2012 August Archive - RecognizeThis! Blog

Archive for August, 2012

Celebrating Labor

Recognize This! – Let’s choose to celebrate those who make our workplaces better every day.

The U.S. is entering its Labor Day weekend celebration with a Monday holiday next week. My regular readers know I’m Irish, but my team is largely U.S.-based. I learn much from them about their traditions and, more importantly, why they matter.

So, in a recent discussion about Labor Day weekend plans, I learned Labor Day was designed as a celebration of American workers and their efforts. The traditional way to celebrate, as I understand it, is local parades and cookouts with hamburgers and hotdogs all around. It’s also the unofficial end of summer, and with it, the expectations and memories of the vacation season. So returning from Labor Day is, in essence, returning to settle down to work.

I think we should do more to celebrate Labor Day and, more importantly, those who labor. Without their work, what would those of us in leadership or those in ownership positions have to boast about? Indeed, it’s the labor of all that we should celebrate, not just those top performers we tend to spotlight the most.

Think about it in terms of the traditional Labor Day feast. Would it be the same if there were only hamburgers, but no salads or desserts? No ice cream? Of course not, all elements are necessary. The same is true in our workforce. We need all of our people, contributing from their uniqueness, to make our work whole. And it is all our people we should celebrate.

So today, as my U.S. colleagues enter their Labor Day weekend, let’s all – everywhere in the world – pause and celebrate our Labor – our own work and the work of those around us. More importantly, let’s celebrate each other by sharing directly and personally our appreciation for those who make our workplace and our work more enjoyable, more productive and more useful.

Who will you celebrate this Labor Day?

Can You “Fix” a Bad Boss?

Recognize This! – Some managers need more development, training and tools to help them become the “good” boss their employees need.

If you’re interested in management, improving your management skills or the like, I strongly encourage you to add Wally Bock to your daily reading list. Among others, Wally’s 3-Star Leadership blog is on my daily list. I particularly enjoy round-up posts in which he lists and summarizes several articles or insights from the media and other bloggers.

In this recent example, Wally pointed to a Washington Post article, highlighting the insights of the author as more valuable than the research being discussed. He’s right. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“We all know the old saying: People don’t quit bad jobs, they quit bad bosses. But how much is a good boss really worth? A new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research attempts to quantify just that. The paper, written by Edward Lazear, Kathryn Shaw and Christopher Stanton, found that removing a poorly performing boss and replacing him or her with a top performing manager is roughly equal, in terms of productivity, to adding an extra person to the team. This implies, the researchers say, that the average boss is about 1.75 times as productive as the average worker. …

“But quantifying how much good bosses actually do affect performance—especially outside of an experimental setting—could help managers make smarter decisions. More people need to understand that they’re better off firing a poorly performing boss and replacing him or her with a better performing one, rather than adding more workers to their staffs. Once that happens, the productivity push should shift from getting more out of people on the front lines to first getting more out of the ones who lead them.”

I see three legitimate choices for HR in such situations:

Keep the current bad managers and try to work around them
Replace the bad bosses with those proven to have good managerial skills.
Work to develop and train “bad” bosses into “good” ones.

The first two options are straightforward enough. The third option gets a bit sticky. I think we can all agree some people in management are the result of the “Peter Principle.” They may have been strong individual contributors, but cannot (or don’t want to) manage others. With these people, the kindest and most effective approach is to have an honest conversation around what they want to do in their careers and ensure they have a path to career advancement outside of management.

Others have the potential to be good managers, but never received the necessary training to help them develop and appropriately use this entirely different skill set. In this situation, it’s up to HR to ensure these people are appropriately developed into the good managers they can be. I’m encouraged by this news that HR globally plans to invest more in HR technology in the coming year, with some focus on training tools and the like.

Additional investment in strategic, social recognition tools are also effective as they remove the manager as the “single point of failure” in providing the frequent, timely and specific feedback all employees need to know they are on the right track and what they do every day is appreciated and valuable to success of the organization.

What are your recommendations for improving “bad” managers?

Employee Recognition Gone Wrong: Self Congratulations and Losing

Recognize This! – Employee recognition done right is simple – give everyone the ability to “catch someone doing something good” and make it meaningful.

Every so often, I’ll write a post about bad employee recognition practices I’ve heard of or read about. Today’s stories made me cringe.

