2011 January Archive - RecognizeThis! Blog

Archive for January, 2011

Why Cash as a Reward Won’t Change Your Culture

Recognize This: How you reward employees is a key indicator of underlying company culture.

We’re often asked why we don’t encourage the use of cash as a reward in strategic employee recognition program. The simple answer is: cash = compensation. Rewards must use a different “currency” than cash or employees will lump your “rewards” into their paycheck, guaranteeing it will become an expectation.

A better question to understand is: What kind of company culture do you want? A culture of appreciation or of compensation?

Your culture is built on the interactions and conversations that happen every moment of every day between your employees. Building that culture begins by encouraging recognition between and by all employees, yes, but it also builds on the rewards employees can enjoy that links the behaviors and actions they were recognized for to the memorable rewards they choose.

When that reward is cash, you can’t – as our client Symantec explained – have a conversation with colleagues, “Oh, I got $500 dollars.”

But when the reward is in a form that gives the flexibility of cash for limitless options, but with a result that employees can share and talk about with each other, you build a culture of appreciation. “Yeah, I went to the spa and had the most relaxing and rejuvenating massage treatment.”

Those are the conversations happening every day in the hallways of Symantec, reinforcing just how much the company values and appreciates the good work their employees do every day.

What kind of culture are you building in your organization?

"Why Recognition Matters"

I’m thrilled with an interview about our book, Winning with a Culture of Recognition, that appeared Monday on The Hiring Site.

In the interview, I answered some of the questions my CEO and co-author, Eric Mosley, and I often receive about the book:

* How is this book different from other management books?
* What exactly is “strategic recognition?”
* What does it mean to “win with a culture of recognition?”
* Why is recognition so important?
* What makes companies with a culture of recognition different than others?

This is just one of great pieces of media coverage the book has received. One of my favorites was this interview on Fox News with Eric:

If you’re looking to increase employee engagement, strategic recognition is one of the most powerful, proven tools for doing just that.

Do Amazing Things * Overcome Stereotypes

Recognize This: We all have the capacity to do amazing things. We need the desire – and sometimes courage – to do so.

Chris Ferdinandi, Renegade HR blogger, has done it again. For the second year in a row he has published a strong compendium of advice from HR experts on how to be amazing in 2011.

I’m honored to have my contribution on “Overcoming Stereotypes” included in “Do Amazing Things” this year. An excerpt:

“One [stereotype] we often hear in our line of business is: ‘People in China don’t want to be recognized individually.’ A client of ours proved this false simply by giving it a try. When implementing a new, first of its kind, global employee recognition program to all 33,000 of its employees, HR leaders knew the large contingent of employees in China couldn’t simply be ignored. … After program launch, the leadership team was pleasantly surprised to discover China had the fastest rate of adoption for greatest number of employees of the new employee recognition program.”

Other strong contributions from HR pros I respect include:

• Fail More (Chris Ferdinandi)
• Simplify, Simplify, Simplify (Lance Haun)
• Values, Not Words (Ben Eubanks)
• Break Out of the Boundaries (Paul Hebert)
• Become the Collaboration Leader (Steve Roesler)
• Be Curious (Ann Bares)
• Shadow Someone (Trish McFarlane)

I encourage you to read the eBook for great additional advice and thought leadership. What would you add as your recommendation to Be Amazing in 2011?

Making Your Company Values Real in the Daily Work of All Employees

Yesterday, I wrote about the importance of company values as the glue that holds us (employees, managers, leaders) together as we face unprecedented change in the workplace.

I received this comment to the post on HR.com:

“At the Manufacturing Skills Australia conference Prof. Alan Patching (Program Director 2000 Olympic Games) gave a great presentation. To open he asked the audience of 500 ‘does everyone in this room work for an organisation with company values?’ A smattering of people raised their hands so Alan went to each one and asked them to detail those values to the audience. No one could remember them. My question to you is if company values are so crucial why isn’t it taken up by the workers?”

This is an excellent question and very important point about company values. Most people in an organization have no idea what the company values are. More importantly, even more have no idea what those values mean in their daily work.

Getting a group of people in a room to decide on the values, creating posters and plaques to hang those values on the wall, perhaps sending out a communications campaign about the values – none of these are worthwhile or in the least effective in making your values real to every employee.

Sure, we’d like to help your employees recite their values. But we’re far more concerned about your employees having the values so deeply ingrained that they both live out those values in their daily work and notice when colleagues around them do the same.

