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.

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.

Five Steps to Change Your Company Culture

Recognize This! – Behaviors drive values drive culture. You cannot change the culture unless you address the underlying behaviors.


As the employee engagement discussion has grown, so has the discussion about the importance of company culture. After all, what is it you’re hoping employees engage with? As the importance of culture has surged, so has the resurgence of Edgar H. Shein (recently profiled in a Q&A in Strategy+Business).

For example, Schein explains the why well-intentioned efforts at culture change fail:

“They think that to change culture, you simply introduce a new culture and tell people to follow it. That will never work. Instead, you have to conduct a business analysis around whatever is triggering your perceived need to change the culture. You solve that business problem by introducing new behaviors. Once you’ve solved your business problems this way, people will say to themselves, “Hey, this new way of doing things, which originally we were coerced to do, seems to be working better, so it must be right.”

Using that as a starting point, here are five steps to changing your culture.

1) Do the business analysis to identify the culture you need to succeed – Is that culture innovative (Apple) or iterative? Low-cost (Wal*mart) or high-end (Lord & Taylor’s)? This is a critical definition as it will guide all future decisions.

2) List the values you believe are inherent in such a culture – If you want an innovative culture, you would likely include values such as “questioning."

3) Define the behaviors underlying each of those values – Under the value of “questioning,” you might include behaviors like “looks for a better way to do things,” “offers critical feedback in a desire to improve,” and “accepts feedback willingly.”

4) Communicate those behaviors to employees so they are understood in their daily work – Unless you communicate the behaviors underlying the values to the employees, they won’t understand what it is you need them to do.

5) Positively reinforce demonstration of those behaviors with frequent recognition – Such reinforcement, given to anyone at any level who demonstrates the needed behaviors in line with the values, ensures employees will repeat them, creating a continuous circle.

Or, as Schein explains it:

"One electric utility company I studied, Alpha Power — I can’t reveal its real name — was under pressure from regulators to improve its environmental record. Management told employees, 'Every oil spill on every sidewalk must be reported immediately and cleaned up.' A lot of electrical workers said, 'That's not me. I’m not a janitor. I splice big, heavy cables.' Alpha responded that this was an order, not an option, and that workers would be trained in cleaning up spills safely.

"Some electrical workers quit, but most were retrained. After about five years, the workers were asked, 'How do you feel about Alpha’s environmental policies?' They answered, 'It's the right thing to do. We should be cleaning up the environment.' That wasn’t what they’d said five years earlier. But once they embraced the behavior, the values caught up."


Change the behaviors, change the values, change the culture. Do you agree?

Top 5 Critical HR Priorities: #5 Performance, Planning, HR Effectiveness

Recognize This! – HR priorities are many. Solving one can be the solution to many others.

Concluding my week-long series on the Top 5 Critical HR Priorities for 2011 from the Corporate Leadership Council HR global agenda poll, is a tie!

Priority 5 for HR in 2011: A Tie! -- Improving Employee Performance, Workforce Planning, Improving Strategic Effectiveness of HR

Improving Employee Performance has a lot to do with management of the company culture itself. Two research studies on this topic seem to contradict each other. The first argues changing culture is hard because it’s “sacred.” If you break culture down into climate, and then into habits, change becomes easier because are more willing to change habits. Based on brain science, the second study argues habits are, in fact, hard to change because doing so is actually painful, requiring a conscious override of “deeply comfortable neuronal circuitry. But (and this is a critical point I think the first researcher would also agree with):

“Therefore, to engender change among people in an organization, it’s important to keep attention focused on the desired end state, not on avoiding problems. This goal-directed positive reinforcement must take place over and over. The most effective way to achieve this is to set up practices and processes that make it easy for people to do the right thing until it becomes not only second nature, but an ethic taken to heart (and to the brain) by the entire company.”

Managing goals has just as much to do with improving employee performance. An HBR blog pointed out:

“For goals to be meaningful and effective in motivating employees, they must be tied to larger organizational ambitions. … No matter what level the employee is at, he should be able to articulate exactly how his efforts feed into the broader company strategy.”

Articulating goals and strategy and appropriately recognizing those who achieve the goals is all well and good for improving employee performance, but that requires retaining key employees, which is likely why Workforce Planning is of equal concern to HR pros. The Corporate Leadership Council says 27% of high potential employees plus another 20% of non-high potentials are actively planning to leave their jobs in the next six months. An Accenture survey found 30% were ready to switch employers. More concerning is results from an American Psychological Association survey showing just over half of employees feel valued on the job. This doesn’t necessarily mean they want higher pay. Only 43% said they receive adequate recognition for their contributions at work.

