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.

3 Steps to Help Employees Find the Meaning in Their Work

Recognize This! – It really is as simple as Listen, Tell, Praise.

Psychometrics Canada came out last month with a study on employee engagement. One of the findings buried in the report was more interesting to me, though:

“Those working in government (80.3%) and business (74.4%) sectors are more likely to identify engagement as a problem than are people in education (64.2%) and not-for-profit (54.2%) organizations.”

Why is this? I tend to think it’s because those who choose to work in education and non-profit organizations are naturally much more connected with the “meaningfulness” of their work. I’ve written before about employees ranking “doing something meaningful” as more important to them even than recognition and cash rewards.

The challenge becomes, then, how do you help those in government and business “find the meaning.” Psychometrics own research lends some insight:

“When asked what leaders could do more of to improve engagement, respondents endorse these actions:
• Listen to employees’ opinions (71%)
• Communicate clear expectations (68%)
• Give recognition and praise (58%)”

That’s a pretty straightforward path for managers:
1) Listen – really listen – to me.
2) Clearly tell me what it is you need me to do and why.
3) Let me know when I’ve delivered what you needed. Recognize me!

How well do your managers follow those three steps with you? Do you believe you’re listened to? Do you know what is expected of you? Are you told – in an appreciative way – when you meet those expectations?

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.

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

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

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.

Differentiation Creep

Recognize This: No one wants to be “the bad guy” in performance reviews and differentiation.

Ever since “Neutron Jack” Welch popularized the “differentiation” approach to performance management in which employees have been segregated by their managers into performance levels of top 10%, middle 80%, and bottom 10%, people managers and HR pros responsible for them have tried to make differentiation work.

The problem for managers is trying to (somewhat) arbitrarily lump employees into these categories in a once-a-year effort to remember an entire 12 months’ worth of performance and achievements. The problem for employees is average and low performers don’t realize their performance is not exceptional.

The result? Differentiation creep. Workspan magazine (“Measuring Employee Performance the Right Way,” January 2011. Membership required.) recently published research showing:

“While high performers are increasing in relative numbers by leaps and bounds, there is also a depletion in the population of low performers.”

Why is this happening? Two reasons:

1)      Managers don’t want to make the hard choices of who appears in the bottom 10%, or they’ve truly hired well and none of their employees are poor performers.

2)      Managers lack enough insight into employee contributions to make correct differentiation decisions.

Are you seeing differentiation creep in your workplace? Before I share solutions on Wednesday, how do you solve differentiation creep? 

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.

Tell Your “Secrets” to Improve Your Career

Recognize This: If you’re not replaceable, you’re not promotable.

Last holiday season, Steve Boese related a sweet story on traditional family recipes in his HR Technology Blog.

In the post, Steve tells of his mother and her special stuffing that was venerated throughout the family.

“But no one knows how, exactly, to duplicate Mom's stuffing. She never shared the recipe, never revealed her secrets. She, I suppose, was successful in keeping 'Joan's Stuffing' as a legendary fixture in the family history. We will never have it again, because no one really knows precisely how to mix, measure, prepare, and serve the dish the way she did for all those years.

“What she did not fully understand, even if she had carefully recorded the recipe, and made sure that the next generation could precisely and honorably replicate the dish, it still would always be her dish. The stuffing, the pie, the potatoes - whatever, they are just food. The legacy of Mom and Grandma isn't about food, it's about how they took care of you, and your brothers and sisters, and everyone else that they touched. What makes me sad it that I don't think we let the Moms and Grandmas know this often enough, and they feel by clinging to their secret recipes we won't be able to forget them.”

The same is true in the workplace. When we withhold knowledge, often in an effort to protect ourselves and our “place” in the team, we also make ourselves irreplaceable. And as a boss of mine once told me, “If we can’t replace you, we can’t promote you.”

Steve’s second point is just as powerful. We don’t tell the people important to us – at home and at work – just how much they are appreciated and valued. Perhaps if we did, it’d be easier to “share the secret sauce.”

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?

How to *Create* a Culture of Recognition

Recognize This: A culture reflects a process that has become a habit.

Now that we understand what a company culture is, how do you do it?

Patty Azzarello in TLNT offered this tip:

“Say thank you. Creating a culture of recognition is a very powerful thing. Make sure you have ways of knowing when good things happen, and personally thank people. Make recognition and appreciation a process and a habit.”

