2012 May Archive - RecognizeThis! Blog

Archive for May, 2012

Any Reward Scheme That Ignores Culture Will Fail

Recognize This! – The best laid reward schemes of mice and HR Pros go often awry. (With a nod to Robert Burns)

What employee recognition or reward program have you put in place that you later regretted? Would unlimited vacation or paid time-off (PTO) make that list?

During the last year or two, I’ve seen many articles talking about the benefits of unlimited vacation. On the surface, this seems quite a progressive approach. But does it really work in practice?

I polled my team of consultants to see what they thought about it. Interestingly, one team member came to us from a company that offered unlimited vacation as a benefit. But she didn’t experience it as a benefit.

How could the freedom to take vacation time when you need it without question, whether for an extended trip away or for your child’s after school play, ever be perceived negatively? There are three distinct factors at play:

You work so many extra hours anyway, you’re not really taking much extra time off.
Sure, you can take as much vacation as you want, but you better be “connected” and checking in regularly.
The “policy” says you can take unlimited vacation, but the culture holds strongly against it.

Lance Haun spoke to this in TLNT a year ago, commenting:

“And that really helps you take ‘unlimited’ vacation policies with a grain of salt. How employers expect you to work normally, how you work while on ‘vacation,’ and the peer culture that often dictates what the vacation norm would be, are really the determining factors in play.”

It’s that third factor my team member found most compelling in her prior organization. The culture was very much one of nose-to-the-grindstone. Anyone perceived as taking too much time off was instantly branded a slacker. Sure people still did take vacation, but it was with an air of apology to their coworkers.

All Recognition & Reward Programs MUST Consider Culture

And that’s the real point here. No matter how well intentioned – or how well planned – no recognition or reward program will be successful if you don’t take into account your culture. Truly strategic and social recognition programs are, indeed, designed as change agents for organization culture.

If you need to create a culture of recognition in your organization – a culture in which it’s common for peers and managers alike to recognize and reward each other for living your core values while achieving your business objectives – then join me in my upcoming workshops in June. You’ll leave with a custom one-page strategy to build your own culture of recognition in your organization.

Register today for sessions in these cities:

King of Prussia, Penn. – June 12, 2012 – Radisson Hotel Valley Forge
Greater Boston, Mass. – June 14, 2012 – Westin Waltham
London, UK – Mid-September (final date and location TBD)
Orange County, Calif. – Early November (final date and location TBD)
Washington, DC, area – Early November (final date and location TBD)

All sessions start with breakfast at 7:30, then kicking off the workshop at 8:00. We’ll end at noon with a box lunch so those who need to rush back to work can do so. But those who have time to stay and chat with us and their fellow participants further are more than welcome to do so over lunch.

Readers of my blog also get a 50% discount on the registration price. Just be sure to use code: RECOGNIZETHIS when registering.

Spring 2012 Workforce Mood Tracker Results

Recognize This! – The only qualifier for needing recognition in the workplace is being a member of the human race.

Last week I had the pleasure of co-presenting with Thad Peterson the results of the Globoforce Spring 2012 Mood Tracker survey (which tracks the perceptions of full-time, currently employed U.S. workers). Now available on demand, the webinar revealed quite a few interesting results and I shared my thoughts around the trends we’re seeing over time with these surveys.

Here are just a few of the highlights from the webinar.

Recognition is a universal desire.

86% of all respondents want to have their efforts/contributions at work recognized.
46% are not satisfied with the level of recognition they receive for doing a good job.
These results are quite similar across all generations in the workplace. And guess what? It’s not GenY who is the most dissatisfied with recognition – it’s GenX (respondents aged 36-45).

This last point deserves to be more deeply examined. I’m not surprised by these generational results. Recognition is something we all need. As I often say, the only qualifier for needing recognition in the workplace is being a member of the human race. As my colleague, Thad, commented, “So all of the companies out there that are hiring humans, this applies.”

Frequent recognition is key.

41% of all respondents to the survey have not been recognized in the last six months.
90% of people recognized within the last month feel their manager effectively acknowledges and appreciates them at work.
20% of people recognized only in the last two years agreed their manager effectively appreciates them.

