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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.

Culture Management Doesn’t Just “Happen”

Recognize This! – Creating a powerful, positive culture takes work, but strategic recognition makes it easier.

I’m thrilled that more and more I’m seeing the topic of company culture being discussed, critically, as a key contributor to organization success and not a “warm fuzzy HR initiative.” As an example, I strongly recommend this terrific post on TLNT on the impact of culture on the organization and a revolution in the appreciation of culture.

Culture Management Requires Effort

If you’re considering tackling your company culture head on, you need to be prepared to do some work. As S. Chris Edmonds said on SmartBlog on Leadership:

“I’m coaching a senior leader through his company’s culture change. He recently told me, ‘Man, this culture management is hard work!’ We both laughed — and agreed.

“It takes time and energy to tend, monitor, and nurture a safe, inspiring work environment in your organization’s divisions and teams. Safe, inspiring work environments do not happen by chance. Human foibles and temptations, driven by greed and power, can make companies lousy places to work. Only when leaders proactively manage productivity and citizenship do organizations enjoy their desired high performance, values-aligned culture.”

Isn’t that always the case? Mixing humans into anything can cause the best laid plans to go awry. And yet, it can be done. Indeed, it can be done more effectively and efficiently by playing directly to those human “foibles” and very real needs.

How to Proactively Manage Culture

We’ve codified how to proactively manage organization culture in our first book Winning with a Culture of Recognition, which my CEO Eric Mosley has now expanded on in his newest book The Crowdsourced Performance Review.

In short, when you use what matters most to your organization – your strategic objectives (what you need employees to accomplish) and your core values (how you want employees to accomplish those objectives) – as the reasons to recognize employees frequently, specifically and in a timely way, you give yourself the means to influence, manage and redirect your culture through positivity.

Avoid a Hero Culture

But the last thing you want to do is create a hero culture. Why? As explained by Holland Dombeck in Fistful of Talent:

Heroes always get pulled off of the projects that work exactly as planned to go save the project in trouble. The hero’s original projects then get behind and need saving in the future.
You pull staff from other unproblematic projects to make up for the hero saving the day, and they often feel fragmented with temporary, random assignments.
Everyone recognizes and praises the hero, and the staff that plan, resource, and execute their work smoothly (which is ideal) feel left behind and under-valued.
The heroes are usually very skilled, knowledgeable, and flexible but never able to spend time mentoring or training others.
You can’t easily scale the ability to get work done unless you hire more heroes. Heroes can only get more work done by working more hours. There’s little efficiency in working as a hero because you are always solving the hardest of the hard problems and can seldom reuse or repurpose any past work products.

Remember, the secret to a strong, effective, positive culture is giving all employees the opportunity to be recognized (and to recognize others) for their heroic efforts – whether those efforts are daily, occasional or rare, indeed. The point is, don’t forget (as Holland says): “the staff that plan, resource, and execute their work smoothly.” Doing that consistently, day in and day out, is heroic, too.

Do you proactively manage your culture?

Recognition Grader: See How Your Employee Recognition & Rewards Programs Stack Up

Recognize This! – This quick 10-question survey will let you know how you can optimize your employee recognition approach.

Regular readers of Recognize This! Know I talk about best practices for employee recognition and reward often. Indeed, these best practices are driven by the work we do with our clients (many of whom appear on various versions of Best Places to Work) as well as our continuous research with employees, managers, leaders, HR Pros and executives alike.

While our best practices approach has been codified in our book, Winning with a Culture of Recognition, and I and my team lead regular workshops around helping companies and organizations integrate these best practices into their employee recognition programs, sometimes this isn’t enough.

Many people I talk with want to know how their existing programs or approach to recognition and reward measure up. They don’t necessarily want the in-depth, full audit of their programs, just a general understanding if they’re on the right track or not.

To that end, I’m pleased to share with you Globoforce’s new Recognition Grader.

This quick, 10-question survey is designed to assess your company’s recognition program compared to best practices. When you complete the survey, you will receive a score, along with detailed recommendations in 10 areas. If applicable to you, included in the recommendations will be suggestions on how to optimize your recognition efforts as well as guidance on how to use strategic, social employee recognition to proactively manage your culture.

Try out the Recognition Grader, then come back here and let me know what you think.

Stop Treating the Symptoms of Employee Disengagement & Start Treating the Underlying Disease

Recognize This! – Most employee engagement efforts only scratch the surface, never getting to the real problems underlying employee disengagement in an organization.

A colleague of mine is currently going through some health issues and working with several doctors to try to determine the underlying causes of many varied symptoms. While, thankfully, none of this is life threatening or altering, it is a highly frustrating process for her as many of the doctors would simply prefer to treat the symptoms rather than dig deeper to find the underlying problem and eradicate the health issues at their roots.

I often think we do the same thing with employee engagement efforts. We conduct surveys to determine “symptoms,” then we treat just those symptoms with a new “Hawaiian shirt Friday” or “pizza lunch Tuesday” or even putting a ping-pong table in the break room.

