recognition.  You can view his works at www.blackbirdinc.com 

Jeff’s premise is not to create a special program to praise your employees, you don’t need one.  And we wholeheartedly agree!   Too many companies in the award industry think you need those elaborate electronic programs with points allocated for certain employee performance improvement.  They hold the points in a bank account and then redeem them for the latest espresso machine or electronic gadget of the moment, all of which are usually way overpriced. 

Instead just follow some of these practical and simple steps to make sure you are giving your employees the recognition they deserve: 

“Treat employees like snowflakes.” 

Everyone is different; recognize each in the way that gives them the greatest impact. 

“Never wait”

Recognizing as soon after the performance has occurred is never too soon.  When you wait you lose the impact of the recognition. 

“Be specific.”

Telling someone they did a great job without telling them will often fall on deaf ears and you will lose the moment.  When you’re specific it tells the employee that you are paying attention and you know what they did and they’ll also know what exactly to do the next time.   

“Be sincere.”

Insincerity will hurt more than help and will be taken negatively.  Don’t waste your time if your not going to be sincere.   

“Leave out the ‘constructive’ stuff.”

Don’t use recognition as a “teaching moment”….ever.  You greatly lessen the effect of the recognition in the first place. 

“Be proactive.”

Focus more on employees doing things right than doing them wrong. 

“Try the “just because” flowers approach.”

A spring bouquet that is a surprise often has a bigger impact than Valentine’s Day roses.  A surprise visit from the CEO to thank someone can be priceless. 

“Always seek a balance.”

It’s easy to recognize the best, but look for reasons to spread the wealth.  A little encourage to an average or poor performer can help them become your best performers. 

“Recognizing effort and achievement is self-reinforcing: When you do a better job of recognizing employees they tend to perform better — giving you even more achievements recognized”      

                                Jeff Haden

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Employee feedback is important, so is recognition of positive performance.  They should go hand in hand.

Over the years we’ve been amazed at the stories we’ve heard about managers that don’t know how to give feedback to difficult employees.  So, they just avoid it entirely or just give them average feedback thinking that average is bad.   In many ways it’s like what some teachers do with their students just to get them passed and on to the next grade.

No one wants to deal with negative performance issues.  No one wants to be the bad guy and tell it like it is, so they sugar coat things, they aren’t direct and they don’t tell the truth.  That just delays the issue and pawns the employee off to the next person who has to manage them.

Unfortunately giving feedback and is more subjective than objective.  Everyone looks at employee feedback through their own eyes and appraise employees accordingly.  What one sees as an inadequacy, another might see as average performance or even as strength?  As much as companies try their best to appraise the performance and provide feedback objectively it’s not always easy to do.

Of course when you do have a very difficult employee you won’t always be able to salvage them.  In those cases, it’s ok to cut your losses and recommend that they might want to look for a position that is more suitable to their own needs.  If not, they will likely become disengaged, or worse yet actively disengaged, and before you know it will have brought down some other less that engaged employees to be totally negative.

In the meantime, do your best to know and utilize the ways to effectively provide feedback, positively or negatively.  If it is negative, when they make a concerted effort to change and improve their performance, but sure to recognize that change with positive reinforcement.  Of course when it’s positive performance and the employee’s accomplishments are particularly noteworthy, then by all means praise them and recognize them for that performance.

Many folks have written about all the ways to give effective feedback.  We came across this article from last year that we feel is well done and provides all you’ll need to know to start an effective feedback campaign for you employees.

And, if the feedback is very positive and you are so inclined and want to give them a small reward along with the recognition, think of the Award of Choice card (a shameless plug).  It is a terrific system that gives the employee terrific choice with no administrative fees for you.

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Will corporate award planners every truly understand the difference between an incentive program and a recognition program?  Try as some of the experts in the industry might to educate them; these two terms are constantly being interchanged. 

The Employee Engagement Alliance defines the two types of programs as this…

“Incentive programs are used to drive behaviors conducive to practically any business objective. Recognition programs are used to recognize individuals whose accomplishments were particularly noteworthy.” 