This proves that so many employees function in a recognition desert in their workplaces. Frequency of recognition is a very important topic because the frequency with which you reach out to and engage employees is critical to a successful recognition program. When people tell me their “good” recognition program only recognizes 20% of employees once or twice a year, I have to inform them that, in fact, they have merely a superficial program where you really need to be a superhero to get recognized. This type of program isn’t going to move any critical business metrics or have any real impact on engagement or performance.

This is also a fundamental question on engagement surveys – that your manager understands and appreciates what you do at work. Increasing positive responses to this question will increase your overall engagement results.

A few other highlights:

78% say would work harder if efforts were better recognized and appreciated.
3 out of 4 employees who are satisfied with the recognition they receive love their jobs.
2 out of 3 employees who are not satisfied with recognition received don’t love their jobs.
81% say receiving recognition makes them more satisfied with their work and position.
A full third of respondents plan to search for a new job in 2012, which means 33% of your workforce isn’t fully focused on the task at hand. Yet, out of employees who feel appreciated, 80% have no desire to leave.

Take a few minutes to watch the webinar for more results and how this impacts your workforce and your organziation.

Blog Updates and Why My Logo Looks Misspelled

Recognize This! -Any successful program should accommodate the needs of all users, not just the majority.

Astute readers of my blog may have noticed a few design changes recently. I’m very grateful to the talented team at Globoforce who keep this blog looking and functioning at its best, which frees me to focus on writing posts about topics that matter to HR Pros who care about strategic and social recognition.

The uplift to the blog design was intended to:

1) Make the 10 most recent blog posts more easier to skim

2) Improve the search functionality, also making it easier to find topics (and the associated research and news) you care about most

3) Add an advert for easy registration for my events where you can join in, such as upcoming webinars or workshops

One thing that did not change is the unique spelling of the blog in the logo header.

I’ve been asked often why the zed is flipped so it appears to be backwards in my logo (picture at right for email subscribers). This was intentional. While the need for recognition and praise is truly universal, the spelling of the word “recognize” is not among English-speaking nations.

I most often use the zed spelling of “recognize” because the majority of my readers are U.S.-based. But in my home of Ireland – as well as in the UK and other countries – it should be spelled “recognise.”And the UK and Ireland represent the next-largest reader base for “Recognize This!”

It seems a little thing to reverse the zed in the logo, but it is important to acknowledge the expectations and needs of all my readers, not just the majority.

The same is true for your recognition programs as well, especially if you have an international base of employees. Creating a solution that works in one country and and expecting to translate to another without adjustments can doom the best intentioned program to failure. Think of how you could address the unique needs of all your employees while creating one common language of appreciation.

Preserving Your Culture during Mergers and Acquisitions

Recognize This! – A formula for M&A success: “People + Culture + Numbers = Success.”

Why do 83% of mergers or acquisitions fail? Because too much emphasis is put on the financials and not enough on the people and the culture.

That’s the focus of an article in TLNT last month by Ron Thomas, and I couldn’t agree more. In the article, Ron says:

“Interviews of over 100 senior executives, according to the KPMG report, which tracked close to 700 deals over a two year period, revealed that the overwhelming cause for failure ‘is the people and the cultural differences.’ …

“It is understood by all that financials are (and should be) at the top of the pyramid. The problem is that many of the specialists leading the M&A team are, for the most part, financial people. They are also expected to handle the implications of culture and people, which is totally not their domain of expertise. These major challenges are underestimated all too often, and in the M&A environment, end up at the bottom of that same pyramid. …

“Numbers only tell a part of the story. Numbers can paint a portrait, but in order to paint a masterpiece, the formula is People + Culture + Numbers = Success.”

One client of ours tells the story of their rapid growth through multiple acquisitions in a very short period of time. As a consequence, they developed a “culture of cultures.” You could walk into a meeting and plainly see each person evaluating the other attendees, “She’s one of us. He’s one of them. I’ll go sit with her.”