You need both.

Process: A system that both makes giving recognition easy and ensures that it happens. This process could be formal or informal, but it must become as much a part of “the way things are done around here” as product development or customer service.

Habit: This speaks to encouraging an attitude of recognition – an approach to every day at work where people stop, look around, notice what others are doing and take the time to say “thanks.” Habits take time to form and require encouragement as they settle in place. Managers are responsible for making sure “process” becomes “habit.”

Once that happens, your culture of recognition is firmly in place.

What kind of culture do you have in your organization? A culture of recognition? A culture of intimidation? A culture of cooperation?

Say “Thank You” Unexpectedly to Motivate More Powerfully

Recognize This: Unexpected appreciation is a far more effective motivator than a predictable reward.

A friend, trying to explain to me the joys of parenting immediately after venting about the challenges, sent me this article in Slate. To be honest, the parenting stories didn’t stick with me as much as this observation:

“If you give animals a predictable reward—say, a shot of sugar every time they press a lever—you can get them to press that lever quite regularly. But if you want irrational and addictive behavior, you make the reward unpredictable. Pressing the lever produces sugar, but only once every 10 tries. Sometimes, the animal might have to go 20 or 30 tries without a reward. Sometimes it gets a big jolt of sugar three tries in a row. If you train an animal to work for an unexpected reward, you can get it to work harder and longer than if you train it to work for a predictable reward.”

And that is precisely the difference between incentives and recognition. Irregular, unpredictable, but highly desired praise for work well done, work demonstrative of company values, work that contributes to strategic objectives, work that keeps the team running smoothly – most certainly encourages and, dare I say, motivates employees to want to continue those behaviors.

It’s proven in the scientific literature, too. If you thank someone, they are 100% more likely to help you again in the future than if you don’t. It’s simple. But the meaning and power of true, sincere appreciation is limitless.

Would you (do you) work harder when you know there is a possibility of recognition for your efforts or when you know you’re working to a predetermined reward? Why?

Knowing the Path to Your Destination * How to Communicate Your Strategic Plan

How’s your 2011 planning going? What changes do you see on the horizon for your organization’s strategic plan?

There’s been a great deal of fluctuation in strategic plans during the last three years as companies have reacted to economic pressures in numerous ways, from drastic cutting of employees (how do we get the work done without them?) to evaluating relevance in a rapidly changing market (do people even want to buy my product any more?)

The more critical questions, however, are:

1. Do your employees know how the strategic objectives have changed?
2. Do they know how to adjust their work to align with the new objectives?


A recent SmartBrief on Leadership poll found that, for 40% of employees, the answer to both questions is “No.”

These findings are worse than the results of an earlier Mercer study I wrote about before that found:

“Simply put, almost two-thirds of all employees are 33% as productive as they can be because they don't understand what they are now asked to do.”

The comments of Mike Figliuolo, managing director of ThoughtLeaders, in reaction to the SmartBrief poll explain the hazards of not getting everyone focused on the same plan:

“Without a defined destination, you’re simply making widgets, and you may wake up one day to find the widget is obsolete because the strategic landscape around you changed while you were hunched over the widget machine.”

So how do you solve this? Don’t forget these two critical steps:

1) Inform people of the destination. Make sure all employees know what the end goal is.

2) Inform people of the path. Knowing the destination is useless unless you know how to get there.

One of the most effective methods for repeatedly communicating both the destination and the path to all employees is through strategic employee recognition. In this kind of employee recognition program, you frequently and in a timely way acknowledge and express appreciation to employees when they contribute to achieving the strategic objective while demonstrating the company values. If you do this consistently, employees come to understand how they, personally, are contributing to the strategic plan, and desire to continue to do so.

Do you understand both the destination and the path? Are you helping those who work for you to understand as well? How?

Finding – and Feeding – What People Want

Do you know what people want at work? If you’re not completely jaded, what do you fundamentally want at work?

I was struck that in the space of a week, I read essentially the same statement from two very different sources. From Talent Management magazine, in an article written by Madeleine Horman Blanchard, a business coach:

“Employees want to be successful at work. It makes people feel good to perform well. But to perform well, employees need to understand what a job well done looks like.”

