Recognition for Very Small Enterprises

I had a great conversation with a lawyer recently. She runs a small law firm, sees value in recognizing her employees and wanted my thoughts on whether they need an online system for running a recognition program.

I asked her a few quick questions:

Q1) How many employees do you have, how many offices do you have and what is the profile of the employees?

A1) Half a dozen people managers, about 30 employees, all of them located in one office in one city. All employees are law graduates. The managers being in the mid 30s, with most other employees in the mid 20s.

Q2) Do you currently do any Recognition?

A2) Two years ago, we tried doing "Thank You" cards, and gave out a few awards during the monthly team meetings. But nothing beyond that. Currently, we do something really rarely.

Q3) Why do you want to do Recognition?

A3) Because all the 3 employees who left the firm in the last 6 months mentioned that they did not feel appreciated enough here.

Based on her responses to these 3 questions, I quickly told her my analysis of the situation.

"With the little information you have given me, the solution to your problem is not designing and rolling out a Recognition program. The Recognition program is just another tool for managers to use and build a trusting & strong relationship with their people. If the trust is not there, the tool will not work"

Her strong reaction was that "We have a lot of trust in our work-place. That can't be an issue".

"If that is the case, why did the employees who left tell you that they didn't feel appreciated? Do you really believe that giving them a few monthly awards would have made them feel appreciated?"

After a few more arguments along the same lines, I told her that the problem may not be with the manager's intent, but with the lack of effort on their part to build this trust.

She quickly asked me what she could do to create this strong & trusting manager-employee relationship. I told her to have my colleague S Max Brown, come in and deliver a 90 minute Real Leadership keynote to all her employees during the next monthly meeting.

"Once your people are sensitized to the fact around why people need appreciation and recognition, figuring out ways to do this will be easy. Given that you have one office with about 30 employees, you could then create a nice physical "Employee Wall" for folks to put up thank-you notes, communicate notable work that employees do, post appreciative emails from clients etc. You could also leverage one of your monthly meetings every quarter to give out a few simple awards. A monthly award for such a small group may make the awards frivolous. These simple tools should do the trick for you".