Solving this last challenge would help dramatically in Improving the Strategic Effectiveness of the HR. As discussed in my Monday post, CEOs don’t see the performance and ROI benefit of employee engagement and employee recognition. The two are closely linked. My CEO, Eric Mosley, explained this well in an article in last month’s Chief Executive magazine:

“If recognition is implemented in a strategic way, it gives senior management a new window into the health of the organization. Acting as a barometer for engagement and employee performance, companies can monitor how often recognition occurs as well as in which divisions, geographies and teams. ... The link between prolonged neglect of consistent recognition and deteriorating company health is not always realized -- the focus is on productivity rather than on what LEADS to productivity (i.e., happy, fulfilled employees who are fully engaged in their work).”

Can you prove the value of what you do to bottom-line?

What is your top priority for 2011:

Prior posts on 2011 Top HR Priorities
Priority 1: Improving Senior Leader Capabilities at Managing the Workforce
Priority 2: Improving Manager Capabilities at Managing Their Direct Reports
Priority 3: Engaging Employees
Priority 4: Managing Organizational Change 

Top 5 Critical HR Priorities: #4 Managing Organizational Change

Recognize This! – Values + Strategy + Recognition = Effective Communication of Change Needs

My fourth post in a series about the Top 5 Critical HR Priorities for 2011 from the Corporate Leadership Council HR global agenda poll, continues to bring together the learnings from Priority 1, Priority 2 and Priority 3.

Priority 4 for HR in 2011: Managing Organizational Change

It’s not surprising this is a hot topic in today’s economic environment. I’ve written before about the impact of the recession (and the resulting changes in company strategy and objectives) on employee understanding of those changed objectives and what that means in their daily work. Recent research from Booz & Co. reported “56% of executives say ensuring day-to-day decisions are in line with strategy is a significant challenge.”

Getting this right is now more crucial than ever. Numerous indicators point to an improving economy and job market. Employees have more options for employment. Customer budgets are opening up. What are you doing to effectively and appropriately redirect employee energy to those projects and strategic targets you need them to hit? How are you ensuring this message is carried accurately to all global locations so no employees feel like outcasts?

Employees are more than willing to work on these priorities – if they know what they are. Commenting on results from research conducted with Gagen MacDonald, an APCO Worldwide senior executive commented:

"The large gap between employee and employer connection we've seen in the last two years is alarming. It's clear from the survey results that to close this gap, CEOs and their executive teams need to have clearly defined company values aligned with their business strategy and support … and regularly communicate those values personally."

There’s no better way to do this than through strategic employee recognition in which employees are frequently recognized every time they perform in such a way that demonstrates a company value while contributing to achieving a strategic objective. This deeply ingrains in employees – in the most positive way – what it is the company needs from them to succeed.

But also never forget the power of the trend setters in your organization. Who do you think sets fashion trends? Designers? Celebrities? Wrong. It’s Pantone – the color company.

You’d likely be surprised at who the true trend setters are in your organization – the behind-the-scenes leaders others look to for how to behave, respond and perform. You can easily uncover these trend setters by strategic application of social recognition – drawing on the wisdom of crowds within your organization to find those most recognized and most appreciated. Those are the people who will carry your torch of change most effectively throughout the organization.

Are you experiencing organizational change? Has your company, team or product line shifted direction? Do you know what you should be doing now in support of change? How is that communicated?

Prior posts on 2011 Top HR Priorities
Priority 1: Improving Senior Leader Capabilities at Managing the Workforce
Priority 2: Improving Manager Capabilities at Managing Their Direct Reports
Priority 3: Engaging Employees

Critical HR Priorities: #2 Improving Manager Capabilities

Recognize This! – Line managers must improve ability to respect, trust and care for their employees, too.

Continuing our look at the Top 5 Critical HR Priorities for 2011 from the Corporate Leadership Council HR global agenda poll, the requirements for achieving priority 2 are quite similar to priority 1.

Priority 2 for HR in 2011: Improving Manager Capabilities at Managing Their Direct Reports

Just as senior leaders must demonstrate respect, trust and caring for the workforce they manage, so too must line managers show the same for their direct reports. But now it becomes much more personal.

