Derek Irvine, coauthor of the book, Winning with a Culture of Recognition (Globoforce Limited, 2010) and vice president of Global Strategy for Globoforce, suggests that it’s time for employers to take another look at employee recognition. “It’s no longer just a nice-to-have a program; recognition can be, if deployed strategically, a massive profit generator and a massive strategy deliverer for organizations when it is done right.”
Even during this difficult economy, more people are voluntarily leaving jobs right now than people are being laid off, says Irvine. “Employees are feeling disenfranchised and disengaged. People sustain an extra level of work and pressure for a time, and then they’re voluntarily leaving jobs and out hunting and finding others. As you well know, it’s the top performers that, even during difficult times, still find alternative jobs.”
Irvine asserts that strategic employee recognition is an answer to retaining staff. He says that one of the problems with relying on individual managers to recognize employees for a job well done is that some managers are more creative than others in individually recognizing and rewarding employees. Another problem is that recognition may fall by the wayside when managers become preoccupied by important business needs.
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The biggest problem, however, is that when recognition is left up to each manager with no structured plan in place, it may not happen at all. Irvine notes that one research study reported that 60% of employees said that they had received no recognition or reward during the past 12 months.
Key Recognition Tenets
“Strategic recognition comes into play by providing a format, a structure to follow [that] is based on five key tenets that we find important to success,” says Irvine.
Tenet 1: Make sure that strategic recognition starts at the top. The CEO must really care about recognition. According to Irvine, achieving long-term support from the CEO and senior leadership requires your ability to provide real data, metrics, and measurements of the successes of your recognition program back up to the executive offices.
Tenet 2: Build the recognition program strongly on the back of metrics. “Put into place metrics for the entire company so you have a cascade of metrics throughout the organization that says that recognition is going to be very important,” Irvine says. “More and more companies are realizing the financial impact of improving employee engagement.”
He cites a recent Harvard Business Review article about Best Buy®: “A store that achieved a 0.1 percent improvement in employee engagement achieved $100,000 more in revenue than any other store.” Irvine also cites a Towers Watson study that a 15% improvement in employee engagement equates to a 2% improvement to a company’s bottom line.
Tenet 3: Build the theme of the program behind quite simple, but extremely important, topics for the organization. “For example,” says Irvine, “your core strategy and goals that the company has set for growth and innovation, clearly communicated to employees so they know these are the things that matter; these are the values we follow.”
“Strategic recognition becomes the lever, the mechanism that reinforces the theme that matters,” he explains. “That’s why we are going to continuously celebrate all employees when they live and behave in this fashion.”
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For more information, visit Winning with a Culture of Recognition.
In tomorrow’s Advisor, we’ll get the last two tenets and a client example of one company’s successful recognition program, plus we recognize a comprehensive and dynamic online resource for training managers and supervisors on key leadership topics.