DerekIrvineGloboforce

Today on Compensation Cafe: What the Oreo Cookie Teaches Us about Global Employee Recognition

DerekIrvineGloboforce — Fri, 17 May 2013 13:01:00 GMT

Recognise This! – Never assume the local approach for employee recognition and rewards will work equally well globally.

Today on Compensation Cafe, I discuss why HR and recognition pros must seek to understand the local wants and needs of their globally distributed employees. I share an example of the Oreo cookie and how it nearly failed in the Chinese market until Oreo producers Mondelez International changed the cookie formulation to change the shape, sweetness and filling flavour (green tea is most popular in China) to align with local tastes. Now, Oreo sales in China account for nearly half of all global sales of the iconic cookie.

Click over to Compensation Cafe for the full story and how you can apply the lessons of the Oreo cookie to your global employee recognition and rewards programs.

Recognise This! – Never assume the local approach for employee recognition and rewards will work equally well globally.

Top Retention Strategy: Strategic Employee Recognition

DerekIrvineGloboforce — Wed, 15 May 2013 14:21:00 GMT

Recognise This! – A culture of recognition is one of the most powerful means of retaining top talent.

In the last few months in my travels to lead workshops with clients and to present at various HR and strategy conferences around the world, I’m hearing a repeated refrain about employee retention. In my (admittedly unscientific) survey of these large, global companies, the importance of culture as a main component of a retention strategy is once again rising to the fore.

Some companies have maxed out their compensation and cannot compete for talent based on pay alone. Others know the only real difference between what they have to offer top talent from the competition is the strength of their workplace culture as an exciting, innovative and appreciative environment. Or, as a recent Chief Executive magazine article put it:

“If the trend of rising company earnings is any indication, the momentum is likely to continue. For employers, that means what it always has: an uptick in competition for the best talent. At the same time, barely out of the recession, companies can’t yet afford to make huge investments in salary increases or large bonuses. By developing employee recognition programmes, employers can improve—in some cases dramatically—employee engagement levels, retention and performance. ‘Employee recognition is a potentially very low-cost engagement driver that can have a very, very significant impact on financial performance,’ says Ken Oehler, global practice leader of engagement at human resources consultancy, AON Hewitt.”

That’s the power of strategic, social recognition done right – it’s the fastest, most cost effective way to impact employee engagement and retention. Indeed, some of our clients have realised double digit increases in engagement and retention in months, not years.

How is this possible? It’s not just telling employees “thank you.” It’s going much deeper and telling people very specifically how they and their efforts demonstrated a core value while helping to achieve strategic objectives. It’s giving employees context for the value of their efforts within the bigger picture. We all seek greater meaning in our work. Sometimes, we just need to be reminded what it is.

And when it’s done right, the benefits are stark. AON Hewitt’s Oehler continues:

“Oehler recently studied the relationship between recognition and engagement and found evidence of a strong connection. For starters, when employees were asked to name their top drivers of engagement, recognition came in at No. 2, well ahead of pay at No. 5. Aon also looked at the lag effect of engagement to sales growth and found that companies with above-average engagement scores correlated with 19 percent sales growth vs. companies below the norm on engagement, which reported only 6 percent sales growth.”

How do you differentiate your organisation to ensure your top talent never want to leave?

An “Effective” Culture Is in Your Hands. What Are You Doing about It?

DerekIrvineGloboforce — Mon, 13 May 2013 12:14:00 GMT

Recognise This! – All employees own the company culture because their daily actions and behaviors impact how the culture is experienced by themselves and others.

Culture. I write about it all the time, yet I never seem to unpack all the myriad facets of culture. Just think about all the different ways the word itself can be use:

A “cultured” person – one who carefully monitors their own behaviors so that they align with the best expectations of the environment they are in
Cultured pearls – a thing of beauty created by human intervention into a natural process
Ethnic or geographic culture – the traditions, behaviors and even expectations of a people group as defined over a very long period of time
Company culture – “the way we do things around here.”

