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Today on Compensation Café * More Themes from WorldatWork “Trends in Employee Recognition” Report

Recognize This! – Old-school approaches to employee recognition do not deliver the business results companies need.

Today on Compensation Café, I shared additional insight into the 2013 WorldatWork “Trends In Employee Recognition Report.” In this space last week, I discussed the overarching theme of companies moving to recognition programs that drive desired behaviors. In Compensation Café, I dig more deeply into four more themes running through the research:

Theme 1: Companies are moving away from traditional approaches to recognition to new forms that drive business results.
Theme 2: Strategy is still lacking in many programs, limiting the real results that can be achieved.
Theme 3: Global recognition programs are making strides, but too many companies still treat international employees as second-class citizens.
Theme 4: Just as senior management buys into the importance of strategic recognition, training efforts for managers are falling.

Click over to Compensation Café to read more.

On a separate note, I proudly share with you launch of Globoforce’s latest book, The Crowdsourced Performance Review, by the CEO of Globoforce, Eric Mosley. If you happen to be reading this post in your spare time while at the annual SHRM conference in Chicago, be sure to swing by the SHRMStore for your own copy, and stop in on Eric’s speaking session where he will discuss this more fully:

The Crowdsourced Performance Review: The New Social Era in HR?

06/19/2013 10:00 AM – 11:15 AM | N228

Track: Talent Management

Learn of ways to leverage crowdsourcing tools & social techniques to redefine performance management and find out who & what is driving your business.

Crowdsourcing is much more than idea generation and problem solving — it has the power to transform the entire HR industry and the traditional ways employee performance is evaluated. With real-time, authentic feedback from employees’ peers, you can get a social yet unbiased view into what and who is driving your business. You will learn why you must crowdsource in order to foster a unified employee environment, increase performance and engagement levels and get unbiased, foolproof insight of your employees. Gain the knowledge necessary to successfully implement a social recognition program that will have all your employees inspired to aid in a new crowdsourced approach.

Today on Compensation Cafe: What the Oreo CookieTeaches Us about Global Employee Recognition

Recognize This! – Never assume the local approach for employee recognition and rewards will work equally well globally.

Today on Compensation Cafe, I discuss why HR and recognition pros must seek to understand the local wants and needs of their globally distributed employees. I share an example of the Oreo cookie and how it nearly failed in the Chinese market until Oreo producers Mondelez International changed the cookie formulation to change the shape, sweetness and filling flavour (green tea is most popular in China) to align with local tastes. Now, Oreo sales in China account for nearly half of all global sales of the iconic cookie.

Click over to Compensation Cafe for the full story and how you can apply the lessons of the Oreo cookie to your global employee recognition and rewards programs.

Recognize This! – Never assume the local approach for employee recognition and rewards will work equally well globally.

3 Lessons for Employee Engagement through Recognition from XL Axiata

Recognize This! – Learning from others’ success can enhance our own efforts for engagement.

I enjoy Abhishek Mittal’s Mumblr blog. Abhishek is a senior consultant for Towers Watson based in Singapore. Recently he shared a case study on XL Axiata, an Indonesian mobile services operator and division of Axiata Group. In the case study, Xl Axiata explains four key steps they took to create an engaging work environment for employees, including a Performance-Based Culture:

“XL Axiata knew that if it wanted the employees to display the right behaviours, it had to recognize and reward these behaviours. The leaders shaped a culture where people and performance are talked about in the same breath. Employees who were creating value for the company were being recognized through company-wide emails and there was a focus on celebrating small successes in the long journey to achieve the vision. It also placed a higher emphasis on differentiating rewards based on performance. Mittal says,These initiatives helped employees build a clear line of sight to the company goals and sent a clear message that the company values high performance above everything.”