Don’t Make People Recognize Themselves

The husband of one of my team members (we’ll call him Jim) works for a very large, global organization. He often works on a project with an extended team of engineers and other technical personnel. At the end of one such project recently, the team was pleased to learn they’d brought the contract in on time and under budget.

Due to the terms of the contract, this means Jim’s company earned more money. To the company’s credit, they decided to share some of the additional earnings with the team members. The way leadership went about doing so, however, leaves much to be desired. Jim – and the rest of the team members – were asked to complete forms themselves explaining why each thought he or she deserved to receive a piece of the award.

In essence, they were asked to recognize themselves for their efforts. How much more effective could this have been if the relevant managers had taken just a few minutes to show they paid attention to the good work being done by their team members and filled out the forms instead?

“Losing” Has No Place in Employee Recognition

I’m often asked about the role of gamification in employee recognition. There can be a limited, appropriate role, but usually the way it’s done only serves to destroy any benefit from the program itself.

Case in point: United Airlines’ new Outperform Recognition Program. Apparently, United customers are encouraged to use a mobile app to recognize United employees for good service. Then, United will select only 16 “winners.” It doesn’t matter how many people were recognized for their excellence, only 16 can “win.”

For the rest of those recognized, they hear that as: “If they are the winners, then I’m a loser.” Is that the message you want to reinforce? Especially in a company currently on the hot-seat for losing a 10-year-old child and demonstrating a complete lack of caring at every level?

Let me put it this way – if an employee says to you, “If I did work well enough to be recognized for it, why am I loser?” then your recognition program itself is the real loser.

(For another story of an airline getting it thoroughly wrong, read this post from Paul Hebert.)

The Difference between Satisfied, Engaged, Aligned and Highly Engaged Employees

Recognize This! – Don’t settle for employee satisfaction. Push for highly aligned and engaged employees who are themselves pushing your company forward.

Let’s get one thing clear – we do not want satisfied employees. “Satisfied” implies sated, content. Do we want employees to be content with the current state? No. We want employees to always be pushing the boundaries and striving for the next level.

That’s why I get annoyed when people use the words “satisfied” and “engaged” interchangeably when talking about employees (as in this recent Talent Management article). Engaged employees are very different from satisfied employees. Indeed, Timothy Clark outlines these differences extensively in his book The Employee Engagement Mindset. In TLNT recently he highlighted in particular 5 Ways Engaged Employees Are Different (quoting):

Highly engaged employees take primary responsibility for their own engagement.
Highly engaged employees feel the least entitled.
Highly engaged employees engage customers.
Highly engaged employees remain highly engaged almost anywhere.
Highly engaged employees apply six behavioral drivers. Individuals who take personal and primary responsibility for their own engagement consistently apply six behavioral drivers: connecting, shaping, learning, stretching, achieving, and contributing.

In other words, highly engaged employee sustain their own engagement. I would argue “satisfied” employees are constantly looking for others to fulfill their requirements for satisfaction.

Engagement vs. Alignment

I would add one additional hallmark of highly engaged employees to Mr. Clark’s list: Highly engaged employees align their efforts with the company mission, vision and values.

To me, a hallmark of truly engaged employees is their ability and willingness to give additional discretionary effort on projects or objectives that are meaningful and important to the organization. It’s that last point that is a critical link.

George Labovitz and Victor Rosansky, authors of Rapid Realignment, see alignment and engagement as two different things entirely, as they explained in this guest post about their book on Dan McCarthy’s Great Leadership blog:

“Engaged and aligned are two different things, and they don’t always travel together. Research by the Corporate Executive Board has found that 40 percent of “engaged” employees do not align their behavior with organizational goals. Overall, it concludes that only one in 10 employees is both engaged and aligned with strategy. Clearly, many managers are failing to connect people with the strategies they are emotionally prepared to support with their daily work. This represents a huge lost opportunity.”

How do connect employees with organizational strategies (many of which shifted thanks to the recession)? You help them understand what those strategies look like in each employee’s daily work.

In other words, you make enterprise-wide strategy goals real at the local job level. And you do that by frequent, timely and specific reinforcement of employees who align their efforts with strategic objectives. Social recognition is the most powerful way to accomplish this, as you not only reinforce that message for a particular employee, but you also empower others to see that message and add their own messages of congratulations and understanding of how those contributions made a difference.

Are your employees satisfied, engaged, aligned, or highly engaged and aligned?

“How” We Work as Important as “What” We Accomplish

Recognize This! – Focusing only on the “what” (results) can lead to unintended consequences.

Kevin Kruse (author of Employee Engagement 2.0) recently presented in Forbes the idea of Feedforward. Instead of constantly looking back once a year at what an employee did (or didn’t do), new performance systems should be looking forward with continuous coaching and refined goal setting.

Indeed, we should be much more focused on “how” employees get the work done and less on “what” they do, especially with how we recognize and reward employees. This is a core component of strategic, social recognition – focusing on how well employees “live” your values in their daily work. And aren’t your core values the most accurate definition of the “how” you want work to be accomplished?

Laurie Ruettimann, author of the “Cynical Girl” blog and frequent speaker on all things HR, recently told this story in her blog:

My colleague, Lizzie, is out on her honeymoon. She left our team a list of things to do while she is out.

Then she called and said, “I suck, Laurie. My job can be distilled down to seventeen things.”

And I said, “Yeah, and the intern can do most of them.”

Dang. I’m a stone cold boss.

But then I told her — that’s the modern economy. It’s not what you do, necessarily, but how you do it. We didn’t hire Lizzie because she is a robot. And I don’t care if there are 17 things or 200 things for her to do each day.

We hired her to do whatever needs to be done — and to do it well.

We all have the list of what we do. The more important question is: Do we know as well how all those things should be done?

What are the important “hows” in your job? How do you know?

Trust, Meaningfulness of Work Critical to Employee Engagement and Well-being

Recognize This! – We cannot separate ourselves from our work, so we must find ways to integrate them in healthy ways.

Our lives at work and outside of work are not easily separated. I don’t know very many people who can truly “leave work at work.” To some extent, what happens at work affects our home lives as well. Recent CIPD research showed the link between employee engagement at work and overall well-being.

“The index asked subjective questions relating to life satisfaction and how worthwhile people feel their lives are, on which engaged employees scored more highly, while they also reported lower scores when asked how anxious they felt, compared to employees with neutral engagement or those who are disengaged.

“In addition, the report found there to be a strong link between the extent to which employees trust the senior management team in their company and their well-being. It said: ‘There is a particularly strong link between employees who strongly agree they trust their senior managers and lower than average levels of anxiety.’

“The extent to which employees agree they are consulted by senior managers on important decisions was also found to have a strong correlation with well-being scores.”

Engagement, trust and knowing your opinions matter – these are fundamental to believing that what you do at work every day has greater meaning and purpose.

US-based research from DecisionWise showed just how low employee trust in senior leadership has fallen. Based on analysis of more than 9.2 million employee engagement survey responses across industries, job levels and more, the research revealed:

“Less than half of all US employees respond favorably when rating their degree of confidence in their company executives. This finding… paints a less-than-favorable picture of the perception most employees have of those leading both large and small organizations.”

At the core of this is knowing my work is meaningful. If I don’t trust my senior leader, then I likely don’t’ trust the validity and importance of what I do every day. Dow Scott, co-author of a recent study on retention of key talent, had this to say on the importance of meaningful work:

“The main way to keep employees interested is simple. At the end of the day, they want meaningful work, ‘Meaningful’, to me, has a notion of purpose: We have a contribution to make, and it’s not just to the bottom line and making money for stockholders. It’s about contributing to society, the community.

“The big thing is, communicate that to employees. How does the company contribute, and how does that person contribute to the overall value?”

One of the most positive and effective ways to communicate to employees that their efforts and have value is through strategic, social recognition. Simply telling employees, very specifically, how their efforts made a difference in achieving corporate goals is a powerful communication mechanism. More important is to link that effort to the greater company mission as well as core values so employees know their efforts are not only necessary to achieve results but also that they way in which those results are achieved is equally important. Doing so helps to build trust in both leaders and the organization.

How do you (or your organization) help employees see the meaningfulness of their work and build trust in leadership?

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Strong Company Cultures Rely on Useful Measurement

Recognize This! – Cultures change. Without measurement of how your culture is doing, you cannot tweak it and keep it on track.

In a blog post on TLNT, Tim Kuppler wrote about the four keys to building a strong culture. What most intrigued me about his post was that 2 of the 4 keys are measurement.

“Measure your culture and engage the organization in understanding the results at a deeper level. I am absolutely amazed by how many expert opinions about culture change lack this basic and absolutely obvious fundamental. Some organizations think they may be covering this measurement through an engagement, climate, satisfaction or other survey but they are actually only evaluating a fraction of the overall culture. Use a research-based tool with a substantial benchmark database so you will be compared to many other organizations. Engage your organization in the process to move from the fog of opinions and lack of clarity about your culture to a clearly defined picture of what you are all about. You’ll understand the overall culture and how it varies by department, division, level, geography or other key sub-groups. It’s like taking an MRI of your culture. This clear definition of “who we are” is critical for the next step where strengths are leveraged and weak areas improved that have been holding the organization back.”

“Measure progress consistently and refine improvements with discipline and determination. John Kotter references the need to implement a new “operating model” as part of the change. Think about habits and routines more than one-time actions. How will you need to adjust meeting schedules, communication plans, measurements, tracking formats, team structures or other areas to improve how you manage the 1-3 priorities you identified? It will be important to monitor key measures related to the top priorities since culture clearly impacts performance however you define “performance” in your organization. There will need to be regularly scheduled feedback and prioritization routines to identify and build on what’s working and to adjust actions that aren’t having the desired impact. The organization will see what’s working and what’s not and will spread the good ideas of your new operating model to areas outside of the 1-3 priorities you originally identified. You’ll know at that point you have the flywheel of culture change moving and gaining momentum.”

I agree with Tim that measurement is often overlooked or underutilized, even by true culture proponents. Even more to the point, you must decide what you want to measure before you launch your new initiative and definitely before you set out to measure it.

All too often, people will measure anything, then manipulate the results to tell a good story afterwards. Instead, if you want solid, actionable culture change and sustained positive culture over time, you must determine your metrics for success first, and then consistently and ongoing measure against those metrics.

Only through faithful measurement and reporting over time (and in real-time) can you see your culture in action and tweak as necessary to keep it on the right path.

Positivity Is Important at Work, but Don’t Confuse It with Delusion

Recognize This! –A truly positive work environment must encourage employees to share the bad news (reality) as well as the good.

I’ve written before about positivity psychology in the workplace and the many benefits that can come from it. But there is a risk of positivity swinging into the realm of delusion. I think of it this way: Does anyone remember the book The Secret that came out a few years ago, which promised to reveal the secret to success at anything? Apparently, if you just thought hard enough and focused strongly enough about something you could essentially wish it into being.

Research reported in Strategy + Business revealed “delusional optimism” like this can rear its ugly head in business in the form of positivity:

“But several recent studies have critiqued the positive thinking movement, highlighting the negative personal and organizational effects that can result from “excessive optimism,” ‘irrational exuberance,’ ‘gambling against the odds,’ and the ‘tyranny of positive thinking.’ In short, Prozac leaders can wind up believing their own narrative that everything is going well. As a consequence, they ask fewer and fewer questions and become deaf to feedback that is ‘off message,’ leaving them, and their companies, dangerously insulated from economic and social realities.”

Am I turning my back on positivity in the workplace? Absolutely not. As much as I think The Secret is bunk, I do think there is great value in focusing your attention on what you need and hope to see. Indeed, it’s just logical that if you focus your efforts, you’ll likely see a desired result.

But there is good warning here in focusing so intently, you put blinders on to any valuable, if cautious or negative, feedback.

“‘By insisting that subordinates’ upward communication [be] exclusively positive, Prozac leaders and the uncritical cultures they encourage can silence committed and concerned followers,’ the author writes. In this context, employees may hold back on their views as a way of protecting their career, reputation, salary, and job security.”

Think of the risk this opens your organization to. The failure points are extensive and worrisome.

Build a culture of recognition and appreciation, yes, but be sure to recognize and reward employees as well for “courage” or “integrity” when they deliver the bad news, too. We strongly recommend to our clients to make their values come alive in their organizations by making them the reasons for recognition and reward. With abstract values like “integrity” this is particularly important.

