My contributions on other sites this month include an amazing story out of Globoforce customer Intuit. Be sure to check out the posts via the links below.

Compensation Cafe: When a $1,000,000 Reward Is Appropriate * Live the Values (September 2, 2011)

Intuit introduced its new “Founder’s Innovation Award” with the presentation of the $1,000,000 prize to Hugh Molotsi for his exceptionally innovative contributions to Intuit with the invention of QuickBooks Merchant Services. Most touching is founder Scott Cook’s comments to Hugh and Hugh’s reply:

Scott Cook: “Hugh exemplifies a values driven leader. He lives our values and makes us proud of him, from integrity through inspiration.”

Hugh Molotsi: “Thank you, this is very generous, especially since everything I’ve done here at Intuit is only possible because of the amazing company. I’m grateful to work here. Scott, you’ve founded a company that has great values because you have great values. You’ve instilled it.”

Be sure to click through to watch the very touching video of the award presentation.

Compensation Cafe: Compensation Juggling: Missions, Generations, and Schemes (August 26, 2011)

I wrote about the challenges true compensation professionals face, including these three points:

  1. Paying people more to get the job done won’t help if they don’t know what the job is.
  2. Everyone says Millennials are different. Everyone is wrong.
  3. Adding global makes communicating well intentioned compensation and recognition programmes difficult.

Compensation Cafe: Could We Ever Enter a Post-Compensation Era? (August 15, 2011)

No company would consider for a second paying only one-tenth of their staff. Yet, many seem to think motivating 10% of employees is a perfectly reasonable strategy. Extensive evidence proves, however, these traditional recognition programmes do nothing to motivate the vast middle-tier of employees, only serving to reinforce those who are already highly engaged. Most importantly, these programmes do nothing to move the needle on critical metrics of engagement, retention, performance, or productivity.

Compensation Cafe: Lessons on Performance Management from the Federal Government (August 3, 2011)

Call me an optimist, but I believe all employees in all sectors of work want to do a good job. Many give up, however, because over time they don’t know what “doing a good job” looks like anymore. Nobody is giving them the feedback they need – positive and constructive – for them to know what they should correct as well as what they should continue doing. Click through to read my three lessons all managers can learn from the federal government’s very broken employee performance review process.

Webinar with Human Capital Institute: Building a Go-Fast Organisation (September 1, 2011)

Click over the Globoforce Blog to learn the practical steps to boost employee performance that Bill Catlette, co-author of the Contented Cows series, and I discussed. From there, you can also register for webinar recasts through Monday.