RESPECT
Line managers must be careful to remember that respect is a two-way street. If they want the respect of their direct reports, then managers must show respect for their direct reports as well. Dan McCarthy points out, “Respect is not something you only give away when it may serve your needs." The same is true of employee recognition. You don’t show your appreciation for your employee efforts only when those efforts directly work to your advantage. You should also be liberal with your thanks when your direct reports may have performed well in helping another manager, team or department.

TRUST
Trust is often more easily gained by direct managers than senior leaders who are more removed from employees. But as with respect, trust is a two-way street. As Bret Simmons says, “You have to earn it by the way you behave toward them. Your people need to believe that you are competent and that you care.”

CARE
One way to demonstrate to employees you care about them is by taking the time to talk with them, to clearly communicate what you need them to do, praise them when they’re doing it well, and offer constructive feedback when they need improvement. Harvard Business School research showed employees overwhelmingly prefer a manager who is likeable to a person is very skilled but terrible at communicating.

Oft-reported Google research into their own employees (in an effort to “build a better boss) found:

“What employees valued most were even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees’ lives and careers.”

What does that tell me? Employees want bosses to be present, patient and honestly interested in the people they manage. How do you or your managers stack up? Take my quick poll:

My direct manager demonstrates respect, trust and caring:

My direct reports would say I demonstrate respect, trust and caring:

Prior posts on 2011 Top HR Priorities
Priority 1: Improving Senior Leader Capabilities at Managing the Workforce

Fear or Excitement: Employee Attitude Closely Tied to Company Success

Recognize This: Stamping out fear of failure will help your company flourish.

Richard Branson, serial entrepreneur, and head of Virgin Brands, attributes his success to the people on his team. There’s a reason he’s one of the world’s wealthiest people – entirely self-made. Perhaps we should listen to his advice: 

“A successful business isn't the product or service it sells, its supply chain or its corporate culture: It is a group of people bound together by a common purpose and vision.”

What binds the “group of people” in your organization together? A mutual desire to continue getting a pay cheque and (for my American colleagues) health care? Or a mutual belief in the goals of the company and the value of that vision in the marketplace?

Casting the vision all can believe in and work hard to achieve is just the first step. How do you keep people bought in over the long-term? How do ensure people don’t lose sight of that vision? Again, from the master:

“Rather than focusing on mistakes, a leader needs to catch someone doing something right every day. If this culture of fostering employee development through praise and recognition starts at the top, it will go far toward stamping out the employee fear of failure that can stunt a business, particularly in its early days.”

Branson will be first to admit failures in his business ventures. But he will never lay the blame at the feet of his employees.

What’s the atmosphere where you work, especially as we finally begin to move out from under the lingering effects of the recession? Fearful of stepping out on a limb with a new idea or approach? Or excited to offer new ideas that might lead somewhere very intriguing?

There's still time to join me for the complimentary IHR Rewards & Recognition virtual conference and attend today's session at 12:30 (Eastern) in which I'll be presenting with Betsy Walker from Quintiles, a Globoforce customer, on The New R&R: Increasing Retention Using the Power of Recognition.

Why Focusing on Shareholder Value Is Wrong

Recognize This: Shareholder value will never guarantee customer satisfaction or an increase in their purchasing behavior.

Is your company a slave to the quarterly analyst call? Are you focused, before all else, on increasing shareholder value as the best marker of company success?

Even Jack Welch has denounced this as a dumb idea. More voices continue to chime in, most recently Roger Martin, dean of the Roman School of Management at the University of Toronto, Canada, as quoted in TLNT:

“Concentrating primarily on creating shareholder wealth is ultimately a loser’s game.  The reason: the only sure way to increase shareholder value is to raise the market’s expectations about the organization’s future results. Unfortunately, executives simply can’t do that indefinitely.… Talented executives can grow market share and sales, increase margins, and use capital more efficiently, but no matter how good they are, they can’t increase shareholder value if expectations get out of line with reality.”

Instead, Towers Watson (authors of the article) suggest:

“Instead of training her gaze directly on shareholder returns, a high performing executive leader should pay attention to the performance of employees and the linkage of employee performance with customer satisfaction and purchase behavior.”

If employees are focused on making customers happy such that they buy more, shareholder value is sure to increase. But there’s no guarantee with the reverse equation of shareholder value first, employees and customers a far-behind also-ran.

In fact, Gallup research found causation between employee engagement and financial success. Guess what? Working for a financially successful company does not necessarily make employees more engaged. But engaged employees do drive financial success.

