Touchpoints & Recognition

I had the opportunity to listen to "Doug Conant" last week, speak about his concept of "Touchpoints" and his book by the same name. Doug was most recently the CEO of Campbell Soup Company, was earlier the President of Nabisco and spent the early part of his career with General Mills & Kraft Foods.

In summary, his book tells you that any interaction you have with your people in an organization is a TOUCHPOINT - essentially an opportunity to connect with them and help them with their issue to the extent possible, while being tough minded "and" tender hearted at the same time.

For several years now, we have been a strong proponent of the fact that "Recognition" is truly about conveying "Respect" and not about the "Stuff". In an organization, managers need to view Recognition opportunities (whether it be a spot award, a simple Thank you note, or a nomination for an organization award) as opportunities to convey respect to the individuals/teams and use them as positive & motivating "Touchpoints".

Just imagine the day when your boss or a colleague sends you an email sincerely thanking you for something you did well. Your entire day goes well, you go home in the evening, treat your spouse and kids better, thus transmitting your positivity to everyone else you interact with during the day. That is the impact simple Touchpoints tend to have. So start Recognizing people who perform tasks and activities that meet your high standards - You can be Tough Minded "and" Tender Hearted at the same time, or as Doug says "the genius of the AND".

Company Values - How to get your employees to understand and imbibe them?

Every company has a well defined set of Values – Almost every “Values” list I have seen has the same content – Integrity, Respect for Others, Customer Delight etc. Over the last 2 weeks, I asked a dozen companies what they do to reinforce the Values and help their employees imbibe them on a day-to-day basis. The answers ranged from “That is a good question – I don’t think we do anything about it”, to “We have our “Values” posters displayed at various vantage points – e.g. Cafeterias, Conference rooms, Screensavers on all employee computers etc. “
Eleven out of the dozen executives asked me “What do other companies do? Do you have any suggestions?”
A Recognition Program can be used as a fantastic tool to reinforce company Values on a day-to-day basis. You can have a simple Peer-2-Peer Recognition program, where every employee can recognize any other employee using an e-Card (with or without any value/gift associated with it). All the recognition can force the nominator to pick 1 or 2 of the company “Values” and a small text box, where the specifics of the nomination (Why does the nominator want to recognize the recipient?), can be included.
On the same lines, you can create an easy-to-use Spot Reward program, where the primary or one of the reasons for the recognition can be “a Value” – a behavior or an action of the employee that is aligned with one of the company’s Values.
From an employee perspective, now “Values” become much more than senior management reading them off a slide or seeing the words on a poster or on their screen-savers. They get something tangible, something they value, for exhibiting behaviours and actions aligned to those Values. If this is done consistently over a 2-3 year period, the Values will become a part of the company’s DNA.

Recognition Criteria

Clients generally ask me about the criteria they need to define for the most premium Recognition program they run. Is there a way to define the criteria in a 100% objective manner, so that everyone is clear on why someone gets an award and there is no controversy over the award winners?

The answer is “NO” in most situations – You cannot remove the subjectivity fully, unless it is a data based program such as a Sales Quota achievement award (even here, there is some subjectivity in defining the quota in the first place).
The better approach may be to use data points to create a short-list of possible awardees (nominees) and then use a subjective mechanism to determine who should get the award. The subjective mechanism could be everyone in the Leadership Team/Recognition Panel saying “YES”, with even one “NO” being used as a veto. Alternately, if the voting group is large, then a percentage cut-off can be used (80% or more need to say “YES”).