To overcome that “culture of cultures,” Symantec decided to create a new culture of recognition, centered on a new set of core values meaningful to all of the employees. Within 9 months, Symantec saw a dramatic turn-around in how people thought about their colleagues – along with a 16% increase in employee engagement.

You can watch Symantec tell their own story of success in this webinar.

Don’t let numbers rule when planning for a successful M&A. Be sure to include your people and culture as part of the success equation outlined by Ron.

The Power of Creating a Positive Culture at Work

Recognize This! – You can get more done, more effectively, with a few kind words and good humor.

One of my colleagues is from the Southern U.S. She tells me she was raised to be Southern Belle. Now, being from Ireland, I’m not entirely sure what all the connotations of that mean, but I do understand that good manners, polite good humor, and kind words are a part of the equation. One of her favorite sayings is, “You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.”

Many people live their personal lives in this way. I like to think I do, as well. It’s quite true that a kind word returns better than an angry one. Yet, why do we so often behave differently or experience far different behavior at work?

Writing in Human Resources IQ, Feras Banna outlines 3 reasons managers fail to get the most out of their employees. One critical point he makes is:

“According to research by the Corporate Leadership Council, a group that conducts research through several high profile organizations, providing positive feedback to your employees is categorized as an A-Level Driver, affecting performance with a value higher than 30 percent. The CLC also identified that while 89 percent of employees believe positive feedback to be their biggest motivator, only 39 percent seem to get any feedback at all.”

As Feras explains, one way to do this is:

“Explain the positive effect of the behavior on the working environment. If you want a certain behavior to continue, your employees must understand the value of this particular behavior on the job. One might say, something like: ‘By drawing our attention to the risks of this project and identifying the measures we should take to minimize this risk, you helped the company avoid a serious setback that would have affected the whole project!’”

The specificity of that positive message is critical. A general, “Thanks! Great work!” is certainly better than never giving praise or acknowledgment at all. But a very specific message, such as that illustrated by Feras, returns 1,000-fold. It takes little more effort to explain exactly what was “great” about the work, but taking a moment to do so makes your praise more personally meaningful and far more illustrative of what you want to see in the future.

If this feels too “soft” to you, let’s look at the purely financial importance of a strong organization culture. Bruna Martinuzzi cites the following in Open Forum:

“’If you do not manage culture,’ says Edgar Schein, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, ‘it manages you. And you may not even be aware of the extent to which this is happening.’ Culture has a significant impact on a company’s long-term economic well-being: A 2000 study published in the Harvard Business Review found that company culture can account for nearly a third of financial performance. This is too high an impact to ignore.”

Far too high to ignore, indeed.

What are you doing to strengthen and improve your company culture and, consequently, drive the financial performance of your organization?

2 Reasons Why Culture Matters to Recruitment

Recognize This! – Strong talent always has a choice of where to work and increasingly is choosing an organization with purpose.

On Monday, I wrote about the importance of culture for organization success and how to do that through consistent, frequent recognition of employees. But your culture matters long before a new employee ever steps through your door for a first interview.

Your organization culture is tied up closely with your employment value proposition. Whether you know it or not, your culture is drawing to you right now the type of talent you can hire.

1) Strong talent is drawn to a strong culture.

Tim Sackett, a recruiting pro, wrote recently in TLNT about a client he ultimately fired:

“The company was tough to recruit for because they had a super bad reputation and nobody locally wanted to go to work there, and on top of that, they weren’t willing to pay leaders to make up for their terrible reputation. I’m not in the business of providing bad talent – it won’t keep me in business long – and they could only afford average talent. But average talent doesn’t want to work for horrible companies, unless you pay a premium, so what you’re left with is bad talent.”

Do you want the best talent available to work for you? Guess what – so does everyone else. Top talent has their choice of work environment. Many even choose less compensation to work in an exciting, invigorating culture. But even average talent won’t work for an organization with a terrible reputation. And that reputation is a result of your culture.

If you want to hire the best, make yourself desirable to the best by creating a powerful culture of recognition and appreciation.

