"Phased" Rollouts of Global Employee Recognition Programs Fail

Recognize This: ALL employees matter, regardless of geographic location.

What’s your general opinion of the employees in your company? If you have multiple locations, do you feel the same respect and appreciation for those in another office, another county, another country? If you’re in HR, do you work to make sure all employees, regardless of location, are treated equally?

I cannot wrap up a series of posts on the second critical tactic for creating a strategic recognition program – Involve Program Participants and Invite Their Input – without discussing the makeup of such a team.

You must consider the widely divergent needs, expectations, and cultural differences that are natural in a multi-location organization. This is compounded a thousand-fold in global organizations. Including representatives from each location in the design phase is critical.

But it’s no less critical in roll-out. If you do a “phased” roll-out of a global program, many will be left feeling like second-class citizens.

It doesn’t matter if you included representatives from the Australian, Chinese and Indian office in the design phase if you plan to roll out the program first to the country of your headquarters, and then eventually to outlying offices or divisions. Truly global programs demand truly global, synchronous deployments.

Have you ever been promised a new “global solution” only to receive it months to years after the initial deployment group? What was your reaction?

Living the Values Should Not Equal Prostitution

Recognize This: Don’t prostitute your staff by paying them to work against their values.

Bnet recently ran an article on “10 Bad Ideas That Can Destroy Your Company.” No. 7: Incentivize people to boost performance struck home with me, making the point that traditional “do x, get more y” incentives often incent the wrong behavior.

“Build jobs around their core commitments, and pay them so that its fair, and you’ll get good performance. Ask them to work against their values for lots of extra cash, and you’ll make them feel like prostitutes.”

Know your own company values. Make your values a prominent part of your hiring process so employee personal values align with your corporate values. Then make the company values real for employees by recognizing them when they demonstrate those values in their daily work.

It’s not about rewarding them for “going above and beyond.” It’s all about recognizing them for living the values and promoting company success every day.

What are your key personal values? What are your company’s values? Are they in alignment? Better yet, tell me if your company has one set of stated values, but the way they work every day is in opposition to them. How do you handle that?

Employee Recognition ROI at KPMG

Recognize This: The emotional impact of recognition is huge compared to the low monetary investment.

Last month I had the pleasure of participating in a webinar, Recognition the KPMG Way: Driving Employee Engagement and Success, with Sara Turner, UK head of employee benefits and wellbeing, KPMG. Sara made quite clear the same point I’ve been making this week about the need to Involve Program Participants and Invite Their Input  when creating a strategic recognition program:

“The key is not to do this in isolation. Look how recognition links to other areas of engagement in the organization and consult with stakeholders – decision makers and users— to make sure what you’re designing will really resonate. You need to take in account how other people feel.”

The ROI of Recognition

The results experienced at KPMG have been phenomenal. They increased the number of award recipients year over year by 25% without any additional spend. But the emotional impact is even more powerful. Again, quoting Sara:

“What you get with recognition is a really emotional response. This is quite different from any other area of reward. What really sets recognition apart – and this comes through the feedback from the people – is that it’s unexpected. Though the monetary value is low, the impact is really huge.

“In monetary terms, recognition is so much less expensive [than other reward systems], but what you get is this emotional gut response from people who are overwhelmed, happy and excited when they get an award. People are so engaged because someone has appreciated the extra effort they’ve gone to and taken the time to make sure they acknowledge it and that others acknowledge it as well.”

Did you miss the webinar? Listen in here.

Have you ever been “overwhelmed, happy and excited” by being recognized in your workplace? Tell me the story. Better yet, how often have you felt that way?

Balancing Input and Progress in Employee Recognition Program Design

Recognize This: Be sure to communicate to program development participants why and how final decisions are made if you want any hope of ultimate program success.

As I discussed in yesterday’s post on Involving Program Participants and Inviting Their Input when creating a strategic recognition program, notice the delicate balance between input and progress. At some point, every initiative must move from the planning to the execution stage. And not all participants in the planning will be happy with the execution decisions – unless you clearly communicate why final decisions have been made throughout the process.

Or, as Ann Bares recently pointed out in her Compensation Force blog:

“Nothing wrong with fun, fulfillment or perks – but maybe our priority should be on creating work environments of truth, integrity and mutual respect then ensuring that employees are rewarded well for the results they work to deliver.”

Communicating why decisions are made – especially to stakeholders (at all levels) who helped in the process leading to those decisions – contributes considerably to ultimate program success. Why? Because those stakeholders will gladly carry the banner of why the program (and the decisions behind it) are good, valid and worthwhile.

Have you been in a position (officially or not) where people looked to you to validate the worth of a new program? What was your response? What was the program? Did you support it to your peers?