Contra View on Recognition

I recently had a fascinating meeting with the HR lead of a very large financial services institution. After I had passionately made my pitch on why Recognition is critical for companies and the business benefits of a good recognition program, the person reacted in a very unexpected manner.
He told me that in his company, they don’t believe in or do any of this stuff. He went on tell me “We do things that really matter to the employees – growth opportunities, security, market aligned pay with aggressive performance linked payouts. Since we have consistently been growing 30% year on year, employees are pushing themselves hard because they can see real growth potential – we have been walking the talk by promoting people internally very aggressively. We also bend backwards to assist employees in times of distress – We have had situations where we have hired a helicopter to provide medical help to an employee”.
I then asked him how satisfied their employees were and if lack of recognition was pointed out in their employee surveys – he told me that they don’t do employee satisfaction surveys. It was more important for them to have aligned employees rather than satisfied employees as they believed that “satisfaction” was too subjective. They did employee alignment studies – their aim was to ensure that employees were aligned with the business objectives and values of the company.
He then went to tell me how they have had bad experiences with awards, vouchers, merchandise in the past (primarily with misuse of these award products) and now they have almost gone into a state of “Nothingness” with respect to employee rewards. The only thing they do is to send their top performers on a holiday overseas.
In summary what he told me was that stuff like Recognition will work in a company which is not growing aggressively and once they run out of other options to positively impact the lives and careers of employees.
My aim with this post is to simply present the contra view, a leading industry player shared with me, rather than react to the views.