2) Purpose matters

A culture that illustrates purpose is also growing in importance. Calling Brands global research revealed in this news release:

“A new report by global brand consultancy Calling Brands reveals a dramatic shift in employee attitudes towards work – with corporate ‘Purpose’ emerging as a powerful new driver of attraction, retention and productivity that few businesses are leveraging. … The survey also revealed that, on average, 57% of respondents (64% Germany, 58% US, 48% UK) said they would favour joining an organisation that has a clearly defined Purpose. Furthermore, an average of 65% of respondents claimed that Purpose would motivate them to go the ‘extra mile’ in their jobs and 64% claimed it would engender a greater sense of loyalty towards the organisation they work for.”

Is your culture attractive to the top talent in your industry? Does it offer purpose to employees in a way that motivates them to achieve more?

What Could Steve Jobs Have Accomplished with More Attention on the B Players?

Recognize This! – There are always B players in any organization who are just as important to your success as A players, if in a different way.

During the last few months, one of the top books has been the Steve Jobs autobiography. It’s a fascinating read and doesn’t hold back on both the genius of Steve Jobs as well as his less attractive personality traits and leadership style.

An excellent summary of the latter recently appeared in Strategy+Business, highlighting how Jobs’ reputation as leader was both highly effective at generating great work out of teams, but highly damaging to members of those teams personally. The article points out:

“When it came to teamwork, Jobs had a highly effective modus operandi with a dark side. He always challenged teams — from those involved in the early product efforts led by Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak onward — to reach beyond the possible. A few strong people thrived on this, rising to become top performers who were highly motivated by the pride they derived from striving to meet the challenge. But many others were needlessly frustrated. The price a leader pays for such behavior is the loss of people who need more encouragement along the way. Such an approach also undermines the emotional commitment of B players, who in most enterprises constitute more than triple the organizational teaming capacity of A players.”

Too often, I hear “who needs the B players?” This is a very short sighted comment, because in even the strongest team, there are always B players, just as there are always those who are clearly the top performers.

Yes, Apple has delivered wonderful products that have changed the face of consumer technology, but think how much more might have been achieved without the loss of talented people who simply could not put up with the “needless frustration.”

Every organization has a bell curve of performance for their employees with the vast 80% in the middle representing your “B” players. These are the people who grind out the work that makes it possible for your stars to shine.

What are you doing to celebrate, encourage and support your B players?

Thoughts on Company Culture from Knowledge Infusion

Recognize This! – Creating the culture you want and need for organization success takes sustained hard work.

Suzanne Rumsey from Knowledge Infusion wrote last month in Fistful of Talent about company culture. Her post is spot-on and deserves to be read by the widest possible audience. For those who are charged with creating or invigorating a strong company culture, this is a must-read.

Suzanne offers three thoughts on culture, but all three lead back to one key point – Creating the culture you want and need for organization success takes sustained hard work. In Suzanne’s words:

“Thought #1: to go at building or changing an organization culture directly is pointless, fruitless, and ultimately, a waste of resources… Conclusion: actively changing an organization’s culture requires hard work and sustained effort towards outcomes that resonate with all employees. This is more than a marketing campaign, a team building event or a newsletter. …

“Thought #2: culture is cumulative. It is the summarization, conglomeration, and amalgamation of demonstrated leadership behaviors, employee support systems, encouraged relationships, achieved results, and rewarded outcomes (the list is longer, but I have a word limit here) over time. …

“Thought #3: culture, like many other things, is strongest when grown from the grassroots. This looks a lot less like “company events”, marketing campaigns, and team building, and a lot more like encouraging individuals and small groups to undertake culturally aligned activities on their own initiative and reinforcing that.”

Creating a culture isn’t an “HR initiative” or a “2012 Goal.” Company culture is not a flowery sentiment or a soft “nice-to-have.” Culture drives and influences every decision made by every employee every day.

So how do you, as Suzanne says, “encourage individuals and small groups to undertake culturally aligned activities and reinforce that?”

Strategic recognition is the most effective, efficient, and straightforward method to do precisely that. Identify the “culturally aligned activities” – your core values and critical objectives – and then frequently, consistently and very specifically recognize and praise employees for their “culturally aligned” efforts. This communicates for employees in real terms, through their daily work, what your culture is and how it operates.