I think that last one is lazy phrasing for a profound idea. Indeed, company culture is far more than an idea. It is perhaps the combination of my three prior definitions. It is certainly shaped by human intervention and influenced by traditions and behaviors of the many over time. And yet it is the daily, individual choices about personal behaviors and actions that can dramatically (and subtly) shift a company’s culture quite quickly.

Culture became top of mind for me again this week after reading this post in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) Blog. Author John Coleman unpacks the six different key factors of culture (Vision, Values, Practices, People, Narrative, Place) with which I agree wholeheartedly. Company culture is all of things and can be changed at the drop of a hat if any one of these things is changed in a demonstrable way.

Yet it’s the statistic right in his opening paragraph that grabs my attention most. (The stat comes from this article):

“Effective culture can account for 20-30 percent of the differential in corporate performance when compared with ‘culturally unremarkable’ competitors.”

“Effective” culture – that’s a key driving factor in corporate success. John’s key factors of Vision, Values, Practices, People, Narrative and Place are indeed the forces behind an effective culture. But do not make the mistake of putting the creation of an effective culture on the shoulders of leadership alone. We all – all employees within an organisation – own the company’s culture. Every person’s actions that reflect the values (or don’t) and contribute to achieving the mission (or hinder it) shape the culture in a new way every day.

The more important question for leaders is: How are you enabling every employee to own the culture and impact it on a daily basis? What are you doing to ensure every employees knows the vision, understands the values, and knows what “practice” they can implement in their own work to achieve it?

Do you know how to do this in your own role? If not, what would you need to do so?

2 Factors Critical to Building Trust (and Engagement) at Work

DerekIrvineGloboforce — Fri, 10 May 2013 13:11:00 GMT

Recognise This! – Managers must be willing to engage in the difficult aspects of managing others in order to help all employees achieve to their best ability.

As I continue to catch up on a backlog in my readers and research feeds, I’m seeing themes emerge. One is around the importance of trust for employee engagement. Employees who do not trust company leadership will not (indeed, cannot) engage as deeply in their work. They do not give their best efforts because they do not see the value and benefit of doing so.

Just a couple of key factors to building trust in the workplace jumped out at me.

1) Managers must be willing to have the hard conversations with low performing employees.

Many were surprised at recent survey that low performers are often more highly engaged than high performers. I was not, simply because low performers too often don’t know they are low performers. Therefore, they are quite happily skating by at work. It’s the effect on the high performers who see their lower producing colleagues getting away with it that dramatically impacts trust in the organisation. Or, as Mark Murphy, CEO of Leadership IQ (the company that did the survey behind these results) said, “It shows high performers that the organisation is not a meritocracy.”

Managers must be willing to have the difficult conversations with low performers, not only to help them improve their own skills and productivity, but to also help build trust with top performers that leadership will do the right thing to reinforce best effort from everyone.

2) Managers must appropriately value employee effort as well as achievement.

Let’s be honest. Every innovative approach and thought doesn’t work. We know that to be true at Globoforce where our core values are Respect, Imagination, Determination and Innovation. The four together drive our success. While it’s all well and good to imagine new ideas and approaches, unless we have the determination to see them realised and the respect for each other as we do, we will never truly deliver the innovation that pushes our industry ever forward.

And yet, part of that approach means we sometimes imagine something that doesn’t work as expected. But we can always learn something from that effort and apply those learning to continue to imagine and innovate. That’s the determination needed to keep moving forward. Without validation of and respect for the effort and encouragement to find the lesson (even in the failure) and move forward, employees would lose trust in our values and our goals as an organisation.

What other elements are critical to building trust?

What Does “Meaningful Work” Really Mean?

DerekIrvineGloboforce — Thu, 09 May 2013 12:48:00 GMT

Recognise This! – Only the employee can define what is meaningful work to them. Leaders, however, are critical for helping them catch the vision.

