5 Rules of Rewarding Teams and Individuals

Non-financial rewards like public recognition, virtual points, or even simple thank you notes from the manager can go a long way in boosting morale and creating motivation. The only question is, who do we recognize? The individual or the team?

The answer can be tricky. 

I worked for an organization with complex multi-level award program. Managers and peers awarded badges and points, the winners' names showed up on TV screens around the campus, people got mentioned in town halls by senior executives. Directors and Vice Presidents took recognition very seriously and never failed to send a thank you note after a successful deployment or project completion.

Which was all great, except at the end of the year the same managers graded their direct reports on a curve and people who received more individual awards during the year had more chances to get higher on the rating scale.

Public recognition and non-financial incentives often go hand in hand with the performance review, which in turn affects promotions, salary raises and bonuses. In companies with enforced rating and ranking process, managers praise and reward "rock stars" who carry enormous workload, work long hours, don't share responsibilities, have low trust in others and never delegate. The team players in such environment can be routinely overlooked because they don't compete with others and don't generate enough visibility for themselves. 

Large corporations operated in this rating/ranking model for years, but it seems like the era of "up-or-out" approach is coming to an end. GE has recently announced that they drop performance ratings and replace the year-end evaluation process with more frequent informal feedback.

On the other end of the spectrum there are companies that focus on the importance or teamwork and believe that "there's no I in team". According to this approach rewards and public recognition should always be directed to the teams and never individual team members.

In this regard I'd like to mention a recent study published by North Carolina State University professor Bradley Kirkman and his co-authors, that shows that public recognition of individual team members can boost the team's morale and performance.

The secret of balanced approach is simple: managers should recognize both teams and individuals, depending on the situation and nature of the reward. Here's my list of five steps of positive reinforcement:

1. Job well done

Publicly recognize teams for projects completed on time, high product quality, successful deployments and go-lives. Celebrate releases but keep in touch with reality: delivering incremental product functionality on time and on budget is in your team's job description. Instead of focusing on the result, emphasize teamwork and collaboration that made the accomplishment possible. 

2. Above and beyond

Publicly recognize individuals for their unique ideas, technical or process-related improvements, proposed or implemented outside their job description. Creativity is a great opportunity for the individuals to showcase their talents and for the managers to celebrate and encourage innovation.

3. Frequent feedback

Meet with your direct reports frequently one on one. This is a great opportunity to provide feedback, discuss issues or potential challenges, encourage, empower and energize on a deep personal level. Not every recognition should be public, sometimes hearing from your manager that he or she is proud of you in an informal 1:1 setting can make all the difference.

4. Boost teamwork

Encourage team members to recognize each other for extra effort, help, leadership and support. Little tokens of appreciation coming from peers are priceless and can be perceived as more genuine comparing to those coming from managers. In addition, being able to provide feedback and reward others cam empower individuals and encourage them to be more positive towards the team members.

5. Reward teamwork

Make teamwork one of the criteria in individual performance evaluation. Discuss it in the beginning of the year during the goal setting process and make sure your employees understand what it means to be a team player and how their individual performance can contribute to the team success. Train managers to take teamwork into consideration when identifying high performers, discuss how being a "lone cowboy" can hurt the team morale and performance, discourage communication and impact the junior team members' growth.

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