And from a New York Times interview with Kevin O’Connor, chief executive of FindTheBest.com:

“People want to be good. They want to be successful. They need help believing in themselves. Sometimes they just need help to get going.”

Do you believe in the innate desire of employees to do well at work? I do. But I also think we, as leaders, play a critical role in feeding that desire – helping them to do well by helping them understand what it means to do well in their daily work.

As I’ve written frequently, the best way to do this is with strategic recognition that frequently and in a timely way recognizes an employee every time he or she demonstrates a company value or contributes to a strategic objective in their work. This kind of positive reinforcement clearly lets an employee know what you need from them – what success look like – in their own jobs and daily tasks. This is not at all abstract. Rather, it is concrete. It is personal. It is real.

Wally Bock, in his excellent Three Star Leadership blog, addressed this very well:

That's good, but it's not enough. Most bosses put all their attention on "bad attitude." What about good attitude? Define the observable or measureable things by asking the same question. "What does he or she do that makes me think they have a good attitude?" The answer to that question might be behavior or performance. It's also something that deserves some positive feedback. Recognize it, praise it, thank your team member.

What’s the benefit to you of feeding the people what they want? Garry Ridge, president and CEO of the WD-40 Co. explained it quite well in the Talent Management article referenced above:

“One positive benefit of defining what success looks like is that you can acknowledge and applaud success when it occurs. At WD-40, our engagement number is 93 percent, which I believe is three times the average. It means that people come to work doing things that mean something to them, that they feel is making a difference in the world today, and that is developing them internally as well. … WD-40 enjoyed the best year in the history of the company in spite of the down economy.”

Acknowledge and applaud success while helping your employees understand how they make a difference in the world today. Who doesn’t need that?

What Type of Company Culture Do You Have?

In my last post, I talked about recent research from Towers Watson on the important role company culture plays in a company achieving its strategic objectives. Other research from Randstad confirmed the same:

“Two thirds of working adults (66%) believe that company culture is very important to the success of their organizations. The survey also found that employees believe company culture has the greatest impact on employee morale (35%), followed by employee productivity (22%). 23% of younger workers, ages 18 to 34, say it plays the biggest role in building job satisfaction.”

Workers also cited several elements as critical to company culture with the top three being:
• Employee attitudes (69%)
• Effective management (64%)
• Strong trust relationships (57%)

One challenge of the research lies in its attempt to have surveyed employees describe their work culture in terms of the four categories of company culture Terrance Deal and Allan Kennedy outlined in their book Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life:

• All hands on deck culture (everyone works as a team)
• Process culture (heavy emphasis on procedure, lacks creativity)
• Work hard/play hard culture (deliver results, but enjoy time with co-workers)
• Tough-guy/macho culture (high criticism, little direction)

While I appreciate this research for pointing out the undeniable importance of culture, I can’t help but notice the decade-old list of cultures is missing a few (as 16% of those surveyed agreed). Like a culture of innovation, perhaps, or most definitely, a culture of recognition.

A culture of recognition, in which people are acknowledged and appreciated for their contributions, behaviors and actions that demonstrate company values and help achieve strategic objectives, seems to be the antithesis of the “though-guy/macho culture” described above. Such a culture of recognition is most successful at driving business results, yet it’s not reflected in this study.

What other cultures do you see missing from the list? How would you classify your culture?

Why You Should Care about Your Company Culture

What role do you think the culture of your company plays in the company’s success? Wait. Let’s back up. What do you think your company culture is? Intimidation? Get it done at any cost? Supportive? Innovative? How does that culture influence people’s attitudes and actions?

Towers Watson recently published a report that removes all doubt about the importance of culture in high-performing organizations:

In a high-performance organization, workplace practices must actively influence the employee behaviors needed to execute its strategy and reinforce its market focus. …

When the culture and strategy align, both people and functions work toward a common purpose. … Culture, and all the systems that support it, must reinforce and reward these actions, behaviors and attitudes.

I think we can all easily agree that employee behaviors and actions are what ultimately execute company strategy. But the challenge is company culture often does not encourage the needed behaviors and actions or doesn’t tie them directly to company strategy. Again from the Towers Watson report:

Many companies’ cultures are not aligned with their business objectives, because their leaders, who by and large focus on the financial and operational aspects of the business, simply allow corporate culture to evolve. In some cases, the responsibilities of day-to-day management intrude, or leaders do not have the tools necessary to identify and close the gaps between culture and strategy.

