Recognise This! – Until you can answer the strategic questions about your employee recognition programme, the tactical questions don’t matter.
Ann Bares, author of the Compensation Force blog (and editor of Compensation Café), recently posted about year-end questions concerning incentive programmes. The points she raises are quite similar to the questions I often receive from clients in the early stages of thinking about their employee rewards and recognition programmes.
As Ann points out, people often ask the wrong questions, focussing on the details of the current programme with questions like (quoting from Ann’s blog):
- Should we extend our incentive plan lower in the organisation? And if we do, do we need to make changes to the plan?
- Are our current payouts appropriate? Should we make them higher … or lower?
- Should we go from annual to quarterly awards … or from quarterly to annual awards?
Instead, you need to start with the bigger picture (again, quoting):
- Why do we have this plan in the first place?
- For what purpose was the plan created? What objectives is it designed to achieve?
- Is the plan working?
- Are the original purpose and objectives still relevant given where the function/business unit/organisation is today? Or is there another purpose and another set of objectives that is more pressing and important today?
The same is true when considering your recognition and reward practices. I and members of my team are often asked by clients to take a look at their current (often overly complex) reward programme structures and tell them what to tweak.
Often, I find myself advising them to go back to the drawing board entirely and ask the very fundamental “why” questions:
- Why are we doing this in the first place?
- What are we hoping to accomplish?
- What’s the bottom-line business benefits we can derive from doing this better or differently?
- (And many more)
If you can’t answer the fundamental strategic questions, the answers to your tactical questions don’t really matter.
What questions are you asking about your employee recognition and rewards programme?
