You Better Recognize!

How often do you thank your employees? Chances are, not enough.

In the book The Carrot Principle, authors Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton look at a survey of 200,000 employees covering 10 years. It found that 79 percent of respondents cited lack of appreciation as a major reason for leaving a job. Additionally, while managers ranked salary and job security as the top employee concerns, the employees themselves reported that appreciation for work done was their top concern. Certainly common sense would suggest that when employees feel appreciated and valued, their productivity, attention, and devotion to their jobs goes up.

But how do companies fairly and accurately recognize employees without creating ill-will among others? Traditionally, recognition programs have only rewarded individual, outstanding performers at the end of the year. But recognizing only the star players leads to disengagement among other employees.

“Companies traditionally have recognized the highest performers because they are the easiest to identify,” says Sonja Hutchinson, design director of the employee performance group at BI Worldwide, a business performance consulting company in Eden Prairie. “But if the organization is really going to perform, you also need to recognize all the people in the middle that achieve the business goals.”

The best way to set up a fair and successful recognition program is to create a three-pronged strategy that couples the traditional, formal program with informal and daily recognition. Formal programs include end-of-year events, usually consisting of a nomination and selection process. Informal recognition is usually handed out by managers, most often at the achievement of a milestone for an individual or department.

Day-to-day recognition, meanwhile, is the ongoing, personal acknowledgment that employees are valued. And that, experts say, is the most important, the cheapest, and the most underutilized form of employee recognition.

Clear Goals, Clear Recognition

The overall strategy of a recognition program should be to support an organization’s core values and goals. This approach helps mitigate criticism from employees that the recognition is arbitrary and inconsistent.

“Almost everything done in an organization can and should be boiled down to very measurable and observable behaviors, regardless of role,” says Rita Maehling, chief motivation officer at Achieve Consulting, Inc., a human resources consulting firm in Plymouth. “If it’s a business strategy, it should be clear how it translates for everybody’s role.”

The recognition program at Park Nicollet Health Services, a health-care system based in St. Louis Park, is tied to the company’s core values: learning, stewardship, excellence, caring, and joy. Colleagues at Park Nicollet can fill out forms that acknowledge the good work they see and note which core value the behavior correlates to. Called Ovations!, the program is available both on line and in hard-copy form. When someone is recognized, the employee, his or her manager, and human resources all are notified.