What’s the tool that identifies and closes the gaps between culture and strategy? Strategic employee recognition. As Eric and I explain in Winning with a Culture of Recognition:

“Organizational culture is the most powerful force in business, and yet it is one of the most neglected (and misunderstood) attributes of any organization. Every organization has a culture, whether it is the culture the leadership wants or the one that has come to exist through inertia and management neglect. …

“Understanding your company’s culture and shaping it deliberately, based on your values, is critical to achieving your strategic objectives. It is critical to gaining competitive advantage. …

“Strategic recognition adds the ultimate layer of value, which is culture management. Strategic recognition is linked to strategic goals such as engagement, employee satisfaction, or culture change. But also, because you have those tools, you get to then use strategic recognition to manage the culture. In other words, you can emphasize a single value that you feel doesn’t have the traction you need to meet your strategic objectives.”

Do you have tools you need to identify and close the gap between culture and strategy? Are you equipping your managers with what they need to help their employees see the connection between their behaviors and actions and achieving the company’s strategic objectives?

Removing Obstacles, Progress & Recognition

Two questions for you today:
1) When you’re down, when you’re at the end of your energy, what keeps you going?
2) More importantly, who keeps you going? Do they know that?

Today’s post is commentary on the posts of two bloggers I greatly respect, Wally Bock from Three Star Leadership and Kris Dunn, the HR Capitalist.

In Learning from Master Banks, Wally tells the simple story of his baby grandson learning to turn over.

“He tries and tries and tries. He gets half-way over and falls back. He grins and tries again. He only stops when he runs out of energy. …

“We didn't wait for Banks to make the perfect roll before we praised him. We applauded his effort. We encouraged him. We cheered the slightest improvement.

“Maybe, just maybe, if we treated our people more like we treat Banks, they'll act with energy and purpose, more like he does.”

Who encourages you as you try again and again? Who do you encourage to keep on trying themselves? Are you recognizing progress and not just results?

In I Cried Like a Little Baby This Weekend…Here’s Why…, Kris speaks to a story of recognition from the world of sports.

“Then Emmitt Smith proceeded to do something I least expected. He made me cry with his eloquence and grace. Not to mention his understanding of the world of recognition.

“Then, he saves what he clearly considers to be the most important "thank you" for a teammate he didn't have to thank - former fullback Daryl Johnston, who is so important in the big scheme of things that he's sitting out in general admission seats with guys sporting mullets and hats enabling easier beer drinking.

“Emmitt's clearly moved by having the opportunity to thank Johnston - so much so that he's crying like a baby. …

“Recognition 101 - thank the people who cleared the obstacles in front of you in some type of public way. Do it often and make sure it's genuine.”

While I don’t claim to be any kind of an expert on American football, I understand exactly the point Kris is making. Who has cleared the obstacles for you, perhaps by fighting the big fights up the chain of command or perhaps by taking care of the more mundane tasks to free you for the more high profile projects? Are you recognizing those who cleared the obstacles for you?

Alignment * Linking Desire with Ability and Outcomes

Meaning and purpose. It’s critical to employee engagement and productivity and it’s also what everyone wants in their work. Last week, the informal (highly un-scientific) poll on the GloboBlog showed that 53% of people are happiest at work when they know their work has contributed to a meaningful goal. Another 40% are happiest when someone appreciates their work – another form of showing meaning. (It’s also interesting to note that not a single person said they’re happiest at work when they get paid.)

Critical to meaning and purpose is having a sense of alignment -- understanding your company’s objectives and values so well, you know the work you do contributes to those objectives and the values are in agreement with your own personal ones.

So what’s the problem? Ann Bares wrote about it well on her Compensation Force blog, based on recent Hewitt research.

“The large majority (73%) indicate that goals are somewhat aligned, that corporate goals are communicated and then left to local managers to translate. So for most employees, it all rests on effective coaching and direction from the local manager. … And how’s that working for us?”

As I pointed out in my comment to Ann’s post, the Corporate Executive Board found:

"Simply put, almost two-thirds of all employees are 33% as productive as they can be because they don't understand what they are now asked to do."

Unbelievable! 64% of employees are not working to full effectiveness, not because they don't WANT to, but because they don't know HOW to.