Yesterday, I wrote about the importance of engaging in meaningful work for employees. But what, exactly, does “meaningful work” mean? As I was catching up on my (admittedly large) backlog of news and blogs in my reader, I found this nugget from the Switch & Shift blog (which is rapidly becoming one of my favorite daily reads):

“Managers cannot make work meaningful for employees. Managers, however, can shape the workplace environment to let meaningful work become possible for employees. With a context set to let meaning be experienced, employees can leverage the environment to derive meaning from their work.

“Meaningful work is vague. What exactly is it? Assuredly it begins quite selfishly. But this is out of necessity. For work to be meaningful, it is the employee who must label it so. This requires a belief that meaningful work is a desired outcome from managements’ actions. And employees believe managements’ intentions and see actions aimed to let meaning emerge.”

This reminds me of the possibly apocryphal story of the senior military leader touring NASA Space Center during the early days of the space race. The leader noticed a janitor cleaning an area of mission control and asked, “What are you doing?” The janitor didn’t reply with the obvious, “I’m sweeping the floor.” No, he said, “I’m helping to put a man on the moon.”

In this story, the employee knew and understood the greater purpose of his efforts. Keeping a neat and clean work environment would help to eliminate distractions for the scientists and engineers in mission control, thereby helping to contribute to the greater space mission. This employee knew the meaning of his work.

Personally, I don’t lead a group of strategy consultants. I help companies change their cultures to ones of appreciation and recognition.

What do you do for work? What’s the real meaning of your work?

3 Tips to Become the Manager Employees Never Want to Leave

DerekIrvineGloboforce — Tue, 07 May 2013 16:23:00 GMT

Recognise This! – People leave bosses, not companies. Good managers make sure their employees succeed before themselves.

We’ve all heard the truism that people quit managers not jobs. If retention of top performers and key talent is a priority for you, then one of the first places you should look for improvement is in the relationship between managers and employees. This recent article, for example, points to a recent survey showing 20% of people say their bosses hurt their career. Half of employees, on the other hand, said the boss had a positive impact.

The article goes on to share common advice we’ve all likely heard before: End micro-managing and help bosses learn the art of delegation. Help bosses feel secure in their role and the importance of leading a team so they are confident and comfortable in giving team members credit where credit is due instead of snatching it for themselves.

While that advice is quite true and valuable, I’m far more interested in why these managerial tactics work. It all boils down to these three points (supported by reams of research conducted by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer in The Progress Principle).

Employees need meaningful work.
Busy work kills the spirit. Yes, some work tasks are menial, repetitive and just have to get done. But doesn’t mean they aren’t meaningful. Good managers help employees see the greater value of even the most menial, repetitive tasks. Help your employees see how their efforts help move the greater mission forward.
Employees need to make progress in meaningful work.
But meaningful work isn’t enough. Employees also need to know they are getting somewhere. Good managers cast a vision for the future and help employees see where they are on the path to achieving that vision. Help employees see forward progress toward big goals by recognising them for smaller achievements along the way.
Employees need recognition of efforts and achievements that make an impact.
All of this boils down to employees’ need for recognition. Don’t misunderstand me. This is not a grab for another trophy or a gold star. Employees simply need to know what they do matters within a bigger picture. Indeed, our Spring 2012 Workforce Mood Tracker survey showed 78% of employees said they would work harder if their efforts were better recognised.

Instead of micromanaging, micro-appreciate. Hone in on what your team members are doing and recognise smaller achievements and progress towards bigger goals. Instead of snatching credit for yourself, be the one to give credit to your team for success and let the entire company see how much you all achieve together.

What other attributes do you see in good managers? What made your best manager so good?

Useless Unless…

DerekIrvineGloboforce — Wed, 01 May 2013 17:10:00 GMT

Recognise This! – Don’t forget the key ingredients to employee engagement and excellence.

I’ve written a few blog posts in the last couple of months where I noticed I used these two words in conjunction – Useless Unless. Two little letters of difference, yet a tremendous differentiator.