This is the power of Strategic Employee Recognition in which you:

1) Purposefully tie every recognition moment in the company to a company value
2) Detail more specifically how the person’s behaviors, actions or achievements reflected the values in contribution to project/customer/company success
3) Encourage everyone to notice and appreciate these “value demonstrations” in their peers and colleagues

When you do this, every employee now not only knows the values, but also knows what those values look like in their day-to-day efforts, knows the company considers these efforts and value demonstrations important, and is encouraged to repeat them.

If you make your company values real in this way for every employee, I guarantee they will be “taken up by the workers.”

Do you know your company values (no peeking at the plaque on the wall)? More importantly, do you know what those values look like in your daily tasks.

Values * The Glue Keeping Us Together during Change (Insights from HR Directors Business Summit)

I enjoyed dinner last night with several leaders of HR in various businesses. A common concern to all them seems to be the whirlwind of change currently blowing through these organizations. The forces of change I described in my post/report yesterday are real and seem only to be getting faster. The resulting question on everyone’s mind was: How do we keep everyone with us during all this change?

I started today hearing more of the same – from both the President and the Chief People Officer for McDonalds UK & Northern Europe. They painted a candid and thorough picture of the challenges McDonalds has faced over the years and how they have evolved their people management model to react.

Particularly striking to me was how Chief People Officer David Fairhurst shared the many changes occurring in the workplace and society in general, making the case that “we need a glue that will hold everything together with all these changes happening.” That glue he identified as company values. “Values are like fingerprints. Nobody’s are the same, but you leave ‘em all over everything you do” – a quotation from that other HR luminary – Elvis Presley!

I couldn’t agree more – values can be the glue holding employee needs and company success requirements together. As employees face so much change – at a pace that is historically the most rapid we’ve ever taken a workforce through – we need our employees to be resilient and have a clear line of sight for how we want to succeed together. Values can give this line of sight, and of course a values driven, strategic recognition program, is a proven robust approach to make these values come alive and be lived everyday in the corporation.

Values too was on CEO & President Jill McDonald’s agenda when she highlighted as one of her top three priorities the need to break down silos and embed corporate values to create what she called a “connected organization”. Her other two priorities included employee engagement for trust, and developing future talent.

Let me ask you, how do you plan on keeping everyone during all this change? What’s your “glue” to hold everyone together? What are your top three priorities for 2011?

Learnings from HR Directors Business Summit

I’m greatly enjoying my participation this week at the HR Directors Business Summit in Birmingham, UK. I’ve already learned a tremendous amount and am looking forward to some interesting sessions on Gen Y tomorrow.

Today, Professor Lynda Gratton from London Business School led us in a great start, sharing shared research on the “Future of Work.” She described the five forces at work, which are creating the future: Globalization, Technology, Demography, Low Carbon and Society Changes. Key insights she offered for coping in this new world are:

1) Encourage collaboration, especially online between teams and the generations
2) Encourage open innovation
3) Build strong cultures & values
4) Invest in your own ability to have specialist skills
5) Realize the days of the generalist are ending fast

Professor Paddy Miller from IESE Business School really captured my attention with his definition of employee engagement. Contrary to the many finely crafted definitions we’ve all seen, his was that engagement is a Puzzle! Each puzzle has similar parts, but each company needs to figure their own puzzle solution. I couldn’t agree more. There is no cookie-cutter solution to employee engagement. Each company must (to borrow from Professor Gratton) build on their own values to create strong cultures in which engagement can thrive.

I presented myself today on strategic recognition and how it varies from other more traditional employee recognition. I was delighted to share the platform with our client Ingrid Waterfield, UK Head of Rewards at KPMG. She took the audience through the case study of their journey at KPMG as she shared the dramatic increases in levels of participation in their recognition program, even as budget costs were reduced! If you’d like to hear more about this, watch the webinar KPMG recently presented.

More tomorrow from the HR Directors Business Summit. In the meantime, do you see any additional forces at work that are creating the future of how (and why) we work? What’s your definition of engagement? Do you think it’s a puzzle, unique to each company, or more universal to most?

Has Someone Killed Your Employee Engagement?

Recognize This: Don’t kill someone’s engagement. Acknowledge their strengths; feed their abilities.

Have you ever been engaged at work, only to have that engagement killed by the actions (or inactions) of others, probably your direct supervisor?

Wally Bock, another favorite blogger of mine, recently told the story of Dan on his Three Star Leadership blog:

To summarize, Dan was a top-notch technician, always willing to help others, always demonstrating a good attitude. Then he switched jobs. From the onboarding experience (form filling) to a boss that wouldn’t listen to suggestions from a “new guy” or trust him to do a job he’d been doing for years without direct (over the shoulder) supervision, everything Dan experienced in the new job killed his engagement. In just two weeks, Dan’s incredible engagement was thoroughly throttled.