These efforts, while well intentioned, are seen by employees for what they really are – treating symptoms, but not addressing the disease of employee disengagement.

What are the roots of the disease of employee disengagement?

A poor company culture – It’s much easier to treat the symptoms than to do the hard work of changing a poor company culture. But it can be done. It starts at the top. The senior executives, especially your CEO, must be on board with effort. Changing your culture into a positive one of recognition and appreciation is possible when directed from the top and enabled through all employees (Join me at one of my upcoming workshops to find out how.)
A poor manager – Let me be clear. A poor manager could be just a mean person who cannot manage others. Far more likely, this is a well-intentioned manager who does not know how to communicate to employees the strategic goals and values of the organization that makes sense to employees in what they do every day.

How to treat the disease of employee disengagement

Properly diagnose the problem – identify where employees feel the most disconnect. Do they understand why and how what they do every day directly impacts the success of their teams, the customers and the company as a whole? Do they have the tools and resources they need to get their jobs done well and effectively? Can they make progress and see the results (the primary factor for self-motivation)?
Treat the disease, not the symptoms – Employees don’t need another pizza party or coffee flavor option in the café. They need the tools to get their jobs done. They need to understand very clearly how their work matters and makes a difference. They need to not rely on their direct manager to provide this information because, frankly, some managers simply cannot. Give all employees the ability to provide this validation and context through a strategic employee recognition program that encourages everyone to acknowledge and praise everyone else for the good work they do every day.

Does your organization treat the symptoms but not the disease of employee disengagement? What would you recommend to treat the disease itself?

4 Truths about Company Culture from 2 Experts

Recognize This! – Culture cannot be ignored, hoped for, or passively addressed. It must be proactively managed, encouraged and supported.

Sometimes, others simply say it better than I can. Indeed, I enjoy featuring these authors and their works as I hope they inspire you as much as they do me.

Today, I’m featuring lessons on culture from Management Issues and a guest post on Tanveer Naseer’s blog (both perennial favorites of mine).

From Rene Carayol in Management Issues:

Culture is the only differentiator that can’t be copied.

“The most important thing about culture is that it’s the only sustainable point of difference for any organisation. Anyone can copy your strategy, but nobody can copy your culture. So why would you leave it untended?”

Culture must supersede the individual to inspire and embrace everyone.

“The best businesses are the ones that have a culture that has grown to be bigger and stronger than any one individual. If your culture is strong then it gains power through inspiring your people to conform to it. It becomes the thing that links everyone together, no matter what department they’re in. If your people become engaged with the company, the strategy is more likely to be ‘owned’ by all and focused upon.”

Culture must be grounded in core values, leadership and trust.

“The culture of a company relies on there being a clear set of values, strong leadership and a sense of transparency and honesty between the company and the public. These factors will be the ones that differentiate your company in times of austerity and increased competition. Of course strategy is important but this must be accompanied by a strong culture if lasting success is to be won.”

From Tanveer Naseer, in a guest post by Dr. George H. Labovitz and Victor Rosansky:

Culture is the secret ingredient to keep employees in alignment with goals, strategies and values.

“Alignment is the state in which the key elements of an organization — its people, strategy, customers, and processes — work in concert to serve the primary purpose of the enterprise: increasing value for stakeholders. Whatever the enterprise or its goals, the degree to which those key elements are integrated and work in concert will determine how quickly and successfully it will fulfill its primary purpose.

“Think of culture playing the role of greasing the skids making alignment to market conditions faster and smoother. Culture is the “magic sauce” that blends people’s beliefs, attitudes, values and behaviours into the capabilities necessary to create change and execute.”

What are other important culture lessons you wish others understood?

Build Your Winning Culture of Recognition & Learn How to Proactively Manage It

If you’re looking to build the business case to create a culture of recognition in your organization, join us next month in Long Beach, CA, and Tyson’s Corner, VA.

Upcoming workshop sessions:

Long Beach, CA – November 6, 2012 – The Westin Long Beach
Tyson’s Corner, VA – November 8, 2012 – Sheraton Premier at Tyson’s Corner

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 are free to go. 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.

Join Me and Build Your Business Case for Strategic, Social Employee Recognition

Recognize This! – Employees seek meaning, belonging and an opportunity to grow and develop at work. Creating a culture of recognition helps fulfill these inherent needs.

As the weather turns chilly and my friends and colleagues at our Massachusetts offices enjoy the brilliance of a New England Fall, I’m pleased and honoured to announce the final sessions in our 2012 series of “Build YOUR Winning Culture of Recognition” of workshops.

If you need to change the culture of your organization and help employees focus on what really matters to your organization (living your core values in contribution to achieving your strategic objectives), then join me and my consulting team in the Los Angeles and Washington, DC, areas next month.

