A Fresh Approach to Employee Reward and Recognition

Employee recognition is a means of communication that not only rewards positive results that people accomplish but also emphasizes positive outcomes. Effective recognition gets the message through to employees that positive accomplishments are rewarded and encouraged. An effective employee recognition system is simple, immediate, and powerfully reinforcing.

When you consider an employee recognition processes, you need to develop recognition that is equally powerful for both the organization and the employee. 

Some important issues should be considered if you want the recognition you offer to be viewed as motivating and rewarding by your employees as well as a contributing factor to the success of your organization:

Tips for Effective Recognition

- Accurate criteria should be established for the kind of performance that entails reward or recognition. 

- All employees must be eligible for the recognition. 

- When presenting the reward or recognizing the employee, specific information about what behaviors or actions are being rewarded should be given. 

- The recognition should occur as close to the performance of the actions as possible, so that the recognition reinforces the behavior the employer wants to encourage.

- Designing a procedure whereby managers select the people to receive recognition is not recommended. This type of procedure will most likely be viewed as favoritism or talked about as "it's your turn to get recognized this month." This is why processes that single out an individual, such as "Employee of the Month," are rarely effective.

Recognition and Performance Management Tips

- People like recognition that is random and that provides an element of surprise. If you thank a sales group every time they exceed their quota with a free lunch, gradually the lunch becomes a given and is no longer seen as a reward. 

- There is always room for employee reward and recognition activities that generally build positive morale in the work environment. In one company, there is a "smile team" that meets to schedule random, fun employee recognition events. They sponsor ice cream gatherings, picnics, ‘the boss cooks’ day, and so on, to create a rewarding environment at work.

- Don't use money to try to shape behavior or boost performance. It rarely works and if it does, it leaves behind some negative results. When you take the carrot away performance slips and you are left with stimulus-dependent people looking for bigger carrots. 

- When you do need to review or adjust your financial rewards, get the people you're compensating involved. They will be able to give you feedback on the current approach as well as ideas for improvement. This would make them feel that they have designed the compensation system and that they own it, which should lead it to being effective.

- Keep reward programs simple and direct. Employees should easily understand them. They should also see a direct connection between what they do and their reward. 

- Simple three tiered compensation systems work well: 
1) Personal
2) Team, division, or plant
3) Corporate profit sharing 

- Make sure there's a good balance between rewarding and recognizing both current performance and improvements. People who do well today but aren't improving won't help your team or organization to develop.

- Build jobs around people. Align good people with what they like to do and what needs to be done. Helping people grow, expand, and move to new challenges and opportunities are some of the best ways to show sincere recognition and genuine appreciation for their improvement efforts.

- Keep measurements, improvement progress and recognition highly visible. Use scoreboards, bulletin boards, electronic or printed announcements. This serves to keep employees updated on their performance levels and adds a motivating competitive atmosphere.

- Use a wide variety of constantly changing ways to recognize and appreciate contributions and personalize rewards so that they are suitable for the employee and actually make a difference. 

Things to Avoid

- Don't set up competitions for limited rewards. Find ways to meaningfully recognize and energize as many people as possible.

- Avoid suggestion systems. They reward people for pitching ideas at others to implement. 

- Don't use promotions as a reward. People should only be put into larger leadership roles because they have demonstrated the capacity, vision, values and skills for higher levels of leadership. Using promotions as rewards puts an unhealthy focus -and competition- on position, rank, and titles as a means of measuring worth. It also puts the promoted employees in a position where they could fail for being unqualified or face resentment from their peers.

- Traditional performance appraisals are detrimental to performance and rarely work. That's why organizations are constantly changing them. If you are looking to develop people, replace appraisals with frequent performance discussions and coaching based on feedback.

- Separate compensation and performance discussions. They serve two different purposes. Most of the factors affecting individual performance are in the system, process, or structure of the organization.

To conclude, organizations that provide recognition enjoy higher levels of job satisfaction among their employees. Additionally, there is a strong statistical correlation between employee satisfaction and increased company profits. If employees are recognized for their achievements, they are more inclined to exert more effort.

Sources:

www.clemmer.net
http://humanresources.about.com
www.vault.com