As I commented to Wally, I hate hearing stories like this because I know it’s far more common than many companies/leaders would like to admit and a reflection of command-and-control still being alive and well. “You haven’t been here long enough to know anything yet. … You can’t possibly know more than I do. … Don’t perform better than I do or make it look like you don’t need me.”

It’s so much easier to help an engaged employee maintain or even increase his/her engagement than it is to give a disengaged employee a reason and willingness to engage in the first place.

Tell me your story of engagement killed. Better yet, share ideas with all of us on how to make sure an employee who’s engaged from day 1 is willing to stay engaged.

You Can’t Survey Your Way to Increased Employee Engagement

Recognize This: Surveys alone won’t solve your engagement problems. You must act and communicate.

Yesterday I wrote about seemingly conflicting survey results and how to interpret surveys effectively. The flip side of the same coin is, you can’t rely on surveys to fix your employee engagement problems.

Brad Federman on the Engagement Factor blog did an interesting rundown of research on the topic, highlighting (among others):

• 10-30% organizations are able to implement strategic plan (Raps, 2004)
• Almost 2 in 5 bosses are bad (Gallup, 2010)
• 34% are thriving at work (Performancepoint, 2009)
• 51% do not feel fully utilized at work (Performancepoint, 2009)
• 84% of organizations using engagement surveys do not see positive results (Hewitt, 2010)

All of these are astounding, but that last on especially so. 84% who survey for engagement do not see positive results. Well, maybe that’s not so astounding after all.

Doing a survey wont’ magically engage your employees. In fact, survey for engagement can have the opposite effect if you do not take the information given to you by your employees, act on it appropriately and, critically, communicate the actions you are taking to respond to employee concerns.

A sure way to kill engagement – in any situation – is to ask for opinion and feedback, have people spend thoughtful time giving it to you, and then ignoring it. If you’re going to undertake surveys, be prepared to invest the time necessary to respond.

Do you survey in your organization? How well do you think it’s done? Is the survey itself useful? Are actions taken as a result? How is that communicated?

Surveys Aren't the Employee Engagement Answer

Recognize This: Surveys give us good data points, but it’s up to us to read them with an eye for the truth in our own environment.

Surveys are nothing more than data on a point in time, which makes it hard sometimes to assess the validity of the results. Especially when the results seemingly conflict.

Global employee engagement is an interesting example. Kenexa’s Employee Engagement Index found:

“While EEI scores might have differed from country to country, the pattern of scores over time is fairly consistent across countries. In fact, almost every country exhibits a similar downward curvilinear trend from 2009 to 2010. China is a notable exception, with an upward curvilinear trend that shows a substantial increase from 2009 to 2010.”

But BlessingWhite’s 2011 employee engagement survey found:

“Of the 10,914 workers surveyed worldwide only 31% are Engaged. As the chart illustrates, India has the most Engaged (37%); China has the least (17%).”

What can we infer then? Perhaps China’s engagement has increased substantially from 2009 to 2010, but their overall engagement levels are still lower than the rest of the world.

Regardless, the message of this post is – survey, but read the survey results for what they are – data on points in time.

What’s your take on the surveys and the value of survey results? Who’s your preferred source of data and interpretations that you trust?

We’re ALL Responsible for Employee Engagement

Recognize This: Engagement is a shared responsibility – so be aware of what you say and do that affects the engagement of others.

In my post yesterday, I highlighted BlessingWhite’s 2011 engagement report and findings that, unless executives set the course, managers can’t lead and employees can’t follow on the path of engagement.

A similar observation I couldn’t agree with more from Points of Rue:

“Shouldn’t it [engagement] be something we talk about as a shared responsibility in which all of us have a role and responsibility to positively influence the engagement of our colleagues and our leaders as much as our leaders are responsible for engaging us?”

Yes, it should. We are – each of us, individually – responsible for the attitude we bring to work every day and how we reflect that attitude towards our colleagues. Paul Hebert, a favorite blogger of mine at i2i, made this point in a post just last week:

“Phrases and words may seem simple and harmless but they can create a situation that enable good people to behave differently – more negatively – toward others. … A simple word can have a big impact.”

And if that simple word is “thanks,” then the impact can cause people to behave more positively towards others. Our customers have repeatedly increased employee engagement scores by double digits – in less than year – simply by encouraging a culture of appreciation. The research backs it up, as I’ve written about in more detail on Compensation Café.

What’s the attitude you bring to work? Are you a positive influence or a negative one? How about the people you work with most closely?

« Older Entries

Event Spotlight

Archive for January, 2011