8 scary things about the state of employee recognition

In the last year or so we've spoken to 1600+ North American organizations and thousands of their employees about what was top of mind for them when it came to culture and the tools they were using to bring about change.

87% of the CEOs we spoke to pointed to culture and engagement as their top people related business issue. Nearly an equal percentage conceded confusion in navigating a new lexicon for what these terms actually mean and a vendor landscape with literally hundreds of providers claiming they have the secret sauce.

In speaking with practitioners, they pointed to a "toolkit" that boasted 5 tool types:

• Measurement & analytics provide validated views of your team’s level of engagement and trigger practical guidance for managers with needed context.
• Modern employee engagement solutions empower leaders and managers to better give and receive feedback.
• Feedback tools are delivering insight to everything from feelings about a project to daily sentiment to requests for Friday’s team lunch.
• The ability to recognize performance at both the team and peer to peer level further reinforces the impact and meaning of work.
• Company-wide communication brings everyone together, whether it’s to celebrate the latest company milestone or for directions to the company outing.

When we focused in on recognition specifically, conversations with both employees and program owners revealed what wasn't working:

Employees told us:

1. “Recognition should be available where I do my work.”
2. “Why is my recognition not visible? I want people to see what I have done.”
3. “Not being able to recognize a group of employees is limiting”
4. “Why do we have so many systems? I sometimes can’t even find the nominations site”

The HR professionals who own the programs told us their current approaches were hindered by:

1. No governance = not spending strategically
2. No consistency across business units/globe
3. No sense of employee value
4. No empowerment for people managers

Why Does Recognition Matter?

Let’s spend a moment to look at why recognition matters in the first place, for the individual and the enterprise.

For individuals, a recent study shows that the #1 reason people leave their jobs is for lack of appreciation.

The psychologist William James told us that the deepest human need is to be appreciated.

We all want to be seen. We all want to be recognized for our accomplishments, especially when it’s genuine, from the heart and timely.

Maslow pointed all this out in the 1940s, that what motivates us is Esteem and Appreciation and Praise and Respect.

When an enterprise invests in this sort of infrastructure for the individual, it pays. So, we invest.

We have pizza lunches and employee appreciation days and we have corporate swag and points programs and peer recognition and years of service awards and president’s club. Valiant efforts, some.

To ensure that employees stay and are motivated to do the job they are paid for we've found there are four elements of a secret sauce.

The Four C's

There are 4 C’s, 4 key words that define the path forward, whether you’re launching a new program, merging systems after a merger or slapping on a new coat of paint on an existing program.

Culture

Nickels and dimes are hard to come by when trying to fund our people projects. Programs that are not aligned with what drives value for your business will not be funded. What we’ve funded traditionally is climate - making our workplaces feel a certain way.

So that begets a question about what drives your business? It’s culture.

According to Jason Korman of Gapingvoid, "To survive and thrive in today’s market, a healthy corporate culture is more important than ever."

Korman's article for the MIT Sloan Management Review makes the argument for "framing culture as a management system."

Korman debunks myths about what culture is not - posters on the wall, company get togethers, the bait and switch of what we tell candidates and what it's really like when they're in the fold - and points to a study by the Annual Review of Psychology about what culture actually is:

This ain't about warm fuzzies.

The "High-Purpose Cultures" Korman studied "had employee turnover rates approximately 50% lower than competitors in their own industries." 

The retention of talent alone represents a cost savings, not to mention the intangible value of knowledge retention.

Here's a great story about how Ricoh USA, Inc. (a TemboSocial customer) built a system for capturing and curating culture through stories of customer success.

Currency

This has several meanings. It first speaks to understanding what employees value. Gone are the days when you were all-in on points or prizes or a non-monetary solution. Every program is a blend because the workforce is a blend.

Currency also refers to time. That in order for recognition to have value it must be timely.

Rather than waiting til the end of the year to celebrate 12 months, giving employees the opportunity to recognize and be recognized in the act of a job well done has great currency.

In the same way, pay increases, bonuses, nominations for the employee of the year award may give a temporary jolt in motivating staff that, according to Gartner, "tails off quickly as time passes."

Their report, "Use Recognition and Reward Programs to Boost HR and Talent Effectiveness" makes the argument for a unified approach to employee recognition that eliminates siloes and spikes in participation.

Great workplaces like RBC and TD use a systematic approach that builds motivation - and momentum - every day, for every employee.

Curated

Recognition today is mostly invisible because most programs are one-to-one or disconnected from each other.

They are an exchange between a manager and their direct report. They are a nomination submitted to a committee that if not selected as a winner for presidents club or the annual gala, never sees the light of day. If you’ve done the work to ALIGN your program, it makes sense that everyone in the organization has the opportunity to discover these culture shaping moments and learn from them, whether they’ve been with your company a day, a year or 10.

Curating this approach means that content is browsable, searchable, discoverable.

Connected

Organizations are being mandated to work within a much more limited technical tool box and to find solutions that fit inside that box. Stand alone portals are not going to be funded, not only because they expose the business to risk but because employees aren’t going to go there in the first place.

Josh Bersin talks about an app-ecosystem that’s integrated - that plugs into to the existing environments your employees use every day. That is frictionless.

Whether you own the HR Tech budget or need to ask your partners in IT for money, you enhance your chances of winning budget when you consider tools that integrate. Part of the checklist needs to be tools for any intranet, in any language and on any device so you can reach & reward employees wherever they are.

The ability to connect means that we should be able to deliver highly relevant content to individuals. To make it easy for them to access the people and the skills they need to be productive.

"Low Cost, High Impact"

Now's about the time when every organization will be spending time thinking about the time and money they'll spend next year on their people programs.

I recently spoke with a Director of HR who's been struggling to ride the wave of an enormous exit of talent.

As they dug into their engagement and exit surveys, employee recognition rose to the top as a key driver of engagement.

With 15,000+ employees globally, their current nomination-based program received under 1,000 nominations each year for 25 eventual winners. 

Worried about making a business case for a new approach to employee recognition, we re-framed the argument.

3,300 employees left the company this year because only 25 employees were recognized for doing good work.

To further their case, a workplace insight from Gallup helped them demonstrate recognition as a "low cost, high impact" human capital strategy.

The insight shares:

- "Top performers need to know their efforts are recognized and valued"

- "Employee recognition isn't one-size-fits-all"

- "Money isn't the only, or even the top, form of recognition"

Final Thoughts

Money is always tough to come by when trying to fund your people projects.

But the scarier truth on this hallowed day or horror, is that it's much more expensive to lie in wait and do nothing.

It's much more expensive to pretend there's not a connection between employee experience and customer experience.

And it's much more expensive to replace an employee that has left your company because they're not appreciated than to hire a brand new one.