Recognise This! — Empowering all employees to recognise others also empowers all employees to live your culture every day and appreciate others for doing the same.
Yesterday in Compensation Cafe, I riffed on a post published last week by Compensation Cafe Editor Ann Bares. In her post, “Discretion and Disempowerment,” Ann highlighted challenges of leaving discretionary rewards to the discretion of managers alone. As I point out in the post, these boil down to:
- The length of time between action deserving of recognition and reward and the actual receipt of that reward (because such programmes most often take the form of annual bonuses).
- The memory of a single person (the manager) over time to appropriately reward someone.
- The unintended reinforcement of the manager and his or her concerns as the primary focus of employees.
I went on to give three solutions to these problems – all possible by empowering all employees with the ability to recognise and reward others. To summarise:
How does empowering all employees impact the challenges referenced by Ann and enumerated above?
- In-the-moment recognition reinforces much more strongly the actions, behaviours and results you need to see to achieve success metrics.
- Even the best manager cannot see everything good happening every day or remember all those instances of excellence over many months. That’s why empowering all employees to recognise and reward each other is so powerful.
- When all employees are empowered to recognise each other for certain actions, behaviors and results in line with core values and key objectives, then the priorities of the organisation become first and foremost.
Click over to the full post for more detail on each, and tell me who you think should “own” discretionary recognition and rewards.