From this one focus alone, I see three clear lessons for employee engagement:

Recognize and Reward the How not just the What
Results (the What) can be achieved in many ways, not all of them positive (think Enron or any of the other recent scandals were the end was more important than the means). By focusing recognition and rewards on the right behaviours, XL Axiata is reinforcing that how the work is accomplished is as important as what is accomplished.
Celebrate progress on the way to the big win
While everyone must understand and work toward the ultimate vision and “big win,” small successes and progress along the way make the big win ultimately possible. Research conducted by Harvard Business School and reported in the book The Progress Principle by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer proved the single greatest motivator for employees is making progress in meaningful work. Doing so increases engagement.
Offer multiple, differentiated awards
Recognition and rewards must be differentiated based on several factors including level of effort, contribution and results achieved. Offering the same level of recognition to someone who came up with an innovative idea that could transform product direction as you also offer to someone who contributed as part of a team to a lesser initiative merely serves to demotivate those who achieve great ambitions. Offering differentiated awards (awards at various levels) ensures both proper recognition and reward activity as well as eliminating any concerns around recognition becoming expected or run-of-the-mill.

What major initiatives has your organization undertaken to encourage employee engagement?

3 Lessons for Implementing Truly Global Employee Recognition Solutions

Recognize This! – “Going global” with your recognition efforts is not sending certificates in English across the globe.

I’m very proud of my team. Right now, they are in the process of recording on-demand training for a global client in 20 languages. That means securing 20 native language speakers, scheduling recording sessions, and producing final training materials – for multiple audiences. And this is just the final step in a months long multi-lingual communications and training effort.

Why do I share my pride with you? Because their effort is a terrific example of what implementing a truly global strategic employee recognition effort really means. Of course, I must also give kudos to our client who, as a global organization, always communicates everything of importance in 20 key languages across their employee population.

So when a global roll-out of strategic recognition designed to reinforce and proactively manage the company’s strong culture got on the docket, of course they would communicate and train employees on the program in those 20 languages.

The take-away lessons here for multi-national organizations considering strategic employee recognition:

Go global – Don’t relegate any of your employees to second class status. Launch your strategic recognition program to all employees at once. Let them know this new approach for appreciation and praise is for all employees, regardless of location.
In language – Little makes people feel more heard and, yes, recognized than having key messages delivered in their own language. If you’re launching a global program, launch it right. Build excitement for the program and train in the local language.
In “culture” – Understand, respect and –critically – involve – employees from your various cultures. Perception of and preference for how recognition is delivered varies widely around the world (and we won’t even get into the details of how a congratulatory hand sign in the US is a terrible insult in other parts of the world). Respect these differences and involve participants early in the process

“Going global” with your recognition efforts is not sending certificates in English across the globe nor blindly shipping merchandise tens of thousands of miles only to sit in customs offices.

No, “going global” with recognition is deep, inherent cultural respect as well as appreciation for your employees everywhere. Do it right.

What additional recommendations do you have for global implementations of recognition (or any initiative directly involving and impacting all employees)?

A Lot Done, But Way More to Do!

Recognize This! – We as HR Pros have accomplished a lot, but our work is not nearly finished.

I was in Berlin last week, chairing day one of a HR conference on employee engagement. The quality of presentations were truly exceptional, with a wide variety of insights as HR peers shared their projects on various engagement fronts.

We heard lots of ambitions, including:

Adidas – project to improve engagement scores
BP – embedding a new set of corporate values
Kimberly Clarke – aiming to move further up the Best Places to Work List
Electrolux – becoming a Social Enterprise (online collaboration and all)
Best Places To Work Institute themselves on how engagement will just be an “employment norm” by 2020

What struck me the most, though, was not the ambitions themselves, but some of the “walls” (suitable given we were in Berlin) HR see in the workplace. And it seems one of the biggest walls of all is managers and the nature of relationship they establish. Yes, even in 2013, I heard:

“How do we make managers accept relationships is a key management task?”
“How do we ensure they take the time to have more conversations with employees?”

Speaker after speaker spoke about the role employee recognition played in one project or another. But, here’s my soap box – We’ve done a lot, but we have way more to do!

Everyone gets that employees love the positive feedback of recognition; everyone gets that good recognition is a quality conversation. They get, too, that recognition can be telling the corporate strategy in a positive way, that we all need encouragement along the way, and that we need to celebrate the “how” just as much as the “what.”

But where is the mass mobilization of recognition in their organizations? Employee of the month or spot awards to just the 5-10% top performers isn’t going to cut it!

Here’s the statistics (from Mood Tracker Spring 2012): 78% of employees would work harder IF they felt their efforts would be recognized. But, only 15% got any recognition in the past month.

Recognition is one of the most powerful tools HR has in its toolkit. Social Recognition – done right – has the power to make all these ambitions real, and break down the walls, too. Boost engagement, drive social behaviors, embed new values, encourage many quality conversations, reward the “how”, and just generally help employees feel really glad they came to work today!

What are your big ambitions?

3 Keys to Successful Big Data Application in HR

Recognize This! – Data is useless unless you know how to analyze your findings, measure the results and report on the ROI of your efforts.

I’m a proponent of big data – especially in HR. You can change a company culture without big data, but you certainly cannot proactively manage it on an ongoing basis. But collecting the data isn’t enough. You have to know what data to collect in the first place, and then what questions to ask about the resulting information as you conduct deep analysis.

As David Bernstein, head of eQuest‘s Big Data for HR/Predictive Analytics Division, said in a recent TLNT article, “[Big data] is nothing without knowledgeable people making the essential connections.”

Indeed, I encourage you to read David’s entire post as he offers sound advice on how to effectively use the data you collect, including several steps in big data analysis that rely on human intelligence for proper interpretation and, critically, application.

For a real-world application of big data collection, analysis and application, there are few better examples than Google’s People Operations department. Slate shared this recent article on the depths of Google’s big data gathering on its people (including the size of café tables and lunch lines). I was particularly impressed by this:

“Then there was the happiness problem. Google monitors its employees’ well-being to a degree that can seem absurd to those who work outside Mountain View. The attrition rate among women suggested there might be something amiss in the company’s happiness machine. And if there’s any sign that joy among Googlers is on the wane, it’s the Google HR department’s mission to figure out why and how to fix it.

“Google calls its HR department People Operations, though most people in the firm shorten it to POPS. The group is headed by Laszlo Bock, a trim, soft-spoken 40-year-old who came to Google six years ago. Bock says that when POPS looked into Google’s woman problem, it found it was really a new mother problem: Women who had recently given birth were leaving at twice Google’s average departure rate. At the time, Google offered an industry-standard maternity leave plan. After a woman gave birth, she got 12 weeks of paid time off. For all other new parents in its California offices, but not for its workers outside the state, the company offered seven paid weeks of leave.

“So in 2007, Bock changed the plan. New mothers would now get five months off at full pay and full benefits… . It would be a mistake to conclude that Google doles out such perks just to be nice. POPS rigorously monitors a slew of data about how employees respond to benefits, and it rarely throws money away. The five-month maternity leave plan, for instance, was a winner for the company. After it went into place, Google’s attrition rate for new mothers dropped down to the average rate for the rest of the firm. “A 50 percent reduction—it was enormous!” Bock says. What’s more, happiness—as measured by Googlegeist, a lengthy annual survey of employees—rose as well. Best of all for the company, the new leave policy was cost-effective. Bock says that if you factor in the savings in recruitment costs, granting mothers five months of leave doesn’t cost Google any more money.”

3 Keys to Successful Big Data Application

1) Gather the right data in the first place.

2) Analyze the data to understand where and when it is most important and effective to intervene and the actions to take

3) Measure the results to prove the ROI of actions taken (and, therefore, the benefit of the big data collection and analysis, too)

If your goal is to deeply understand your organization’s culture so you can intervene and take effective actions to change the culture for long-term success, one of the most effective big data collection mechanism is strategic, social employee recognition. Look to all of your employees, frequently and globally, to tell you how your culture is doing based on the core values they are recognizing in their peers and colleagues.

Does your organization collect, analyze and take action on big data efforts around your people operations? What effects have you seen?

How Fiefdoms Destroy Company Culture (and What You Can Do about It)

Recognize This! – Allowing local leaders to create fiefdoms for their own advancement seriously impacts organizational culture strength and validity.

This morning I had breakfast with a friend, Martha. As friends do over coffee and pastry, we filled each other in on the latest happenings in our work and personal lives. I was particularly concerned about Martha’s work experiences as her company has gone through some “right sizing” in recent months. As part of the restructuring, the groups in her building have officially divided into two formal divisions within the larger organization.