Think of the ramifications in real life:

The fastest car in the world is useless unless you put fuel in the tank.
The best education is useless unless you put it to work.
The most talented basketball player is useless unless you give him a basketball (and committed team) to play with.
An incredibly delicious dinner party is useless unless you have friends and family to invite and share it with.
Talented, high-potential employees are useless unless they know the end goal and how to help achieve it.

What’s missing that’s most important? “E”

Encourage – We need encouragement at work. Encouragement isn’t just something to be given in tough times, but also to let people know they’re on the right track – their work has greater meaning and purpose in achieving the bigger picture.
Extoll – Don’t forget the praise. Recognise people when they go above and beyond. Shout their achievements and contributions from the rooftops. Make sure they know their efforts are noticed, appreciated and valued.
Engage – If you Encourage and Extol, you’ve taken a giant step forward in creating a work environment in which people choose to engage. And engaged employees are more productive, more easily retained and more beneficial to the bottom line.

What else is useless unless… ?

3 Lessons for Employee Engagement through Recognition from XL Axiata

DerekIrvineGloboforce — Wed, 01 May 2013 15:39:00 GMT

Recognise This! – Learning from others’ success can enhance our own efforts for engagement.

I enjoy Abhishek Mittal’s Mumblr blog. Abhishek is a senior consultant for Towers Watson based in Singapore. Recently he shared a case study on XL Axiata, an Indonesian mobile services operator and division of Axiata Group. In the case study, Xl Axiata explains four key steps they took to create an engaging work environment for employees, including a Performance-Based Culture:

“XL Axiata knew that if it wanted the employees to display the right behaviours, it had to recognise and reward these behaviours. The leaders shaped a culture where people and performance are talked about in the same breath. Employees who were creating value for the company were being recognised through company-wide emails and there was a focus on celebrating small successes in the long journey to achieve the vision. It also placed a higher emphasis on differentiating rewards based on performance. Mittal says,These initiatives helped employees build a clear line of sight to the company goals and sent a clear message that the company values high performance above everything.”

From this one focus alone, I see three clear lessons for employee engagement:

Recognise and Reward the How not just the What
Results (the What) can be achieved in many ways, not all of them positive (think Enron or any of the other recent scandals were the end was more important than the means). By focussing recognition and rewards on the right behaviours, XL Axiata is reinforcing that how the work is accomplished is as important as what is accomplished.
Celebrate progress on the way to the big win
While everyone must understand and work toward the ultimate vision and “big win,” small successes and progress along the way make the big win ultimately possible. Research conducted by Harvard Business School and reported in the book The Progress Principle by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer proved the single greatest motivator for employees is making progress in meaningful work. Doing so increases engagement.
Offer multiple, differentiated awards
Recognition and rewards must be differentiated based on several factors including level of effort, contribution and results achieved. Offering the same level of recognition to someone who came up with an innovative idea that could transform product direction as you also offer to someone who contributed as part of a team to a lesser initiative merely serves to demotivate those who achieve great ambitions. Offering differentiated awards (awards at various levels) ensures both proper recognition and reward activity as well as eliminating any concerns around recognition becoming expected or run-of-the-mill.

What major initiatives has your organisation undertaken to encourage employee engagement?

What Makes a Happy & Innovative Employee? Big Data Tells Us.

DerekIrvineGloboforce — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 13:38:00 GMT

Recognise This! – Knowing the mission, how to contribute and being empowered to do so drive employee happiness and innovation.

Regular readers know I’m a big proponent of Big Data – especially Big Data for HR. It’s catching on and in a big way. This article in the New York Times shares several examples of the benefits of workforce science, which it defines as:

“It adds a large dose of data analysis, a k a Big Data, to the field of human resource management, which has traditionally relied heavily on gut feel and established practice to guide hiring, promotion and career planning.”

In today’s workplace, we can and do measure much more than ever before. I’m not talking about employee surveillance (though that can be a component where appropriate), but rather about using the information we already gather in more effective ways. Says Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the Center for Digital Business at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, in the article:

“The heart of science is measurement. We’re seeing a revolution in measurement, and it will revolutionise organisational economics and personnel economics.”