If you need to create your own winning culture of recognition, join me next month in Boston or Philadelphia for interactive workshops with your peers. We’ll go through best practices, debunk recognition myths and create personal, individual one-page strategies for your culture of recognition. Sessions run from 7:30 for breakfast to noon, with a box lunch and opportunity to network more with your peers. Recognize This! readers receive 50% of the registration using code RECOGNIZETHIS.

Positivity at Work Must Have a Strong Foundation in Your Values

Recognize This! – Focusing on positivity at work must be based on more than just “good feelings” to be successful over the long term.

What do you think about the positivity at work movement?

I’ve written about positivity psychology at work before, noting:

“If choosing positivity for ourselves is within our power (and I believe it is – we choose our attitude every day), why are we neglecting positivity in the workplace? Is it because we work in a highly competitive culture? Is it because we believe we can only thrive in the workplace at the expense of others?”

And now I see that Lisa Zigarmi and Chris Edmonds of the Ken Blanchard companies have written a tweet book on the topic, “#POSITIVITY AT WORK tweet.” In an interview in SmartBlog on Leadership, they confirm my point about positivity being a choice:

“Creating positive well-being is a choice by any organization members. This ‘positivity revolution’ will not take hold if it is seen as a ‘program’ sponsored by HR, talent management or learning and OD [organizational development] functions. A safe, respectful, constructive work environment enables satisfied employees and leaders to deliver quality products and services that inspire customer devotion and revenue that exceeds expenses. Positivity at work makes business sense.

“Leaders that create the conditions for individual growth and positivity enjoy not only the benefits above but see lower health care costs (physical and mental health improves in these workplaces), stability of the workforce (talented staff stay), and increased application of discretionary energy from an inspired workforce.”

But how do you create those conditions for individual growth and positivity? I strongly believe you must create a culture of recognition based on your core values so it is clear to every employee (1) what behaviors and achievements are required for success and (2) they will be praised and recognized for demonstrating those behaviors.

Chris Edmonds also confirmed this approach in another SmartBlog on Leadership post in which he said:

“Organization values are the foundation of every plan, decision and action. In high-performance, values-aligned organizations, there is greater focus on values demonstration than there is on performance demonstration. There are typically many systems in place to gauge productivity, efficiency, market share and the like. Organizations must implement systems to reinforce and gauge values alignment to enjoy values alignment.”

Do you use your core values at work to help build positivity around recognition and appreciation? If not, what kind of culture does your organization have? What’s it built on?

Stop Rewarding People for Just Showing Up

Recognize This! – Perfect attendance awards are a bad idea.

Can we talk about a dirty little secret of employee recognition?

“Perfect Attendance” awards are a really bad idea. Yes, we want our employees to come to work. But we already pay them to be here and to do their job. At their base, that’s what attendance awards are all about – show up and do your job.

In fact, attendance awards aren’t recognition. They are incentives – “do this and you’ll get that.” Show up every day without missing and you’ll get an award. And like many incentives programs, it’s easy to incent the wrong behavior. In this case, you’re often encouraging employees to come to work sick (and infect those around them).

What should you do instead? True recognition. That is, after-the-fact praise of employees who, yes, come to work and do the job, but do it exceptionally well while demonstrating your core values while they do so.

Or, as Lisa Haneberg put it in a recent post on her Management Craft blog:

“This is a portion of a real email: ‘Super! Very well done. Exactly what I requested.’

“After seeing this, and feeling its effect, it got me thinking about how some people are so much better at providing feedback and reinforcement than others. A message like the one above, sent in a timely manner so that the ‘what’ is very clear, not only reinforces expectations and provides feedback, it buoys the spirit. We all want to hear that we nailed it.”

Reinforce for employees what you want to see repeatedly in their work. Praise them for achieving big goals as well as making progress along the way. Don’t just award them for “showing up.”

Do you have “perfect attendance” awards at your workplace? Do they deliver the results management expected or wanted?

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