The outcome, while beneficial in some ways, was detrimental in others. One division, I’ll call them Alpha, in particular believes they deserve to be entirely separate and have no need to participate with the Bravo people (the other division) at all. Keep in mind, these divisions share the same building and facilities.

Why is this so bad? Here’s just one example. Martha heads up the employee recognition team for the Bravo division. She coordinates pizza lunches, bagel breakfasts, holiday events and the like. (While I will argue this isn’t real recognition, the example still highlights the dysfunction.) She was informed last week that the Alpha group doesn’t want to participate in the “thing” Bravo does and will create their own. Of course, this generated ill will, not the least of which is a result of Alpha not stepping up to create their own recognition solution.

The problems run much more deeply, however. Martha’s company offers a glimpse into why multiple disparate recognition programs cause problems.

Fiefdoms Destroy Culture

The senior leader of the Alpha group was a driving force behind the decision to split the group into two formal divisions. There’s a reason team members call him “Napoleon.” Indeed, Napoleon has effectively built himself his own little fiefdom within the larger company. He runs things his way, without concern for the larger needs or desires of the entire organization. (A fiefdom is very different from an organizational division or business unit. Business units exist for valid business-based reasons. Fiefdoms exist for the glorification of the local leader.)

The company itself has a strong culture. These fiefdoms are rapidly eroding that culture. Employees within Alpha do not feel part of the larger group, many see themselves as distinctly different and separately entitled. Are Alpha employees as committed to the overall company goals and mission? I wonder.

Localized Employee Recognition & Satisfaction Programs Prop Up Fiefdoms

By choosing to “go their own way” with employee recognition, Alpha further distances themselves from the rest of the organization. This is why we strongly advocate as best practice a single strategic, social recognition program for the entire organization as this is the most efficient, positive (and cost effective) way to create one culture across the entire organization. When done right, strategic recognition reinforces the company’s overall core values and strategic objectives, uniting all employees in a common vision and mission.

Executives Must Take Control of the Culture (and Recognition)

Executives must stop propping up fiefdoms in their organization. They must take control of their culture, which is most easily done through strategic recognition. Again, when done right, strategic, social recognition generates the big data necessary to see your culture in action, everywhere, in all divisions, across all employees. That’s simply not possible when fiefdoms are allowed to create their own approaches.

If a company decides to pursue one culture of appreciation through a single, universal (or global) strategic recognition program for all employees, then executives must step up and clearly, firmly inform divisional leaders (especially fiefdom lords) that local recognition programs will no longer be funded or encouraged. The expectation is for all units to join into a One Company culture and engage with each other through the single recognition solution.

Does your company have fiefdoms? How do they affect your overall culture?

Premier Farnell Tells Their Story of Successful, Strategic Recognition

Recognize This! – Incorporating the 10 Tenets of strategic recognition is critical for success.

Just before the holidays, our client Premier Farnell joined us for a webinar: “Making the Most of Recognition: Premier Farnell’s Recognition Journey.” Located in 35 countries with headquarters in London, critical to Premier Farnell’s recognition journey was multi-lingual, global expertise in recognition and rewards that are appropriate and meaningful for a global audience of employees.

Amy Montefinese, VP of global total rewards and HR operations for Premier Farnell, shared an excellent story of what the firm was able to accomplish through their iCAN recognition program. By happenstance, Amy directly spoke to several of the 10 tenets for a successful strategic employee recognition program (as explained in detail in Winning with a Culture of Recognition). Below are just a few with quotations from Amy and my comments on importance.. The entire webinar is also available here or via the video below:

The Tempo Starts at the Top

“Our CEO is a big champion of the program, which has really helped our recognition program be successful. He really gets it. He knows how important recognition can be, and in fact has been one of the top 5 nominators in the program since it launched… He set the tone and really made recognition a priority for the organization.”

By his or her actions, your CEO signals to all employees very clearly what matters most. Securing CEO sponsorship – visibly and consistently – is the top tenet for successful strategic recognition.

Base Recognition on Your Values and Objectives

“Currently, we are in a brand transition, which includes ‘Our Elements’ showing who we are and what we value as an organization. This is a very critical ingredient we use in our recognition program as we link these values to every recognition moment to help us embed them in the organization as we go through change. So, for example, our award reasons of Passion, Simple Structures & Systems, Flawless Execution, Totally Reliable and Resourceful, come straight from Our Elements.”

Whether your organization is in transition or not, linking employee recognition to what matters most to your organization (your values and objectives) is the most powerful way to bring these ideas to life for all employees.

Involve Program Participants and Invite Their Input

“We had a cross functional global team on this. I brought together stakeholders from across the globe, from line managers as well. We had definite buy-in at launch. This was a very important contributor to our success. This helped with line sponsorship and the program not being viewed as an ‘HR thing’ because we had input from across the organization.”

A culture of recognition is owned by all employees, not just HR or the recognition program champion. To get to a true culture of recognition, it’s critical to involve people from across the organization in program design and implementation.

Call All Managers to Training/Promote It or Perish

“As a partner, Globoforce brought in their expertise and their knowledge of implementing programs. Communication and training was big and I didn’t have a huge team to help me. So we leveraged the Globoforce team to help us develop a presentation that we used for a series of global webexes. We also recorded an on-demand training session available through the intranet. This really was key to a successful roll-out and implementation.”

To reach program adoption goals quickly, you must not only communicate the program through various vehicles, but train employees on why this new approach to recognition is critical to company and individual success. Use the resources available to you, and don’t shirk this critical tenet.

Touch as Many People as Possible, as Often as Possible

“In the environment today where organizations are hamstrung by sluggish sales and the need for efficiency gains, employees really are motivated by recognition. Feedback from a manager for doing a great job really does go a long way… Every quarter our team produces an HR dashboard and recognition metrics are highlighted. Employee reach is a big one – what percentage of employees in which groups were recognized. Our target this year is 80%. At the end of Q3 several divisions have already reached their goal and the rest are on track.”

Not only do you need a goal of 80-90% program participation, you need an easy yet detailed mechanism for measurement and metrics accumulation and reporting.

I encourage you to watch the full webinar, then come back and tell me what lessons you can apply in your own organization.

The HR Challenge: The Importance of “While”

Recognize This! – “While” can turn a challenge into an opportunity.

Quite a lot of kerfuffle hit the HR blogosphere in the last few weeks after the appearance of KMPG International’s “Rethinking Human Resources in a Changing World” report.

Without going into all of that, let’s look at HR’s three core challenges as defined in the report (and admirably summarized on TLNT by John Hollon):

Balancing the global and the local – managing, hiring and identifying talent globally while retaining important local insights
Managing a flexible and virtual workforce – but not at the cost of loyalty and career development
Retaining the best talent – maintaining employee engagement in the face of a less committed, more flexible workforce.

Let me reframe those challenges in terms that make more sense to me:

Honor the unique talents and differences (cultural or otherwise) in all employees while integrating them fully into one company culture of recognition and appreciation
Let employees work how (and where) they work best while creating opportunities for building interpersonal relationships and advancement
Reward your top performers as they deserve while recognizing and praising the continued day-in and day-out commitment of your middle 70% “Steady Eddies.”

Did you notice that one little word “while” in all three challenges? “While” is that little hook that turns a challenge into an opportunity – and, very often, into a solution.

Let’s look these challenges again through the lens of the “while” solution:

One culture of recognition and one language of appreciation and praise, applied strategically so that local cultural expectations are honored globally, brings the balance needed in today’s widely distributed workforces.
Though we may work in scattered locations, we all need to know that what we do matters and contributes to a bigger picture. Building interpersonal relationships with our colleagues through frequent, timely positive praise helps those who are physically disconnected from their coworkers reconnect through the knowledge that their efforts made a difference.
We can no longer focus on the top 10% of performers and expect everyone to be engaged. We must focus on the 80-90% of performers who do their best every day. We must never forget it’s those middle 70% who make it possible for the stars to shine. When you expand the “winner’s circle” to the vast majority, you make it far easier for employees to choose to engage in your culture of recognition.