Register to join us in:

Long Beach, CA, November 6^th, 8-Noon, Westin Long Beach
Tyson’s Corner, VA, November 8^th, 8-Noon, Sheraton Premiere at Tyson’s Corner

Why does this matter? As I said in a recent HRO Today article, employees are searching for meaning and a sense of feeling valued in the workplace:

“Here are three reasons why recognition makes us feel valued in the workplace:

We all want to belong. Social acceptance drives our need for relationships and the desire of belonging, friendship, and affirmation…
We all want to matter. When we feel part of the greater good, our mood and stress levels improve greatly…
We all want to grow. Self-actualization is the need for self-awareness, personal growth, and the fulfillment of our potential. In the workplace, this is achieved through effective talent and performance management…”

Join us in California or D.C. to learn how you can help your employees find the meaning they need while also building your custom business for strategic recognition. I’ll share how you can change the conversation with your executive team by showing them how you can drive millions to the bottom-line through double digit increases in employee engagement, retention and productivity. You can also earn 3.5 (General) recertification credit hours through the HR Certification Institute.

I hope to see you there. Be sure to use Registration Code: RECOGNIZETHIS to get half-off the workshop price.

Join Me in London & Build Your Winning Culture of Recognition

Recognize This! – Learn from your peers and colleagues about recognition strategies that work in this interactive half-day session.

One of the many aspects of my role as head of strategy and consulting with Globoforce is leading workshops around the world to help organizations build their own winning cultures of recognition.

I’m excited for our first UK workshop, coming up on Wednesday, 10^th October, at the Strand Palace in London.

Workshop attendees receive a copy of our book, Winning with a Culture of Recognition, along with an intensive, interactive 4-hour session as we step through the 5 tenets and associated 10 tactics of building a culture of recognition. You’ll leave the workshop with a custom one-page strategy and compelling business case for strategic recognition in your own organization.

Participants in past workshop sessions noted they were particularly valuable for the opportunity to network and discuss with like-minded colleagues from various industries on how to successfully create a culture of recognition.

Registration for the London workshop is now open. Readers of my blog also get a 50% discount on the registration price. Just be sure to use promotional code RECOGNIZETHIS when registering.

All sessions start with full 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.

Stay tuned for more information on upcoming sessions in November planned for the Washington, D.C., and Orange County, Calif., areas.

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 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?

The Culture Cycle: A Review (How to Change Your Culture)

Recognize This! – Understanding how cultures evolve and are reinforced is critical to effecting culture change

On my return from India, I finished a terrific book on organizational culture – The Culture Cycle: How to Shape the Unseen Force that Transforms Performance – by James Heskett, professor emeritus at Harvard University Business School. The challenge for me today will be keeping my review short. I highly recommend The Culture Cycle to anyone wondering how to go about the process of culture change in their organization.

Much in agreement with our own book, Winning with a Culture of Recognition, Heskett defines culture and its importance this way:

“Cultures are not abstract notions. They enable strategies and ways of executing them. They are direct contributors to the bottom lines of both for-profit and not-for-profit organizations. But, perhaps most important, they influence how we work…and with what amount f joy, personal development, and satisfaction. …

Cultures directly influence economic performance through the people they attract and the ability of those people to serve customers and each other well, and, in a for-profit organization, profitably. There is nothing ‘soft’ about them. …

In an organization in which a large proportion of employees are customer-facing, as much as half of the difference in operating profit performance between offices can be attributed to culture.”

Indeed, culture is not soft. And a strong, effective culture that leads to greater organizational profitability relies on these key points I’m highlighting and paraphrasing from the book. Throughout, Heskett uses numerous detailed examples from organizations large and small, local and global, across industries.

Culture must be nurtured over time so that “pride” does not become “arrogance.
Organizational values are very important, but even more so are the clearly defined and universally understood behaviors behind those values. Changing behaviors changes your culture. You make this stick by linking changed behaviors to improved performance metrics. This is especially true in globally distributed organizations where values can be interpreted several ways.

Employees can’t live your values or deliver on your mission if they don’t know it. Communications is your first priority, then clear processes, and recognition to reinforce what is most important.
Heskett makes the connection between culture and innovation with two examples from very different companies and industries – Apple and 3M. As Heskett points out, many marvel at Apple’s consistent innovation and product delivery in the last three decades, yet 3M has been doing the same thing (or even better) for nearly a century.
Your culture will define how your organization handles adversity when it comes (and it will come). Will your company’s reputation survive? Can you trust people to act and react as needed in the moment of crisis based on your values and culture? Heskett shares several examples, positive and negative, including the recent BP oil spill.
Strong cultural foundations make possible fast culture change and resulting actions when needed.
Global makes a difference. It’s important to understand what all of this means in vastly different global sub-cultures in multi-cultural organizations.
None of this will work if you focus on a “star performer” system and ignore the vast majority of your employees and how they live your values and embody your culture.

Tools to measure culture and its impact:

To measure financial impact, use the 4 Rs – Referrals, Retention of Employees, Returns to Labor, and Relationships with Customers.
Steps are clearly outlined on how it implement culture change, with examples from very different industries and organizations – GM, a hospital system in Florida, and the New York City Police Department (NYPD).
There are questions at the back of the book to measure the health and effectiveness of your culture.

The book also features excellent chapter summaries for those who prefer to skim, though I do recommend engaging deeply in the entire book.

What are your favorite books on organizational culture?

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