One way to accomplish this is by including “customer satisfaction” as a reason for recognition in your strategic recognition and rewards program. Doing so reinforces for all employees the value the company places in focusing on the customer, and gives employees an opportunity to acknowledge each others’ efforts in making customers happy.

What does your company focus on at its key marker of success? Shareholder value? Customer satisfaction? Employee retention?


Also, don't forget to join me for the complimentary IHR Rewards & Recognition virtual conference tomorrow and Thursday, March 30-31, especially for my two sessions:

• March 30, 12:30 (Eastern) - Presenting with Betsy Walker from Quintiles, a Globoforce customer, on The New R&R: Increasing Retention Using the Power of Recognition
• March 31, 11:00 (Eastern) - Presenting The Future of Rewards and Recognition

How to Stop Talking AT Your Employees

Recognize This: If you want employees to think like “owners,” give them a reason to care about the business like an owner would.

I’ve heard nearly every cliché under the sun for employee:

·         Team member

·         Partner

·         Customer Success Enabler

·         Owner (at an ESOP company)

What others have you heard? Why do I bring this up? Because too often such cliché attempts to “get employees to care more about the business” are undertaken as the solution. How ridiculous.

Judah Schiller, CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi, recently had this to say on Huffington Post: 

“Many companies are still missing the boat when it comes to getting their people to show up at work with their hearts, minds and bodies present. Most employees view work only as a means to an end--a way for them to collect a paycheck and receive health benefits. Part of the problem is that companies consistently fail to make a strong connection between their own "big picture" and its relevance to their employees. They continue to talk at rather than with their workers, dictating what's good for them, rather than making an effort to understand their wants and needs.”

Yes, employees want to understand the big picture. But simply telling them the big picture doesn’t accomplish the goal. You have to make that big picture real in their everyday work. And you can’t do that through a slick communications program, online newsletter or Twitter campaign.

If you want to make your “big picture” matter to your employees in such a way that they are focused on helping you achieve it in their daily work, you need to make it real for them.  The best way to do that is through strategic recognition in which you tell employees – frequently, honestly and specifically – how their individual efforts are helping the company succeed. Praise them when they get this right. Make it real in their daily work and connect that to how those efforts are contributing to achieving the company’s strategic objectives.

It takes a bit more effort than announcing all “employees” are now “team members,” but the results are far more effective – and you may have some fun along the way.

Also, don’t forget to tweet your tips for employee appreciation and recognition using hash-tag #appreciationtip to be entered to win a copy of the Winning with a Culture of Recognition eBook or Amazon Kindle pre-loaded with the eBook.

Pruning Your Culture Tree

Recognize This: A little careful pruning and nurturing goes a long way in managing your company culture.

I'm thrilled to appear on the cover of the March/April 2011 issue of Engagement Strategies Magazine. In the Q&A-style article, "Authenticity, Tree-Pruning and the 'Wisdom of Crowds'," I explain the critical link between employee recognition, employee engagement and managing your company culture.

A couple of excerpts:

ESM: What you see as the link between recognition and engagement? Is a “culture of recognition” really necessary to create an engaging work environment?
Irvine: The link, as I see it, is that recognition is the fastest way to employee engagement. There are many different contributory factors, but I would contend that recognition is one of the fastest and most efficient in the overall armory of tools that people have available to boost employee engagement.

Click through to read the case study example I share of why this is true.

I also comment on the importance of proactively managing your culture:

Companies have to ask themselves: “Are we managing our culture, or is our culture managing us?” There’s a lot of debate out there as to whether culture is manageable or not. But I would say culture is a bit like a bonsai tree. It can be steadfast and strong, but it requires deliberate nurturing in order for it to grow in a particular way. If you aren’t careful about your tree, if you cut it the wrong way or neglect it; you can create a rather ugly looking tree – or culture.

Do you agree? Is culture something that can be directly managed, or only endured? Is recognition the fastest way to engagement?

GenY Grows Up * How They Will Manage the Workplace

Recognize This: The “young ones” soon become the leaders. GenY will forever change management – for the better.

GenY and their needs in the marketplace is frequently a topic for bloggers.Usually, the attitude is one of annoyance about GenY’s need for constant praise, recognition and rewards, or their preference for team-oriented work.

But always remember – GenY, like every generation before them – will grow up. That doesn’t mean, however, their work preferences will change. It’s far more likely GenY will forever influence the way work (at least until the next generation comes along).

