I'VE MOVED -- www.recognizethisblog.com

To all my readers, I'm pleased to announce I've relaunched my blog as Recognize This! and relocated it to www.recognizethisblog.com.

I'm still blogging on everything employee recognition, rewards, incentives and engagement, but also broadening my focus to the power of strategic employee recognition to positively impact the entire talent management spectrum - from recruiting and onboarding, through performance management, succession planning and even exiting. You can continue to follow my posts at Recognize This! by subscribing here.

I hope you'll continue to follow my blog and share your thoughts and insights. I learn so much from my readers. To continue to follow the Globoforce Blog, which is now a multi-author blog, you'll need to subscribe to the Wordpress feed at http://globoforce.com/globoblog/

Proactive Management of Company Culture Is the Cure for What Ails the Workplace

Recognize This! – “Facestabbing” in the workplace is a symptom, not the disease.


What’s your opinion of managing “Facestabbing” incidents in the workplace? When it comes to your attention that an employee has posted a negative comment of some kind about your company, superiors or colleagues, how does your company respond? How do you think it should respond?

Is there a formal policy? What is it? If not, do you think there should be a formal policy or procedure for addressing such comments progressively up to and including termination? Do you believe in a more informal approach?

Or do you see it more like my friend Bob Selden, author of the Management-Issues issues blog, who sees such Facebook commenting as “the old ‘water cooler gossiping’ or ‘heard it at the pub’ that have been part and parcel of work life forever?”

I tend to fall in the camp of how medical professionals might address Facestabbing – treat the disease, not the symptoms.

For some companies, treating the disease may be a bit like treating cancer at first, requiring excising of cancerous growths in the form of backstabbing, unproductive, and incompatible people that simply don't fit with a culture of appreciation focused on teamwork, success and a commitment to living out the company values in the daily work. As Josh Bersin pointed out:

“Companies which understand their core culture can far outperform their peers by building a set of staffing and management programs to reinforce this culture. And what this research clearly shows is that employee engagement (or employee satisfaction) is directly related to leadership and culture: the company must understand the culture it wants to create, hire for that culture, and manage around that culture.”

Once you have that culture built, the symptoms simply melt away.

Don’t forget on Monday next week I’ll be writing on my new blog – Recognize This! Content will be what you’ve come to expect here on the Globoforce blog, but with an expanded focus across the entire Talent Management spectrum. Current subscribers will move with me. If you want to subscribe to the corporate Globoforce Blog for new multi-author content on Globoforce news, events, customers and products, please subscribe here.

This Month on Compensation Café * Merit Increases Are Dead & 2 More

Today on Compensation Café I wrote about the possible death of merit increases as a feasible means of managing (and hopefully improving) employee performance. This year’s average merit increase is 3% -- barely a cost of living increase and not enough of a differentiation between employees who at the top of performance will receive a 4% salary increase as compared to those who meet expectations receiving 2.5% increases.

Where’s the differentiation in that? As inflation rises will those merit increases even be noticed? And even those increases for top performers are reliant on a largely failed annual performance review process. How many of you have dealt with the manager who says:

So what’s an alternative? I propose year-round rewards commiserate with year-round recognition of employee efforts. Those who perform at a higher level are naturally more frequently recognized and rewarded for those efforts.

Also this month in the café I wrote about Communicating Compensation, Total Rewards & Meaning in which I ask how well we communicate total rewards and the value of benefits packages to employees. More importantly, do we fully understand what it is about their total rewards package that most matters to employees?

In my third post of the month, I also spoke to the importance of communicating “dinner” vs. “dessert” to employees – ensuring the base compensation is fair and accurate before laying on recognition and rewards.

Pop over to Compensation Café and join the conversation or share your thoughts on this concept here. I’m really interested in what you think communicating total rewards and undifferentiated differentiation reward practices.

Also, don’t forget I’m moving to my own Recognize This! blog on Monday, May 2. Subscribers will move with me. If you want to subscribe to the corporate Globoforce Blog for new multi-author content on Globoforce news, events, customers and products, please subscribe here.

What’s a Leader Supposed to Do?

Recognize This! – A leader’s sole responsibility is to focus employee energy on achieving target objectives.

Leaders in an organization – especially people with the responsibility for managing others – are often overwhelmed with the many responsibilities, objectives and tasks on their own plates, much less those on their employees’. That’s why I enjoyed Chris Edmonds’ piece that focused expectations of leaders to one clear thing:

Source: www.drivingresultsthroughculture.com

Isn’t that the essence of what we expect our leaders/managers to do? Set their employees on the path to delivering strategic objectives and doing so in a positive, helpful way that reflects the company’s core values?

That’s precisely what strategic employee recognition is designed to help leaders accomplish:

1) Clearly communicate expectations through frequent, in-the-moment praise and recognition of employee efforts that help meet company goals

2) But not offer that praise unless such employee efforts are in line with company values and a culture of positive appreciation and recognition.

As we learned in Monday’s post of highlights from an HBR podcast:

"If managers just increased their praise and recognition of one employee once a day for 21 business days in a row, six months later, those teams as opposed to control group, had a 31% higher level of productivity." 


Do you agree? Is this list of 1 sufficient for what we need leaders to do? What would you add?

I’m launching my own blog – Recognize This! – on Monday, May 2. Content will be what you’ve come to expect here on the Globoforce blog, but with an expanded focus across the entire Talent Management spectrum. Current subscribers will move with me. If you want to subscribe to the corporate Globoforce Blog for new multi-author content on Globoforce news, events, customers and products, please subscribe here.