Recognize This! – Helping employees make a connection between their work and the success of the organisation is critical to employee engagement.

I’m often asked questions like, “Derek, what do you think is the key to effective employee recognition?”

The answer, frankly, depends on the situation of the organisation and person asking. But one answer that is true across all situations is this: Focus on the How, not just the What.

By that, I mean be sure you are recognising how employees are achieving their goals (preferably, how they are demonstrating your core values and desired behaviours) whilst they are achieving what you need them to accomplish.

Dov Seidman in Forbes put this another way when discussing results of research he shared more fully in his book How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything.

“Once again, we’ve been applying a ‘how much’ solution to a ‘HOW’ problem…

“This is a Eureka moment for employee engagement: we’ve cracked the code on what truly inspires employees. The source of engagement has nothing to do with breaking bread (or bread sticks) and everything to do with the extent to which trust, values and mission actually inspire and drive daily activities and interactions…

“When trust, values and a purpose-driven mission exist to a statistically significant degree and guide leadership, decision-making and behaviour, these ‘enablers’ give rise to a highly inspired group of super-engaged employees.

“The analysis also tells us that when trust, values and a purpose-inspired mission do not drive behaviour in a company, far fewer of these engagement traits exist. Even worse, extremely low levels of these engagement sources produce a ‘disconnected’ group of employees who work against or even sabotage company objectives.”

This dives back into the discussion around recognition gone wrong and poor employee recognition programme examples. It doesn’t matter how many pizza lunches or birthday cakes you provide if you are not doing the far more important things – recognising individuals and teams who live your values whilst achieving your mission.

This is critical to recognition programme success and, more importantly, creating  a culture of recognition, because it connects your mission and values with the daily work of the employee. It helps employees understand in very concrete terms how their daily work contributes in a valuable, meaningful way to the success of the team, department and company as a whole.

Does your organisation focus too much on the “how much” or the “what” and not enough on the “how?”

Earlier Rules of Engagement Posts: