Recognizing Up

Over the last few weeks, I have been asked by two people as to why recognition programs were always about recognizing down, rather than recognizing up. Can’t organizations allow employees to recognize good managers and good leaders?
Though my first reaction was “We can’t do that”, I found the thought intriguing. If we categorize managers into three buckets – the senior/executive level managers, the middle level managers & junior/supervisory level managers. The senior managers typically get paid very well, receive significant visibility both within and outside the organization, have powerful roles with a reasonable span of influence and large budgets they can control. When we look at the middle level & junior managers, they need to deal with employees at the ground level, manage their bosses, and have limited decision making ability. Let’s say an employee comes to a manager with a significant issue. The manager’s job then is to escalate it to the senior manager and try and facilitate a solution. So the middle level & junior level managers are caught in the middle. This juggling act can become pretty stressful for them. This could be the reason why a lot more employees are choosing to be in non-supervisory roles – their return on investment for the effort and the pain they go through is not significant enough. So in some ways, if these managers who perform the juggling act day-in and day-out, can start getting recognized by their sub-ordinates, it may start having a reasonable impact on the engagement levels of the managers.

Recognition Events

I had an interesting conversation with an ex-HR leader of a very large global company. He was telling me about how his company spent 40% of their India recognition budget in hiring a popular musician to do a concert at their annual awards event. He told me that in the past the participants were so bored with the presenter talking about the achievement of the employees being awarded, that the event was considered a painful experience by all the employees. In the last year, the event was a huge success because of the musician and the concert.
I found it very strange that he felt proud about using a “Distractor”- the musician, to turn the focus of the audience away from the employees who were being rewarded. In essence, the company did not know how to make the recognition event engaging for the audience and the recipients, and hence chose to convert the event into a music concert and then called it a grand success.
I don’t have a problem with companies making the awards night a grand event with popular stage performers/musicians, but the focus obviously needs to be around the award recipients and why they are being rewarded. Rather than make a mockery of the recognition event, the company should probably set up a young energetic group of volunteers to create and run the event. I am sure most large companies have enough young creative high energy employees who would love to coordinate an event, especially when it comes with a nice budget. Then the event would serve a dual purpose - focus on the recipients and provide employees an opportunity to exhibit their creative and stage skills.

Employees First, Customers Second

I recently read a book “Employees First, Customer Second” by Vineet Nayar, CEO, HCL Technologies. Is Vineet propogating that companies start treating customers as second rate citizens? Absolutely not – His book is really sending a message to the leadership in organizations telling them that, as leaders, your primary job is to enable your employees to deliver value to your customers by removing the bottle-necks and the time-consuming processes put in place by management and the support organizations such as HR, Administration & Finance. If your employee is worrying about filling a big form to get his salary tax credits for the previous years, how is he/she going to focus on your customer?
Taking the same concept to “Recognition”, where the HR organization is designing an enterprise wide recognition program, they spend most of their time worrying about how they will administer the program, the resources they will need, IT issues with the platform etc. This diverts the focus away from the managers and employees who will actually be using the recognition programs.
If I were a manager in a company, what do I really need to recognize my employees frequently and consistently?
Primary Needs:
1) A budget I can use
2) Broad guidelines on the various categories I can award my employees for
3) Other avenues to recognize my employees in larger forums beyond just my team
Secondary Needs:
1) Support in procurement of suitable awards (customization where possible)
2) A mechanism to share some notable contributions of my employees with the company at large
3) A forum where I can understand what other managers are doing from a recognition perspective
So why does the HR organization responsible for creating a mechanism to enable the managers to use recognition more effectively, focus on the secondary requirements rather than the primary ones. I have seen a number of RFPs which focus on the breadth and pricing of products a recognition service provider offers. It’s time we start looking at managers as customers and focus on the customer’s requirements.

Sending a Birthday Gift to Employees

I recently met a company which has over 2000 employees and one of the programs they run is to send a birthday gift to all employees on their respective birthdays. The value of the gift is around INR 500. I wondered if the INR 1 lakh they spend is really worth it. I asked the HR manager if they have questioned the spend on this. He told me that once in a while, someone asks if we should be doing this and if we would do it if we were a larger organization. He went on to tell me why they felt the birthday program was important for them.
1) This was one of the few things where everyone in the organization from the CEO to the cleaner boy were treated as equals – they would all get the same gift in the exact same packaging during a calendar year.
2) They viewed this as a touchpoint – their leadership believed that they need to make use of every opportunity to touch the employees - they felt that a person’s birthday was a significant day in the employee’s life and it was the employer’s obligation to acknowledge the employee on this day.
3) The company had almost 40% of its employees who were factory workers. This population expected management to only offer them gifts on important occasions – big festivals like Diwali, Christmas etc. By recognizing them on their birthdays, it made these workers feel that the management/corporate office cared about them. So they actually wanted the gift to come from the corporate office rather than from their local supervisor - Ironical to our philosophy that managers are the ones who need to recognize the employees.
4) He also candidly admitted that since the birthday gifting program was in place, they were unsure about the impact if they removed it. Given the small cost, they would rather let the program continue than stop it and deal with any negative impact it may have.

Points as an Award

Points based programs seem to be flavour of the times when it comes to recognition programs – not without reason. Points based programs offer the following benefits:
1) Makes it easier to managers to recognize their employees frequently without the need to present an award in person and create an event around it everytime.
2) The award (Points) are credited immediately to the employee’s account, making the recognition instant.
3) The manager does not need to worry about whether the employee will like the merchandise/award he/she has chosen.
4) The manager can decide to recognize in an impromput manner without the need to plan a few weeks in advance and worrying about whether the merchandise will arrive on time.
5) The employee has the flexibility to accummulate points and choose a product that he/she really values.
6) Global implementation becomes easier as the merchandise is delinked from the recognition program.
The best place “Points” as an award fits into is in “Spot Award” programs. Managers can print out a certificate (where the system supports it an email with the certificate can be sent to the recipient and the team), announce the award and the employee’s account gets credited with the points instantly.