The Hindu Business Line : The growing importance of employee recognition

Simply put, Employee Recognition is if you appreciate and encourage your staff when they do something right, they are likely to repeat this behaviour. And others are likely to copy this behaviour in the hope of receiving similar recognition. While firms will need explicit means of recognition to ensure predictability, they also have to ensure that their managers demonstrate an understanding of recognition.

The CEO's next quarterly open house is just a few days away. Part of the agenda is to "recognise" the stars, the service champions and the ones who went beyond the call of duty to get something done.

The only problem is that the number of employees nominated by the respective managers seems thin and the CEO is not going to be pleased with this. The Employee Relations Manager gets on to the phone and starts his follow-up to persuade more managers to nominate. The nominations come in, the awards are given out but the same employees who cribbed about lack of recognition in the last survey make snide comments about how this whole thing is a meaningless ritual of turn taking.

Cut now to a senior management meeting. They are trying to understand more about one of the issues that the recent survey has thrown up — that most employees do not believe they received recognition for their work in the last few days. The team discusses strategies to reverse this trend.

Everyone recognises the importance of employee recognition. Organisations already seem to have access to several solutions. Yet, the results are not always good. While some organisations are able to leverage the power of employee recognition very successfully others are struggling.

The objective of this article is to try and take the mystery out of the subject of employee recognition by looking at the basics all over again.

What is Recognition?

The National Association for Employee Recognition (did you know that there was such an organisation? In fact it even runs a few one-day certification programmes for the employee recognition professional!) defines `Employee Recognition' as the application of a scientifically confirmed behavioural psychology principle that employee performance and retention are strongly linked to consistent, appropriate positive reinforcement of behaviours that promote the organisation's goals. (Positive reinforcement is the process of choosing and adding a stimulus that increases the likelihood of the desired behavior occurring in the future.)

Simply put, if you appreciate and encourage your employees when they do something right, they are likely to repeat this behaviour. Other employees who see this are also likely to copy this behaviour with the hope of receiving similar appreciation and recognition.

Is Recognition culture- specific?

It seems quite obvious that some organisations have an inherently strong culture of encouraging, recognising and celebrating and some organisations don't.

The origins of this may be traced to the personality of the founders, their own self-esteem and their own belief system of spotting people when they get something right.

Such positively-oriented founders and CEOs also beget people who share this belief system and demonstrate this through their daily actions, spontaneously.

On the other hand, CEOs who live in self-doubt, are fighting for their own acceptance and believe that the whole world must be "perfect" tend not to recognise spontaneously and more often catch their employees making mistakes.

Similarly, there are cultural differences between countries and races when it comes to recognition and appreciation.

There is no better place to see this cultural difference being acted out than in firms that do business with clients in the US. The young employees in these firms quite often end up receiving a lot more spontaneous appreciation for their work from their US client managers than from their own immediate supervisors.

While this is interpreted as managerial insensitivity, I think the real issue is one of cultural difference. For the client manager, saying, "terrific", "fantastic", "great job" or "wow" is almost a social courtesy and means nothing more. There is no contextual meaning to this.

The local supervisor is however wary of using such words since he fears that it will lead to heightened expectations of monetary rewards. He attaches a lot of contextual meaning to these words.

The young employees therefore end up bringing print outs of such client mails to their performance review meetings as evidence of their good work.

Similarly, in India, recognition from the boss is of far greater value than peer recognition given that as a race we are characterized by vertical collectivism. Therefore peer recognition schemes do not seem to work as well.

With a lot more global influence and greater awareness, this aspect of our culture is changing, at least in our metros.

While in the past, the average child was brought up to believe that performance was his duty and that appreciation might actually "slacken" the efforts, today there is less duty orientation and at least some parents believe that the already stressed child needs some appreciation and positive reinforcement.

What is the best way of formalising a culture of appreciation and recognition?

How can any organisation formalise recognition-oriented behaviour? There are three broad ways in which organisations can do this:

By hiring people who share this value

By implementing policies, programs and processes that drive recognition with rigour

By influencing such behaviour through training and other strong organisational rituals.

Many recognition programmes fail because organisations rely almost exclusively on the polices and programmes they implement and far less on creating the right managerial behaviours through training and other cultural enablers.

While organisations will need explicit means of recognition to ensure predictability and consistency, they also have to ensure that their managers demonstrate an implicit understanding of recognition through their everyday supervisory behaviour.

In the absence of a right balance, employees are likely to see it as more mechanistic and less humanistic, more of the letter and less of the spirit. This is what makes the manager's role most significant.

Of what use it is if an employee receives a great looking trophy from the CEO but has to return to work for a manager who does not demonstrate appreciation and recognition for the rest of the quarter!

(The author is founder and CEO of totus consulting, a strategic consulting firm that designs and implements HR systems and processes for organisations across diverse industries. He can be reached at ganesh@totusconsulting.com)

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