So, what’s the data actually telling us about our workforces? Several examples shared in the article:

Past performance isn’t a good indicator of future results.
The personal warmth and quality of the supervisor is more important to employee results than the experience and attributes of the employees themselves.
Being outgoing doesn’t make you a good salesperson. The ability to persist and keep going forward, even after being told no, does.
At Google, the happiest and most innovative workers are those who “have a strong sense of mission about their work and who also feel they have much personal autonomy.”

Let’s look at just that Google finding more deeply for a moment. What makes Google employees happy? It’s not the free food or the amenities of the campus. What makes them innovative? It’s not predicated by their college degrees or prior accomplishments. No, happy and innovative employees at Google understand the big picture, know their role in helping to achieve it, and feel empowered to do so.

I know from the data gathered by our clients that this is true for the vast majority of employees in workplaces everywhere. Through their strategic, social employee recognition programmes, our clients gather (in a very positive way) a great deal of data on employee accomplishments and attitudes about work.

These are the 3 keys to happy, innovative employees:

Understand the big picture – a mission statement on your website, hanging on your wall or even spelled out in your Employee Value Proposition is useless unless employees personally and individually understand what that means for them.
Know their role in achieving the big picture – Understanding the mission is one thing, but knowing what I personally can do to help achieve it is entirely another. Making lofty goals real for employees in their daily work makes the corporate mission much more personal – and achievable. Specifically and in a timely way tell employees when and how they and their efforts are helping the company achieve the bigger mission.
Are empowered to do so – Towers Watson, Hay Group, Bersin by Deloitte and others all tell us that companies who enable their employees have at least 2x higher engagement. Enablement includes communicating back to employees when and how they’ve achieved the mission.

Are you using workforce science analytics in your workplace? What results or conclusions are you able to draw?

Strategic Employee Recognition Critical to Strong Manager/Employee Relationships

DerekIrvineGloboforce — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 11:39:00 GMT

Recognise This! – Gallup research shows “best” managers empower, recognise and communicate with their employees regularly, supported by an effective performance management system.

If present trends continue, this week’s series of blog posts may be an ongoing theme of “isn’t that obvious?” Yesterday, I shared results of the Parnassus Fund (consisting of companies that treat their employees well and with respect), which performs consistently better than the S&P. Today, I’m sharing about Gallup research showing the manager/employee relationship is critical to employee engagement.

I’m sure we’ve all uttered the truism: “People leave managers, not companies.” This is the research to back it up as featured in an Incentive magazine article:

“A new article from Gallup researchers points to the pivotal role that the employee-manager relationship plays in driving the performance of companies. Drawing on data from more than 50,000 employees across 10 major industries, the analysts found that while effective engagement and recognition programmes are key to a company’s success, strong relationships between managers and their subordinates are the key factor in making those programs work.”

Breaking this down further:

* 70% of employees giving managers a “best” rating also ranked the company’s recognition and engagement system as very good (vs. only 5% who rated managers as “best” also saying recognition programmes were poor)
* 85% of those rating their manager as “below average” said their recognition programmes were poor

Call me an optimist, but I really believe the vast majority of managers want to do right by their employees. They want to facilitate excellent work and help their employees in the best way possible. Yet, why do so many fail? I also believe we don’t equip managers with the tools they need to be the best managers they can be.

Managers know they need to recognise and reward employees for exceptional effort. Perhaps they’ve even received training on this management philosophy. But have you given them the tool and process needed to not only recognise employees, but to do so in a meaningful, personal way tied to what matters most to your organisation (demonstration of your core values in contribution to achieving strategic objectives)?

Desires and objectives without a means to deliver are nearly useless. Empower your managers to be the “best.”

And the Travel Travails Award Goes To….

DerekIrvineGloboforce — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 15:28:00 GMT

Recognise This! – Irritating, exhausting situations can be made better by those around us who choose a good attitude. Find a way to thank those who make your day better.

