RECOGNITION & REWARD

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Workplace recognition motivates, provides a sense of accomplishment and makes employees feel valued for their work.  Recognition not only boosts individual employee engagement, but it also increases productivity and loyalty to the company.

 

Beyond communicating appreciation and providing motivation to the recognised employee, the act of recognition also sends messages to other employees about what success looks like.  In this way, recognition is both a tool for personal reward and an opportunity to reinforce the desired culture of the organisation to other employees.

 

Acknowledging employees' best work can be a low-cost endeavour - it can be as small as a carefully crafted email, or a thank-you card.  The key is to know what makes it meaningful and memorable for the employee, and who is doing the recognising.

 

The most memorable and important recognition comes from a high-level leader or CEO.  Employees will remember personal feedback from the CEO - even a small amount of time a high-ranking leader takes to show appreciation can yield a positive impression on an employee.  In fact, acknowledgment from a CEO could become a career highlight when acknowledging a particularly impressive result or outcome.

 

The best managers promote a recognition rich environment, and keeping it timely (e.g. weekly) to ensure that the employee knows the significance of the recent achievement.

 

Recognition and reward can take many forms

 

• public recognition or acknowledgment via an award, certificate or commendation

• private recognition from a boss, peer or customer

• recognition of achievement through evaluations or reviews

• promotion or increase in scope of work or responsibility to show trust

• monetary award such as a trip, prize or pay increase

• personal satisfaction or pride in work

 

The criteria for recognition should align with the purpose and culture of the company and should reflect its aspirational identity to inspire others.  Rewarding employees who are not top performers could adversely affect high performers' motivation.  As such, companies need to be clear on the reasons for awards to avoid any bad feeling.

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Reward & Performance

 

Studies show that for jobs involving mechanical skills, for example, bricklaying and other repetitive tasks, performance related pay is highly successful.  The harder people work, the greater the reward, the harder they work.

 

However, for jobs that requires cognitive skills, i.e. conceptual/creative thinking, rewards related to performance result in poorer performance.  The rewards are counter-productive because it distracts the employees’ thought processes from where it should really be focussed, their job.  And it doesn’t help that the correlation between reward and better performance is less clear because of the more subjective nature of the task and outputs. 

 

Money is a motivator for employees and, indeed, if you don’t pay people enough it will undermine their motivation.  However, the best use of money as a motivator is to take the issue of money off the table by paying them enough so they are not thinking about money.  They can then focus on their job.

 

The evidence shows that there are three factors improving employee performance and increasing their personal satisfaction:

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• Autonomy - rather than management direction.  Self-direction increases engagement

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• Mastery - the challenge of improving your skills increases engagement and satisfaction 

 

• ​Purpose - a higher transcendent purpose, typically related in some way to helping to make the world a better place and to helping others.  For many people, these higher goals are highly motivating in terms of ‘putting their shoulder to the wheel’ and progressing the day-to-day job at hand.