Well said. As employee motivation experts in the contact centre industry we agree that recognition is the critical success factor in motivating employees. Interestingly though, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that recognition is actually most effective if it occurs as close to the “event” as possible.

For this reason, many reward & recognition schemes don’t really work. It matters not if the scheme offers awards, incentives or cash. What matters MOST is that the recognition for the job well done occurs immediately & consistently if the employer wishes to make this behaviour permanent.

Which is why at Motiv8 we use controlled access to casual games combined with employee competency & knowledge optimsiation to motivate and reward employees. It really works well because it’s automated and immediately & consistently recognises employees every time they display the desired behaviour or achieve the desired outcome.

Certainly reward schemes can be attached to the recognition but it’s all rather pointless if the company in question is not doing the recognition every time and at the point the event occurs?

Wow, this will be a late 2011 reply to your 2009 post. What you’ve written is still relevant today.

You mention the difficult part is keeping employees engaged, and I couldn’t agree more. On a psychological level most people need variety and change, but also need to have constant parameters within which to operate to meet the needs of safety, etc. E.g., we must eat every day, but may have something different from meal to meal.

Organizations are becoming fairly adept at instilling the expectation of change, but not always at meeting the safety needs of employees. Therefore, employees are not willing to engage because of the preoccupation with the unmet need of safety / parameters. That is, employees aren’t thinking about self-actualization when there is a certainty gap around continued employment, etc.

Enjoyed the post – have a wonderful 2011.

Kind regards,
Bryan Seaford

Should organisations invest a lot more time in identifying an individual’s interests and then match those interests with a targeted range of attractive, personalised rewards, rather than a bulk standard selection of rewards? In today’s highly customer focussed world we create bespoke, segmented consumer offers. Would doing the same for our employees generate a better return?

Perhaps vouchers or the pre-paid card offer a cost-effective route for the majority of participants but should we be offering something distinct for our top 20% of performers?

One US bank has had a 91% participation rate in it’s recognition scheme using a Facebook style ‘wall’ as the basis of it’s recognition. No nominations are required. Everyone has their own ‘wall’ or pdersonal blog area. Employees are invited to post stories about people on the walls. When something is submitted about a team member their colleagues are invited to add their own message in support, or indeed to balance the praise. The entires are scanned on a monthly basis to highlight stories for Recognition Awards and for use in marketing campaigns. It’s a really simple but powerful tool as it’s completely owned by the employees.

Of course, you’re thinking Arrgghhh – impossible! What about the scope for abuse? How do we minimise that? Well yes, it’s a potential issue, but the solution doesn’t require huge manpower. Technology can help with rude word and key word checkers, reciprocity checks and with summary reports. However, your best police are the users themselves. With openness, manager awareness and a positive culture the vast majority of employees respond well. The US bank mewntioned above had just 10 problematic issues in over 93,000 posts!

If that’s the case is employee engagement a step too far? At best a distraction and at worst detrimental to employee motivation? If an employee is unhappy and feeling uncertain about their job, asking them to ‘engage’ with the company, their managers and to understand how they can impact the business or suggest improvements is going to go down like a lead balloon. Perhaps the age of austerity has stalled the development of engagement and we should set our heights a little lower with defined schemes that focus on tangible benefits that make employees working lives better – eg more satisfied rather than engaged? Or is employee engagement only suitable for top performers who are more secure in their jobs?

Brands are made up of people, are created for people, they are about people and yet often we find brands, forgetting about their humanity.

Companies like Apple have built their following and business with their brand at the heart, they have considered both inside and outside in the process, ensuring that what they stand for is embodied in the very fabric of the organisation – its culture, its strategy, its systems and processes. To our mind, this critical internal dimension of brand tribalism has been largely overlooked by corporates, and it is one of the things New Brand Tribalism is designed to address.

At our launch in Nov 2009 Tim Pointer HR director at Diesel shared his view that HR and Marketing function would one day merge. You can check it out on the videos here at
http://www.newbrandtribalism.com/2010/02/28/an-exploration-of-the-diesel-brand-by-tim-pointer/

we believe the winners will be those businesses that grasp the value and importance of brand tribalism and harness its power to build strong communities both inside and outside the organisation. Those that succeed in bridging the gap between their communities, based on a transparent demonstration of what the brand stands for, will have discovered the most important natural barrier to competition in the 21st Century – an authentic and charismatic brand for which people believe there is no substitute.