Zappos - Featured on Real Recognition Radio

Zappos has become legendary for the way they treat employees and focus on keeping their work-place truly unique, exciting and a little weird in a positive way. On their website, they state that their biggest asset is their "Culture". Check out our Radio show featuring Zappos's leader of the Cruise Ship Operations Department within Human Resources, Jamie Naughton. The interview begins with why a HR sub-function at Zappos is called Cruise Ship operations and goes on to focus on why culture is so important to Zappos and what business value they derive from creating and maintaining such a unique Culture. This is a radio show you don't want to miss - Click the link below to hear the radio show - Enjoy: Real Recognition Radio Show featuring Zappos

What's Recognition Education in Companies got to do with Sex Education in Schools?

Whenever I have had the opportunity to meet with a CEO or someone in the executive leadership team of a company, I have asked the question “What do you want to achieve with Recognition?” Every single response has been the same - “I want to build a strong Recognition culture in our company, where every employee feels appreciated for the contributions he or she is making, however small the contributions may be”. Of course, the words used and the phrasing of the response varies, but the essence has always been the same.

So how do you go about creating a strong Recognition culture within an organization?

It needs to begin with Recognition Education – i.e. managers across the organization need to understand what real Recognition is and understand why Recognition is almost a fundamental expectation of the employees who work for them. This is very different from Recognition Training, which is about using the Recognition Programs (i.e. Tools) available to managers. As my colleague, Roy Saunderson, says – “Think of it as Sex education in schools – what kids need is Sex Education, and not Sex Training”. In companies, what managers need is Recognition Education. If they are educated, using the tools will come naturally to them.

The Google approach to Recognition Program Design

While designing Recognition programs for clients, we have found that clients get really surprised with the simplicity of the program design that we recommend. “Isn’t that too simple a program?” is a common question they ask. They probably are thinking “Did we pay these guys to design such a simple program for us?”

I call this is the Google approach to Recognition. When it comes to search engines, why is Google so popular. I believe it is because of the simplicity for the user – the interface is clean, uncluttered and simple. The results are relevant to the search and are displayed in an easy to understand manner. Essentially, they make the product very simple to use, although the back-end may be very complex.

When it comes to Recognition Programs, the primary focus for me would be to design something that the employees in the organization (the end users) will actually use extensively. If you create too many programs, offer too many award options, make them input too much data, it will confuse the end-users and make it cumbersome for them to use the system. While on the other end, if they can nominate/recognize someone very easily, the chances they would use the system more are higher.

We have repeatedly seen that as companies evolve with their Recognition programs, the programs get simpler and simpler on the front end, with all the complexity (budgets, nomination/approval rules, award fulfillment etc.) moving to the back-end. So for those in the initial stages of designing and implementing a recognition program, you might as well jump ahead and create a program that is simple and very usable for the employees.

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".

Recognition for Contract Workers

I was recently advising a large global company with local manufacturing facilities in India on various Recognition programs they could adopt for their Sales, Support and Manufacturing organizations. I learnt that over 20% of the total number of employees in the company were contractors employed through a third party staffing company. The contractors were at the lowest levels in the organization – field sales, factory workers etc. A number of supervisors/managers were including these contractors in their Reward and Recognition programs and wanted my advice how they could do more for them. To some extent, they considered them equivalent to full time employees when it came to recognition and wanted to integrate them into every program we would design for them.

This poses some legal questions. Can you include contract workers in your Recognition programs? The answer varies by geography and the legal/labour rules applicable locally. I decided to speak to a labour lawyer to get his opinion on this. I managed to find a good lawyer who would give me some quick advice without sending me an invoice.

The lawyer’s advice was exceptionally clear – For contract workers, the company should NOT provide any benefit outside of the fees payable to their employer (i.e. the contract staffing firm). Ideally, you should exclude contractors even from company celebrations to the extent possible. Individual rewards and recognition are an absolute “NO-NO”. Why? Because anything done for contractors outside of the contract fees is tantamount to “Pseudo Employment”. Such practices done over a period of time coupled with a few tenured contractors, could put the company at risk – essentially, the company can face legal action and be forced to employ the contractors as full-time employees and extend all employee benefits to them, retro-actively. This would pose a short term financial burden, longer term HR implications and impact long term benefit plans. So his answer in short was "IF you employ contractors, treat them as contractors and stick to the contract document on what you can do and what you cannot do – do not try to integrate them into the company and extend any employee benefits to them”.

The Rewards Continuum!!

What kind of Rewards work best to drive employee engagement and motivate employees?

A colleague of mine “Jay Whitehead” (jaywhitehead@rideau.com) and I were recently at a client meeting, when the client asked “What kind of Rewards work best to drive employee engagement and motivate employees”? Jay answered the question very well and I thought his response will be useful to a lot of us. His response was the following:

Rewards work in a continuum. At one extreme, you have an investment banker working in Wall Street with 6 figure salaries - For him/her, merchandise awards, cash awards are nice, but not very significant. They crave for the softer Recognition – someone saying “Thank You” to them, getting a $20 plaque in front of the company employees, getting an email from the CEO congratulating him/her for a good job done etc. The Recognition for them is less dependent on the product/merchandise as it has very little value for them.

At the other end of the continuum, you can have a call center worker in India earning $300 per month, has a lot of unsatisfied basic needs and aspirations for a better life. So for them, dinner vouchers, household goods as awards, cash awards etc. mean a lot. Any recognition done without a product/material will be trivialized by them – e.g. an email from the CEO is nice, but I would love to get a TV from the company for the contributions I have made. For them the recognition experience must be matched with an appropriate product – the bigger the recognition, bigger the award value they inherently expect.

In between these 2 extremes, the balance between the recognition and the reward product changes in a linear manner.

So when you are looking at creating a Recognition program, you may want to design the mix between the recognition and the actual reward along this continuum. In most companies, this would mean that for the lower level/junior employees, merchandise/reward products would play a very important role and for the senior employees, the recognition experience would play a more critical role. This does not mean that we have no reward products for the senior employees, and no recognition experience for the junior employees. It is really about the balance between the two.

Recognition Program Design 101

I have consistently been receiving queries from HR folks about their company's recognition program. They typically send me their Recognition Policy document and ask me for feedback. Over a period of time, I figured out that I was getting these queries when the HR person was tasked with evaluating the company's Recognition programs and come up with a enhanced and better program. Based on what I have seen, I have given a very high level guidline you can use while designing a Recognition program.

The program you design needs to touch a large segment of the employee population i.e. around 60-70% of the organization should feel that they can actually get some of the awards/recognition. Recognition needs to be very pervasive within the organization - “Everyone likes to get Recognized – so Why are we stingy with this?”.

An ideal Recognition program should have a variety of initiatives/awards that can touch 100% of the employee population:
1) The Premier Corporate awards (for the best-of-the best): Touches about 10-15% of the employee population.
2) The BU/Department/Location level awards (Senior Manager driven awards): Touches about 25-30% of the employee population
3) Manager level awards: Spot rewards/low cost team level awards: Touches about 40-60% of the employee population
4) Standard Corporate Awards: Exhibiting corporate values, CSR, Long Service awards etc. (Touches 100% of the employee population).

In one of the following posts in the blog, I will try and provide a sample Recognition Program Design that you can readily use and customize for your organization.