One client wisely gave an example to all employees on what such a detailed message of recognition could look like: “Joe, thank you for living our value of integrity by coming forward to point out the broken equipment. By alerting us to the problem, we were able to repair the machine much more quickly and suffer less downtime.”

Think how powerful that message became when shared through Social Recognition.

Does your organization balance positivity with reality?

The Tempo Starts at the Top: Why Executives Must Lead Strategic Employee Recognition

Recognize This! – Leaders must lead – especially in setting the tone and tenor of your organization’s culture.

Out of everything I read on a daily basis, interviews with CEOs tend to be among my favorites. Case-in-point: this recent SmartBrief interview with John Taft, CEO of RBC Wealth Management, in which he focused solely on the importance of executives leading the culture of their companies:

“Culture is everything when it comes to responsible, long-term business success. Culture is what exists before any given leader shows up, and it’s what exists after any given leader moves on. Culture is in the DNA of an organization. It is not something that a leader necessarily goes out and creates. A leader’s job is to discover, communicate and reinforce culture. If you don’t get culture right, nothing else matters.”

In fact, Mr. Taft lays the blame at the feet of failed culture for many of the problems in financial institutions today:

“I believe that the financial organizations that have gone astray have done so because they lost touch with their culture. They lost touch with their stewardship mission, purpose, values and responsibilities. Those have always been at the core of the financial services industry. What we need to do today is not so much invent or create a new culture for our industry but find our way back to the culture that should have been there all along.

“Most financial services firms have a culture that at some point, somewhere, was about serving the needs of their clients. It wasn’t just about making money. It was about helping clients achieve their objectives, promoting economic growth and performing a social good. Chances are the people at the firm came to the firm because of the chance to make a positive difference in the world. That ethic is embedded in most of the financial institutions I know. We’ve just lost touch with it in too many cases.

“Restoring the culture of financial institutions to what it ought to be is the No. 1 leadership challenge right now in the financial services industry. Regulatory reform is not enough. If we are going to keep future financial crises from happening, we have to address cultural failings at the heart of the financial services industry. Whether or not we get it right will be a case study in leadership for years to come.”

This is precisely why our number 1 tenet of strategic recognition as outlined in our book Winning with a Culture of Recognition is “the tempo starts at the top.” Without senior leadership support, guidance and demonstration of desired behaviors and actions, no employee recognition program can move beyond being a “program” to becoming the basis of your culture.

Or, as Chris Edmonds of the Ken Blanchard Cos. said in a recent SmartBlog post:

“Senior leaders must become champions of their desired culture, investing time and energy each week in proactive culture management. Responsibility for corporate culture cannot be delegated to subordinates; the responsibility falls squarely on the shoulders of senior leaders.”

Who is in charge of the culture of your organization?

Recognition: Why Do You Do It That Way?

Recognize This! – Until you can answer the strategic questions about your employee recognition program, the tactical questions don’t matter.

Ann Bares, author of the Compensation Force blog (and editor of Compensation Café), recently posted about year-end questions concerning incentive programs. The points she raises are quite similar to the questions I often receive from clients in the early stages of thinking about their employee rewards and recognition programs.

As Ann points out, people often ask the wrong questions, focusing on the details of the current program with questions like (quoting from Ann’s blog):

Should we extend our incentive plan lower in the organization? And if we do, do we need to make changes to the plan?
Are our current payouts appropriate? Should we make them higher … or lower?
Should we go from annual to quarterly awards … or from quarterly to annual awards?

Instead, you need to start with the bigger picture (again, quoting):

Why do we have this plan in the first place?
For what purpose was the plan created? What objectives is it designed to achieve?
Is the plan working?
Are the original purpose and objectives still relevant given where the function/business unit/organization is today? Or is there another purpose and another set of objectives that is more pressing and important today?

The same is true when considering your recognition and reward practices. I and members of my team are often asked by clients to take a look at their current (often overly complex) reward program structures and tell them what to tweak.

Often, I find myself advising them to go back to the drawing board entirely and ask the very fundamental “why” questions:

Why are we doing this in the first place?
What are we hoping to accomplish?
What’s the bottom-line business benefits we can derive from doing this better or differently?
(And many more)

If you can’t answer the fundamental strategic questions, the answers to your tactical questions don’t really matter.

What questions are you asking about your employee recognition and rewards program?

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