Retain Workers with Employee Engagement * Stanford Business School Case Study

Employee rewards and retention typically brings to mind office parties and one-off gift certificates – efforts that often involve discretionary spending and no measurable outcomes or business impact. In a global context, the effort is even more fragmented and tactical, with each country or division offering various types employee recognition – none of which roll up under a strategic corporate initiative that has the potential to motivate employees, shape an organization’s culture and influence its bottom line.

As I’ve blogged before, this type of tactical employee recognition is precisely the model that Globoforce has turned on its head with our approach to global strategic recognition. And now research out of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business is proving the value of the strategic approach.

Intuit’s management viewed employee recognition as a major opportunity to create excitement and momentum within the organization’s culture and ultimately impact the company’s performance. After scuttling a catalog-based rewards program that failed due to the inflated costs of catalogue items, outdated electronic products, broken merchandise, long delivery time, and an inability to effectively deploy the system outside the U.S., Intuit chose to make recognition strategic at all of its global locations.

Adoption of “Spotlight” immediately went through the roof, soaring to 20,000 rewards given in the first year and 26,000 the following year. The program touched 90 percent of Intuit’s employees each year, and employee opinion surveys showed that employees felt their accomplishments were recognized by the company.

Read more about how Intuit achieved such rapid success.

Tell me, do you have an employee recognition program in place? Is it tactical or truly strategic?