We’ve addressed the issue on several occasions but many folks still persist on confusing them.   Here’s an excellent post from our friend Paul Hebert at I2I Incentive Intelligence that will give you one way of looking at a difference between the two.  Another great way to differentiate them is by reading this post from the Compensation Café on the Right vs Wrong Incentives.  As this article comes to us from a well-respected blog on cash compensation, it gives us a good look at the same things we need to consider when discussing incentives or recognition to improve performance.   

The key paragraph in this compensation piece is the discussion of a financial rationale and these questions… 

“What will the company receive in return for the increased costs of an incentive program?” and “If you are planning to increase your targeted compensation costs of an affected group, how will you answer the ROI question? 

All well planned non-cash incentive programs follow the same methodology.  They plan for an ROI.  This is the single largest difference between incentives and recognition! 

The award industry has struggled for years to apply any sort of meaningful ROI to a recognition system.  They haven’t figured out a good way to do it and never will based on the metrics and fundamental structure they use for these types of programs. 

And as mentioned in the Compensation Café article…

Caution: You had better provide a business rationale, and not subjective phraseology like “survey says” or “everyone else is doing it” or even “it’s the right thing to do.’ Management tends to frown on such trivial rationalizations.

So for all corporate award planners, please get your definitions straight.  Regardless of what all the prize peddlers in the industry tell you, you won’t change behavior and drive significant results with a recognition program.  Recognition programs can provide you with a whole different set of benefits.  You can drive results with an incentive program that is well designed and implemented, but it won’t necessarily recognize specific behaviors of employees whose accomplishes are particularly noteworthy.

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Sound like a trick question?  Well it’s not; it is raised by this article that discusses research conducted by the Impact Achievement Group, a leadership development consultancy.  Just when you thought the entire recognition aspect of employee engagement has become a proven employee improvement strategy, along comes “research” that attempts to negate the value of employee recognition programs.  Well at least it tries to contradict employee recognition programs as the research download states that they want to “challenge existing assumptions and provide an impetus to further exploration.”  They probably should have said “provide an impetus for further clarification” as the research was not very evident nor was it very clear and certainly provided no evidence to support conclusions drawn. 

In our opinion this piece is nothing more than a compilation of re-occurring thought on the values of recognition awards to change behavior in the workplace and is more self-promotional than anything else.   In addition they include some thought  from the works of Herzberg in the sixties as if to authenticate their position, all of which makes for a hodgepodge of creative deductive reasoning that leaves you a tad baffled.  Hey, we’re not saying their conclusions are wrong, just a little confusing. 

As is often the case, the Impact Achievement Group, who did the research, doesn’t seem to have a clue about the difference between an employee recognition program and an employee motivation or incentive program.  They also hang their case on “happy employees” not being productive, but productive employees being “happy.”  Not sure where the “happy” came into to picture, we’ve always heard “engaged” as the buzz word of the day.  We’ve been designing and implementing recognition or incentive programs going on 40 years and have never used “happy” as the objective of the program.   

We believe the issue here is who is best equipped to assist companies in improving employee performance.  There are many who claim the high ground on this, not the least of which is the consultant types as mentioned here whose income is dependent on assessment, coaching, training etc., but not awards.  Others include those research types who want to research every nuance possible of the employee world.  Then we have the communication companies who feel that all you need to do is communicate better and your woes will be gone.  Then you have the recognition and award companies who hang their hat on the award as the driving factor.  Take your pick, read up on all of them, you’ll find that they all say much the same thing.   

If you believe that employee engagement (or happiness) is a behavioral issue (which we do) you might want to consider tackling the issue using the behavior model.   In it you’ll find that research, training, communication and measurement and feedback are all part of changing behavior, with positive consequences as the piece to close the loop and continue the behavioral circle.   As “positive consequences” include the reward piece, than it would seem that it is kind of difficult to extricate the reward and recognition from the total.  Or are we just being too simplistic here? 

Let’s stop thinking about whether reward and recognition does or doesn’t work in helping to engage employees and improve performance.  There is plenty of evidence out there to support that conclusion.  I don’t know if engaged means they’re happy, but it does mean they are performing better than those who are not engaged.  What do you think?

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May the Christmas angel whisper only thoughts of peace, love and happiness in your ears. 

From all of us at AwardEmployees, have a wonderful Christmas holiday and happy and healthy New Year.

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