They don't know or fully understand your strategic objectives (which likely changed due to the recession), don't know how this affects their personal jobs/functions, and don't know what they should be changing. Even more frightening, they don't know that they should even be thinking about this.

And you lose out. Tremendously.

If you’re going to improve your business results, then you must get all of your employees aligned with your changing/changed business strategies. One of the most effective and positive methods for creating alignment is through strategic recognition. These highly structured programs communicate clearly through positive reinforcement the desired changes you need your employees to make in their everyday work and focus to achieve your new objectives.

What are you doing to create alignment?

Remove Obstacles to Progress to Achieve Happiness at Work

Happiness at work. I hear that all the time. People are always talking, blogging, writing about how to achieve happiness at work. While of course I believe happiness at work is not only possible, but something every employee and employer should strive for, I think it misses the broader point – people are happiest when they are doing work they believe in.

I’ve read similar research reports on this topic (here’s one), boiling down to this main point. People who are busy at work, in control of what they are working on, and cognizant of the purpose of what they are doing are happier than those who largely idle away the work day.

In another study at Harvard Business School, a professor found:

“Progress ranked No. 1 on the list of engagement factors related to performance. Analyzing 120,000 journal entries, Amabile found that workers reported feeling most engaged on days when they made headway or received support to overcome obstacles in their jobs. They reported feeling least engaged when they hit brick walls. Small dents in work meant as much as large achievements.”

The lessons for management?

1) Remove obstacles. Make it easy for your employees to make progress.

2) Recognize progress, not just results. Be sure your employees know you notice and appreciate the advances they’re making that will ultimately bring your project to a successful conclusion.

It’s really not any more complicated than that. Help your people make progress. Thank them for their efforts that achieve progress.

Diffusing a Negative Environment * The REAL First Step to Recovery

I thought I’d read just about every possible angle on jobs, employee loyalty, retention strategies, rehiring strategies, etc., as the economy improves. I was wrong. Last month, the Wall Street Journal offered a new twist: “Coping as a New Hire at a Dispirited Firm.”

The article is targeted to the new employee walking into the typical workplace devastated by layoffs, etc., during the recession. Advice includes “keep a level head,” and “stay neutral and positive.” This is solid advice to the new hire entering a tough environment, but what about advice for the leadership of that company to diffuse the negative environment itself?

Times were tough and are slowly getting better. Management in many companies made difficult decisions and executed those decisions -- some well, many poorly. The results of those actions certainly left dispirited employees in their wake. But if companies are now positive enough to begin hiring, then they MUST do something to reinvigorate the atmosphere of the workplace for those still there.

There is no easy or quick way to do this. Open, honest, direct and personal conversations -- as groups and between individuals -- is a critical step. Just being able to hire more bodies won't help companies return to past levels of profitability and productivity. They must also restore employee sentiment, attitude and morale.

Creating Meaning at Work * Show Them the Way

Meaning at work – it’s a phrase bantered around quite a bit in this industry. People want meaning at work. The cynical rejoinder is often, “People are just happy to have a job. That’s meaning enough.”

But this misses the point entirely. People want to know that what they do matters, that it makes a difference in something larger than themselves – whether that be the company’s success, positive impact on the environment, or changing the world for the better.

Dave and Wendy Ulrich recently published an entire book on this topic, which they discussed in a post on Harvard Business Reviews’ blog site:

“Neither position nor salary seems to have much to do with finding meaning in work. … People have to create the meaning of their work and their lives, and that process requires skill and practice, not just luck.”

Why should you care if people find meaning in their work?

“Those who succeed at creating meaning – either on their own or with the help of their boss – tend to work harder, more creatively, and with more tenacity, giving the companies that employ them a leg up in the marketplace. What’s more, study after study suggests that when employees experience meaning, their employers enjoy higher rates of customer commitment and investor interest.”

But how can you help people find meaning in their work?

“Even in unfavorable circumstances, people can experience an activity as meaningful when it resonates with chosen values, connects them with people they like, raises their sense of competence, or gives them an ‘ah-ha’ moment of insight.”

And that’s so easy to do with strategic employee recognition. If you follow best practice to build every recognition around your company values and strategic objectives, then use every opportunity to acknowledge and appreciate employees when they demonstrate those values in contribution to those objectives – you give them meaning. You help them see their unique value in the organization and helping achieve a greater purpose – individually and as a team.