Building the Business Case for Strategic Recognition

Avnet’s Vice President of Operational Excellence Terry Cain recently joined me in a webinar to explain how to build the business case for strategic recognition programs. You can request the recording here.

In this webinar, we discuss how to bring recognition programs to the level of a strategic investment that changes the very culture of a company – and how Avnet achieved just that.

The first step to building a business case for recognition is to set the right AMBITION for global strategic recognition to achieve:
• Culture Change
• Support for the Company’s Mission and Values
• Employee Motivation
• Employee Engagement

Avnet’s main challenge was figuring out how to keep a growing and culturally disparate global workforce united through times of drastic growth and acquisitions in the electronics market. In the last 10 years, Avnet has grown through 59 acquisitions to more than 12,000 employees in over 300 locations in 73 countries.

Avnet set their recognition ambition to create a unified company culture with recognition and rewards based on a desire to improve the company, increase innovation, foster a consistent employee experience, and unite all employees globally in a locally relevant way.

To build the business case for strategic recognition and achieve this ambition, Terry Cain knew – as with any strategic operational excellence initiative – executive buy-in and sponsorship was critical to bring this program to a high-level, strategic business and ROI opportunity for Avnet. Key to securing executive buy-in was changing the belief system of the C-suite, management and the company. In the webinar, Terry discusses in more depth how to ask the right questions so that these key executives and leaders come to desired belief system themselves.

Terry also describes how he and his team worked to balance the needs of all the stakeholders – employees, customers, suppliers and shareholders – to achieve this ambition for strategic recognition.

Terry and I wrap up with a discussion of how Avnet successfully applied Globoforce’s Tenets of Strategic Recognition:
1. Clear, Global Strategy
2. Executive Sponsorship with Defined Goals
3. Alignment with Corporate Values
4. Opportunity for All to Participate
5. Power of Individual Choice

Feel free to download the recorded webinar. I’d like to hear from you about your ambitions for recognition in your company. What would you like to see happen in culture change and employee engagement?