James Kerr in a recent post on Management Issues put it this way:

“Today's organizational designs will likely be deemed obsolete. Millennials will demand a shift away from ‘command and control’ reporting lines to more cooperative-based leadership models that provide greater autonomy and freedom of choice in the way work is performed. …

“Clearly, a greater degree of emotional intelligence will be required by senior leaders so that they can proactively guide organizational transformation while continuing to grow and evolve successful enterprises.”

Are you ready for a “cooperative” work style? How does your team function today? What would be your preferred style – either in an individual contributor role as a manager? Do you see these changes happening already?

Performance Appraisal Games on Compensation Café

Recognize This: Performance appraisal/salary increase games make everyone losers.

I blog regularly on Compensation Café. Last month, my posts dealt with the games we play with performance appraisals and salary increases.

In my first post, I outline three of the most common games and their hallmarks.

Game 1: Relying on the Appraisal as the Primary Means of Feedback

Game 2: Ranking Performance

Game 3: Differentiating based on Pay Increases

In my follow-up post,  I discussed that although many have advocated just dropping the performance appraisal, in reality these have become so embedded in the people process, removing the annual review entirely is simply not feasible or desirable in most organizations.

The answer to “what should we do instead?” lies in solving the inherent problems with the games we play in the first place:

1)    A general dearth of feedback in the workplace today
2)    A company culture that tolerates head-in-the-sand management
3)    Reliance on too few tools for accurate performance assessment.

Hop over to the Café and read the full posts, then come back and tell me, have you ever played one of these games (unwittingly or otherwise)? What other games do you see being played with employees? How else would you recommend solving the problems we play with performance assessment? What other ways of assessing performance more accurately, fairly and frequently would you recommend?

Also, don’t forget to tweet your tips for employee appreciation and recognition using hash-tag #appreciationtip to be entered to win a copy of the Winning with a Culture of Recognition eBook or Amazon Kindle pre-loaded with the eBook.

Kindness or Meanness * Which Is the Better Management Tactic?

Recognize This: You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

An American colleague of mine used this phrase recently. It came to mind when I happened to read these two article on kindness and meanness in the workplace. While I certainly don’t think of employees as flies, the truth of the aphorism still resonates.

Writing in the New York Times, Bob Sutton, author of Good Boss, Bad Boss, said:

“Widespread meanness not only damages people; it also increases costs and undermines performance by driving out good employees at alarming rates. Numerous studies have also shown that people respond to demeaning and disrespectful bosses and co-workers by calling in sick more often, making fewer suggestions, working less hard and doing lower-quality work.”

Quite true. Management by intimidation must end. The evidence is clear that mean management styles, even just by ignoring employees, does no good and great damage.

In counterpoint to meanness is Davia Temin, CEO of Temin and Co., writing in Forbes about kindness: 

“I am here to tell you that it need not be so! I firmly believe that kindness can still infuse winning, tough-minded, smart, highly competitive and driven organizations. In fact, it can fuel them, and make them even better-functioning, even more outstanding. And it can make those extreme hours we spend in the office that much more pleasant, even fulfilling.”

I know which environment I’d rather work in, and indeed, do work in today. What about you? Is your day more filled with meanness or kindness?

Also, don’t forget to tweet your tips for employee appreciation and recognition using hash-tag #appreciationtip to be entered to win a copy of the Winning with a Culture of Recognition eBook or Amazon Kindle pre-loaded with the eBook.

Observations from the 2011 HCI Human Capital Summit

Recognize This: Can recognition help build a great culture?  Dan Pink & Facebook think so!

I’m at the HCI Human Capital Summit this week in Atlanta and have been really taken by two presentations.  First, Dan Pink, whom I love for his passionate exploration into the new truth about what motivates us at work.  He once again set down his manifesto of what’s required for a win-win relationship between corporation and employee. Dan’s agenda of Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose is set to create better performance and personal satisfaction in equal measure. He tells how “now that” instead of “if then” rewards and feedback plays a vital role in this, helping to create the culture that sustains these core motivators.

Without any formal overlap, I earlier saw a presentation from Stuart Crabb, Director of Learning and Development at Facebook, and couldn’t help but think about how all of the HR strategies he described where so aligned with Dan’s mantra. He spoke about freedom to choose work, a strengths-based HR philosophy, and of course lots of passion!  A real eye opener about Stuart’s presentation was research he shared about how Facebook finds that their high proportion of GEN X and Y workforce. These groups are in need of constant praise and constant feedback, with GEN Y having a particular preference for co-worker recognition. This is such the case at Facebook that they have actually abolished the annual appraisal and instead rely on a constant feedback and a constant “Thanks” recognition mechanism. 

