From Individual Rewards to Organisational Outcomes: A New Narrative for Promotions

If you were asked “how would you like to be appreciated or recognised for your contributions to your organisation’s successes?” What would be your immediate response? In a poll I conducted on LinkedIn, the majority of the respondents shared that they prefer to be acknowledged for their contributions to their organisations through enhanced visibility and genuine appreciation.

Promotions and performance management are critical aspects of an organisation's success. They play a pivotal role in motivating employees, driving productivity, and nurturing a positive work environment. Understanding their impact is essential for designing a process that creates a thriving and high-performing workforce. It’s important to understand the value of promotions and how it links to the organisational outcomes, for example:

• Motivation and employee engagement, by way of tangible rewards, through career advancement, more opportunities for development and increase commitment towards the organisation.
• An effective promotion system can significantly contribute towards?talent retention, while the reputation of this fair system of promotion may also be?attracting top talent?seeking their own advancement.
• While not always the case,?embedding a strong feedback culture?and a development plan enables individuals to focus on skills and capabilities to develop to fulfill their current roles and prepare for the future next steps.
• Employees who see a clear path for the work contribution and their career advancement ambitions are more likely to be?committed to enhancing their skills?and contributing their best efforts to achieve individual and organisational goals.

In an experiment we have conducted, we have made a few shifts in language and structure, which are designed to achieve some of these outcomes:

• Focus on Impact?- By shifting the narrative of promotions and performance management as a rewards mechanism to a renewed focus to positive reinforcement of behaviours that help create value and impact, it shifts the question from “what’s in it for me?” to “how might I behave to serve our end customers?”?
• Developing a Feedback Culture?- Designing a process that allows individuals to flex those feedback muscles regularly helps the teams communicate better, build trust and also care for each other’s individual professional development.
• Radical Transparency and Fierce Inclusion?(borrowing from Niaga’s Principles) - Demystifying some closed door calibrations and competition in traditional promotions processes and shifting to clearly defined guardrails for promotion, a cross-hierarchical panel-based approach to decision-making and a development-bias communication model towards the applicants , we leverage transparency to increase self-awareness and trust within the team, and allow newcomers and senior teammates to feel seen, heard and appreciated.
• Self-nomination?- Self nomination is a key differentiator from the leader-led and peer-based nominations in traditional promotion systems. The self-nomination is an enabler for buy-in and increased accountability, which are in turn levers for high performance.?
• Rhythms in Communication?- When things are done behind closed doors, individuals feel powerless against time, which can lead to frustration. By communicating a clear heartbeat around the promotion process, everyone moves with the rhythm, expectations are managed to a certain extent.?Rather than feeling the anxiety in a waiting room, rhythms help to cope with ebb and flow of emotions around this process.