Lucky 10

I recently met with a company which is completing 10 years (a very successful 10 years) in Jan 2011. The HR team is preparing a nice scrap book (with comments from a number of people) to be sent to all those who have been with the company since Year 1- i.e. those who joined on or before Dec 31, 2001. Good initiative and the scrap book looked great.

I asked the team some uncomfortable questions:
1)What about those who joined in Jan/Feb 2002 – have they contributed lesser because they joined a month later?
2)Do you think this tenure program is sustainable? Can you replicate this level of effort for all employees completing significant tenures?

My colleague S Max Brown, often talks about why a Recognition initiative/program is not just meant for the recipients, but also for those who observe the recognition initiative/event. The Recognition initiative communicates to everyone (including the non-recipients) what the company and the leadership team values. So it is imperative for the team planning a recognition initiative to evaluate how the program will be received by the non recipients as well.

Recognition for Small Enterprises

I have been getting enquiries from a number of companies with 200 to 1000 employees (the Small Enterprises segment, I guess), asking me if we could help them with the administration of their Recognition program. I met with a few of them to understand their requirements better. In most cases, they don’t do any recognition currently, but the HR person has been asked by the CEO to run a program and this person now wants an R&R platform. I want to avoid making a premature judgment of their requirements, but I am convinced that what these companies need is not a software platform for running their R&R programs. If they are serious about using Recognition as a strategic HR tool, they need to begin building a culture of Recognition. How can they do this? First, by helping the people managers in their organizations understand:
1) Why Recognition is important for the employees they manage?
2) What is the return on investment they can expect for the effort they put into recognizing their employees?
Once the managers have bought into the idea and concept of using Recognition more effectively, HR can provide a small budget and high level guidelines for each manager and let them design and run their own recognition and reward program within their teams. This way, managers can begin using recognition easily, without getting stifled by organizational processes around approvals & procurement. Given the small spend, I would advocate letting the managers determine and procure the award products directly, with some checks and balances to ensure that fair market value is paid for the reward products procured. HR can supplement the localized efforts by designing and running an enterprise wide formal recognition program.
I believe that for a 1000 employee organization, the effort around the administration of the programs will not justify any spend on a platform/system. Once the usage of recognition significantly increases, HR can evaluate investing in a simple system to track and manage the programs – I would actually wait till the people managers start complaining that they are finding it difficult to run their R&R programs. In most cases, the only real support managers need would be around the procurement of reward products (specifically those that require customization).
Going back to my interactions with SMEs, I have been urging them to evaluate if their real problem is not having a Recognition system or is it that their managers are still not on-board with using recognition.