Not to mix the presenter’s words too much, but it seems like Facebook has really have figured out that constantly recognizing and feeding back on mastery, purpose and autonomy creates a company culture that feeds our true motivators.

Today on Compensation Café: Signs Your Recognition Program Is in Trouble

Recognize This: If people aren’t appreciating each other, your employee recognition program is a failure.

Check out my post on Compensation Café today, Signs Your Recognition Program Is in Trouble, in which I discuss three signs you know your employee recognition program isn’t working:

1) A visitor’s reaction to the general atmosphere upon crossing the threshold is, “I’m glad I don’t work here.”

2) A consultant is the first person to make a 28-year employee feel like his thoughts and opinions are valuable and listened to.

3) Employees aren’t participating in the program, no matter how good you think your recognition and rewards program is.

In the post, I dive more deeply into the drivers behind these signs of program failure and what you – at any level in the organization – can do about it.

I also mention our own survey results, announced today:

“The first semi-annual report for the Globoforce Workforce Mood Tracker shows recognition ambivalence among today's employees in the United States. While 68 percent of those surveyed feel appreciated at their jobs, an alarming 41 percent of workers are not satisfied with the level of recognition they receive for doing good work. Indicative of both the infrequency and non-personal nature of many of today's employee recognition programs, 43 percent of U.S. workers had not been recognized in the past three months. More importantly, a startling 55 percent felt they were not rewarded according to job performance, indicating a critical disconnect between recognition and performance.”

These results parallel findings from a SmartBrief on Workforce poll earlier this month in which only 15% agreed their incentive program is effective.

Click over to Compensation Café and let me know -- What signs of a recognition program in trouble have you seen? What are your recommendations to fix such a program?

What Culture Did You Create in Your Company during the Recession?

Recognize This: The good times are over for companies that took advantage of the recession on the backs of their employees.

Did you (or your company) resort to any measure necessary to survive the recession – layoffs, salary cuts or freezes, etc? Or, if your honest with yourself, did you use the recession as an excuse to perhaps trim a bit more than necessary, knowing the remaining employees would take on the additional work, for no additional pay because of their fear of losing their job, too?

If you (or your company) fall in the latter category, the day of reckoning has arrived. As reported in TLNT:

“For employers that have used the economic downturn and the scarcity of jobs to justify squeezing every drop of productivity out of workers at the expense of the employees’ mental and physical well being, this turnaround sounds a death knell, not for the companies necessarily but rather for the way they have been treating their staff.

“The end is near for those practices as well as for the peace of mind that staff will remain loyal and in place. In fact, for employers who took this tactic, voluntary turnover is almost certain to rise dramatically as their employees learn there are new outlets for their efforts and talents. In addition, these employers likely will have a more challenging time making new hires as word of their actions gets around and impacts their reputations.”

In the age of Glassdoor and the like, you can’t afford for a miserly, whip-cracking, threatening reputation to get out. Sure it may have served you well in the short-term, but payback is coming.

Good employees always know what they’re worth. And I don’t mean just monetarily. They know they are worthy of respect, fair play, recognition and rewards for their efforts, and a work environment that encourages employee engagement.

What kind of culture have you been working in the last couple of years? Intimidation and fear or respectful and engaging? If the former, what are your career plans in the next 12 months?

Employees Don’t Know Your Objectives & Don’t Care

Recognize This: If you want your employees to care about your strategic objectives and work to achieve them every day, you better make it clear what those objectives are in their daily work.

How about some frightening statistics to shake up the middle of your week? (Quoting from Fake Work research as cited in TLNT):

• 87% of employees are not satisfied with the results of their work at the end of most weeks
• 73% of workers say their organizations’ strategies and goals are not translated into specific work tasks they can execute.
• 70% of workers do not know what to do to support their organizations’ strategies and goals.
• 81% of workers do not feel a strong level of commitment to their organizations’ strategies.

Let’s boil that down. People don’t know what you want them to do, don’t know how to do it anyway, don’t particularly care, but at least they’re somewhat dissatisfied for it at the end of the week.

