Recognition for Support Staff

I had a customer call me today asking me to help him design a reward program for the support staff in his organization. They currently had a very robust R&R program for the line staff, primarily based on business metrics – sales & profitability. He wanted to find out if we could use similar metrics for the support staff that would make the R&R program very transparent and easily understandable.
I heard him out and wanted to find out if there is data they currently measure for their support staff – maybe something like internal customer satisfaction scores, budget management etc. The response was “No” – nothing that is available to an extent that we could readily use the data. I then gave him the following inputs:

1) In the absence of a strong MIS for the support staff, do not try and create new reports for R&R purposes. In my experience, getting employees to generate new reports and data specifically for R&R does not work well. Making use of existing data and reports is a more viable option.

2) Given no specific metrics are available, the R&R program would have to be subjective one. But the subjective process can be made very transparent and clear. For example – the program criteria can be well defined, post which, nominations could be invited from all people managers. At the department level the nominations could be reviewed and shortlisted. Then at an organization level, the shortlisted nominations could be reviewed and further pruned down. The final set of nominees could then be interviewed by a committee and the winners chosen.

3) A weightage could be assigned to each stage in the process – e.g. 25% for the manager evaluation, 25% for the department level evaluation, 25% for the organizational level evaluation and 25% for the interview. The final award would be based on the scores in each of the 4 rounds.

4) An additional criterion they could add was around “Cost Management”. Whether the support staff likes it or not, they are invariably a cost center in the organization. So if employees do things that help the department control/save costs (e.g. implement a software tool to reduce manpower and improve productivity or negotiate with a supplier and reduce costs of a raw material etc.), these could have some weightage in the R&R program.

5) In addition to the big program, Spot Rewards seem to work well for support functions since they are normally based on subjective assessments. Plus a lot of the work the support staff do get forgotten easily – e.g. an admin could go the extra mile to get a hotel booking for an employee during a really busy period. Instances like this would be great for a spot reward, since it is unlikely that such behaviours, get captured in the larger evaluations.

In summary, designing an R&R program for the support staff is not easy, but a robust Spot Reward program coupled with one or two big department/organization level programs should work well.