HR, Safety, Fire, CSR & Supply Chain Awards

These days i see every company claiming to have been awarded CSR, Safety, Fire Safety, Environment, HR, Supply Chain Performance awards from temporary award companies, groups or entities without having credibility of their own.

Mostly these awards are managed through connections, relations or initiations of the award winning companies themselves. The Head of HR or the Head of Safety would be lured in by a friend (startups). The company winning the award will pay amount from 25K to 500K and sometimes 750K as sponsorship money to get a trophy or few certficates worth 5K to 10K. The CEOs think there company is doing great. The word performance is added to the award. To the outside world it appears the Safety Culture, HR Values, CSR Practices, The Environment of the award winning company is fabulous.

I agree it generates positive energy for sometime, but imagine feelings of all those workers who actually know how your environment is, what your safety standards are, how justfully your HR handles each employee, how much qualitative work your procurement guys do.

For the positive image in the outside world you generate negative feelings and vibes amongst 90-95% workers who work for you.

I also wonder if the KPIs are internationally known, accredited and accepted on a different scale such as True TRIR, Attrition Rate, TRFIR, employees average length of service, Safety Pyramids, employee independant satisfaction surveys etcetera are known to everyone so why companies cannot get awards on the same.

Why companies have to pay themsleves to get to an award function or an event?

Interestingly the culture of such cosmetic awards has spread out to Middle East as well and lot of departmental heads get tickets from the companies to be there for shopping of awards.

Even the awarding groups have started declaring themselves as National and International entities as if they are registered with some national institution or organisation owned by state.

Those giving awards on safety dont follow safety themselves often.

How many departments in your organization or company actually publish statistical KPIs that can be translated easily into organizational profits.

Values are easy to be announced and pronounced but very hard to implement.

By generating a help desk doesnot mean you have started satisfying your internal or extrenal customers, you need to wait for the reviews, responses and acknowledgments translated into profits and Stats.

Its better to give titles to the awards then to keep them general. When you announce positions you must pronounce calculations and basis of your judgment as well. You can only do this if you are pragmatic and you have done your spade work very well.

Titles could be like Best in Work Permit Management System, Best in low attrition rate, Best in long service record, best in quality of emergency response arrangements, best in average response to customer's query assessed through company data base linked with awarding comapnies software application for six months before award, loyality award for all employees who served for more then three decades in a company.

I will write more some other time but this culture has to be improved.