Spouting strategies does little to align employees with your goals. It’s not that employees don’t want to help the company achieve its strategic objectives. It’s that they don’t know how. That’s where strategic recognition comes in as a very powerful tool for communicating both what the company needs down and how each employee contributes to that. When you thank an employee – specifically and with details – for achieving an objective (including a description of the work and the objective) it becomes clear to the employee how they are helping.

Do you know your company’s strategic objectives? Do you know how you contribute to achieving them in your daily work? Do you care?

I Got More Money in My Paycheck?

Recognize This: Cash rewards go unnoticed, leaving no impression on employees of your appreciation for their efforts.

To my American friends and colleagues: Did you notice the extra money in your paycheck? According to an article in last week’s Boston Globe newspaper, most didn’t.

“‘What?’ said the professor waiting for a train at South Station. ‘I get extra money?’ asked the mom with her son. ‘I didn’t realize that,’ said the guy getting his shoes shined. Three weeks after a payroll tax cut took effect, few people are noticing the extra money — $40 a week for some, $10 to $30 a week for most — that Congress put in their paychecks.”

As I’ve written many times before, cash rewards do nothing to reinforce the messages you’re trying to send. Employees often don’t even notice it in their paychecks. As one client told us after surveying their 300,000+ employees, of those that even realized they’d received a cash reward, 29% used it to pay bills and 18% didn’t remember how it was spent. Is that what you were hoping to achieve?

Or, as one Globoforce colleague of mine recently related:

“At my last company, I got a $500 bonus directly into my direct deposit account. From the time I left work to the time I arrived home, my wife saw that bonus in the bank account and went shopping with the girls. I never even saw it.”

Do you want your employees to actually notice and value the appreciation you give them? Find another way than cash to recognize them.

You CAN Manage Your Culture. Behaviors Are the Key.

Recognize This: Changing and managing your culture is simple, but not easy. It begins with finding and praising the behaviors you want to underpin your culture.


We’re often asked about our book Winning with a Culture of Recognition: “Is it really possible change and proactively manage a company culture?”

Unequivocally, yes! And doing so is relatively simple. But it’s not easy.

The steps you need to take to change and manage the culture you want are fairly straightforward, as discussed quite eloquently in a recent Strategy + Business article, “Stop Blaming Your Culture,” by Jon Katzenbach and Ashley Harshak, but finding the courage, diligence and desire to take those steps is not easy.

The first step – an important realization – is that you cannot deny the power of the culture you already have. Rather, you have to find ways to work within that culture to encourage only those behaviors you want to see influence the new culture you desire and to discourage behaviors you don’t. Katzenbach and Harshak put it this way:

“You need to focus on specific behaviors that solve real problems and deliver real results. This, in turn, enables people to experience the results of thinking differently. Experience becomes a better teacher than logical argument.”

Or, for a practical example they use in the opening paragraph of the article:

“It would have been easy for Gray (new commandant of the US Marine Corps) to blame the damaged organizational culture for the problems he inherited, and to launch a formal, full-scale change initiative. But instead, he began to praise and seek out elements of the old Corps culture, such as the ethic of mutual respect.”

Seek out behaviors you desire as foundational to your culture. Praise the people demonstrating those behaviors. Repeat. Often.

Simple, but not always easy.

Why Cash as a Reward Won’t Change Your Culture

Recognize This: How you reward employees is a key indicator of underlying company culture.

We’re often asked why we don’t encourage the use of cash as a reward in strategic employee recognition program. The simple answer is: cash = compensation. Rewards must use a different “currency” than cash or employees will lump your “rewards” into their paycheck, guaranteeing it will become an expectation.

A better question to understand is: What kind of company culture do you want? A culture of appreciation or of compensation?

Your culture is built on the interactions and conversations that happen every moment of every day between your employees. Building that culture begins by encouraging recognition between and by all employees, yes, but it also builds on the rewards employees can enjoy that links the behaviors and actions they were recognized for to the memorable rewards they choose.

When that reward is cash, you can’t – as our client Symantec explained – have a conversation with colleagues, “Oh, I got $500 dollars.”

But when the reward is in a form that gives the flexibility of cash for limitless options, but with a result that employees can share and talk about with each other, you build a culture of appreciation. “Yeah, I went to the spa and had the most relaxing and rejuvenating massage treatment.”

Those are the conversations happening every day in the hallways of Symantec, reinforcing just how much the company values and appreciates the good work their employees do every day.

What kind of culture are you building in your organization?