Better results, higher engagement, complex recognition programs. We are not just randomly mentioning buzz words related to modern business goals but giving you the concepts with a high correlation that are conducting to improved business results.
Let’s start from the beginning.
If you’d like your business to have higher customer ratings, increased profitability, and productivity, less turnover, decreased absenteeism, product defects, and shrinkage and little to no safety incidents you have to do something to increase engagement. And it’s plenty of room here for only 29% of employees are highly engaged working at a superior level, while 18% of employees are actively disengaged, hurting the organizations they belong to. 53% of the employee left in the middle are just performing at a mediocre level.
When speaking about engagement we speak from hiring to separation and lately we are more and more concerned on the candidates’ engagement too, for a disagreeable experience as an applicant can hurt the company’s bottom line. In the Rullion Candidate Survey, from 2014 and in the Ph Candidate Attraction eBook from 2015 you can see that 75% of the applicants were already customers of the company they applied at and 1 in 4 applicants consider stopping purchasing products and services as a result of poor candidate experience.
Let’s take an extra step forward. We now know that engagement is of paramount importance, but why correlate engagement with recognition and reward?
Experts point that there are for engagement drivers for engagement consistent among employees around the world:
- The work itself, including opportunities for development
- Confidence and trust in leadership
- Recognition and rewards
- Organizational communication that is delivered in a timely and orderly way
With a solid place among engagement drivers, recognition and rewards should be on the spot lite for all companies around the world when working to increase employee engagement. Add to this that, according to Gallup, number one reason people leave jobs is they don’t feel appreciated and the fact that Organizations with Recognition programs had 31% lower voluntary turnover, according to Deloitte, while 60% best-in-class organizations state that employee recognition is extremely valuable in driving performance. (Aberdeen Group) and I hope I’ve grabbed your attention to the reward and recognition topic.
Let’s talk about the way recognition was done not long ago. The manager remembered from time to time what he/she had learned in management/leadership training and gave the employee a tap on the back accompanied by the familiar “good job”. Sometimes he remembered that recognition should be public other time he/she didn’t remember such a small detail. Anyway, this type of recognition was rare to very rare and most of the time not accompanied by quality feedback. The employee of the month or employee of the year programs created on happy persons while all the other employees were unhappy. The other types of recognition programs, mostly related to increasing in seniority, remember the golden watch people received at retirement, had little to do with performance and competency improvement.
So, forget about these old programs for they never worked then and for sure they will not work now when Gen Y is almost 80% of the working force and Gen Z is starting working too.
You need a program based on social wisdom, on crowdsourcing, a program where peer to peer recognition and feedback is as important as manager’s recognition and feedback, a program where recognition and feedback are immediate and public to everyone in the company. To implement such a recognition and reward program you need a platform that provides the framework for an organization to structure and implement such a complex recognition program that reinforces behaviors and improves individual team performance while aligning it with organizational values and result.
Via such a program you offer your employees, beyond recognition and feedback, you offer rewards that are meaningful for them, customized to their needs, wants and preferences.