How can you incorporate “while” to change challenges to opportunities or solutions?

Fall 2012 SHRM/Globoforce Report: The Business Impact of Employee Recognition

Recognize This! – Culture management continues to rise in importance to HR leaders as the ability to measure and analyze culture also improves through strategic employee recognition.

Last Friday in a broader post on how to get more value out of your core values, I alluded to the SHRM/Globoforce Fall 2012 Report. A bi-annual report, this latest edition focuses on “The Business Impact of Employee Recognition.”

While I encourage you download the full report on the employer perspective on the importance employee recognition, I’ll share with you here the top 5 findings of the report with my thoughts on why these are rising to the forefront of thought for leadership today.

Key Finding #1: The top 3 challenges faced by HR organizations today are succession planning, employee engagement and culture management.

Culture management has been rising fairly rapidly in the ranks of importance, which is highly gratifying as this communications that HR Pros understand more their ability to directly and proactively manage culture – and lead the charge to do so. Critically, they also understand they are able to change the conversation with their senior leadership team on the impact of culture management to the bottom line. The research itself reported:

“In part this is likely because culture is so critical, yet traditionally so difficult to measure and quantify. Companies are searching for reliable metrics for gauging culture and cultural change that can reinforce company values and drive business goals.”

Key Finding #2: Companies with strategic recognition programs report less frustrated—and more enabled—employees.

Enablement is another topic rising in discussions thanks to work down by several analyst groups, including Hay Group and Towers Watson. The latter published this summer an interesting report showing that Sustainable Engagement delivers 2 times the operating margin that regular engagement does. And a key factor of sustainable engagement is enablement – making sure employees have the tools they need to do their jobs and the right environment to do it in. The interesting finding from the research showed:

“The SHRM/Globoforce survey found that when companies have strategic recognition programs—programs where all recognition awards are tied to corporate values—their employees feel more enabled and empowered to succeed and less tempted to jump ship. Employees with strategic recognition programs also possess a stronger understanding of organizational objectives and feel more capable of achieving them. This is likely due to strategic recognition’s ability to reinforce values, encourage strong working relationships and clarify must-win battles.”

Key Finding #3: Strategic recognition programs tied to corporate values are more effective than programs without ties to corporate values.

This finding lends further weight to the ability to now proactively manage your culture through strategic, social employee recognition. From the research:

“These kinds of recognition programs also yield actionable data that provides deeper insight into company culture and talent performance, which enables organizations to better manage and measure those areas.”

Key Finding #4: Empowering employees to both give and receive formal recognition yields better results.

You cannot manage your culture through management alone. That’s the difference between a culture of recognition and a recognition program – giving ALL employees the power to recognize and reward each other for living your values, which are the core of your culture. And remember, true peer-to-peer recognition gives all employees skin in the game by communicating you trust them as well. From the research:

“In metric after metric, SHRM/Globoforce survey results showed that companies that have implemented peer-to-peer recognition perform better. These companies have recognition programs with greater impacts on their financial results. HR managers perceive that employees are better attuned with company values and in turn feel that rewards are given out according to job performance. These companies are also more likely to feel highly engaged at work.”

Key Finding #5: Organizations that spend more than 1% of payroll on employee recognition experience better results.

Budgeting for employee recognition is nearly always a touchy subject. Too often, people wrongly assume the same results can be achieved through low cost pizza parties or casual pats-on-the-back. In fact, nothing communicates importance of anything better than putting monetary commitment behind it. (And often, companies are already spending at least 1% of payroll on recognition practices they aren’t even aware of.) From the research:

“Companies that allocated 1% or more of payroll to recognition see higher engagement levels, better retention and better financial results. They also have employees with stronger ties to company values.”

Again, I encourage you to download the full report for the facts and figures to help you build your business case for strategic recognition in your organization.

Here’s one parting thought from Mark Schmit, SHRM’s vice president of research:

“The latest SHRM/Globoforce survey shows HR leaders are thinking about how to instill stronger employee performance. Employee recognition, as observed by those surveyed, provides quantifiable business results. It’s these types of findings that cement recognition as a critical program for any HR leader.”

How high on your priority list is culture management?

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