A large part of my role as a consultant on strategic, social recognition is travel. And when travel is part of your work, you end up with travel horror stories. I had one myself earlier this week.

I was in Brussels leading a workshop on how to build a winning culture of recognition. My flight home to Dublin was scheduled to leave at 9:40pm for a planned 1 hour and 15 minutes…and then I landed the next day at 1:00pm! We’ve all been there with these Planes, Trains and Automobiles travel stories. Weather closed the Dublin airport, so redirected to Manchester, with bus transfers at 3:30 in the morning, a brief four hour rest in a …ahem… lovely hotel room, back to the airport, re-board, wait on the tarmac, etc.

I shared my travel travails with my team members because I had to cancel a scheduled meeting. As we commiserated together, sharing our own travel stories, one colleague suggested a recognition award for the worst travel story! While a funny idea, I think there may be merit in this.

Hear me out. One thing I notice every time I’m caught in a travel snafu is the camaraderie of many of the people caught in the same situation with me. Fellow stranded travelers – strangers one and all – tend to open up, club together, find ways to help each other. When I returned to the airport from the hotel, I noticed many folks greeting each other like long lost friends, though we’d only met the night before. It’s very much a sense of “we’re all just humans in this together.”

Think how our workplaces would be changed if we all behaved in this way towards each other more often, especially in stressful situations that just aren’t going our way.

Perhaps the award should be “Kindness Under Stress” or even “The Golden Rule Award.” After all, we choose our attitude, regardless of our circumstances. An exhausting, frustrating travel experience was made far more endurable (if not actually enjoyable) by the relaxed, friendly attitudes of those I happened to be lucky enough to have as impromptu travel companions.

Two questions for you today:

What’s your worst travel story? Did anything – or anyone – help to make it better?
If you could create a special recognition award, what would it be for?

Intentions for Building and Sustaining a Strong Company Culture Will Fail without a Process to Back It Up

DerekIrvineGloboforce — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 13:10:00 GMT

Recognise This! – Give all employees the tools and systems needed to reinforce your desired culture every day for everyone.

Your company leadership makes a commitment to build a strong culture. They understand how powerful of a differentiator culture can be in the market. They know what kind of positive culture they want to instill and they take steps to make it happen. Yet over time, the culture changes into something else. What happened?

Over on the Fistful of Talent blog, Suzanne Ramsey tells a parable that ends this way:

“So, now we’re at the point in the story where the company is at a crossroads. To those who have been around a while, there is a feeling of the founding culture being unappreciated and not cared for by new employees coming in. To those newly joining, there is a feeling of having been slightly duped; that the descriptions of cool culture and being a different kind of firm, etc., shared during the recruiting process aren’t really true. Both groups are frustrated, and sad, and the early founders are befuddled. Their principles and priorities for the company, for differentiating itself through its awesome culture, have not changed. So what has?”

Read her story and it’s clear what happened – while there was every intention of sustaining and building the culture over time, there was no process to make it happen. Suzanne ends her post with these two recommendations (quoting on both points):

It is time to stop assuming that the desired culture will sustain itself as the company grows, and time to make sustaining the culture a key responsibility of ALL within the company. Identify and develop the skills (storytelling, interpersonal relationship building), programmes, and actions necessary to do so. And hold everyone in the company explicitly accountable for doing so through their behaviours.

And it is time for the company to get laser focussed on how it onboards and welcomes new employees into the fold, from leaders right on down to the most junior of hires. It is not fair to put the entire burden of acclimating to the new organisation, a new job, a new culture, on a newly joining employee, no matter how senior. And it is not fair to have the entire burden rest on the company, either. New employee onboarding needs an overhaul.

While I agree with these two points, Suzanne has missed a key third step – the sustaining process for making sure your culture is not just understood but actively lived by every employee in their daily work. Yes, we must onboard new employees properly into the culture, and we must all own the responsibility of sustaining that culture – as leaders we must also give everyone the tools and methodology to do so daily.

So, what is the process? Strategic, social recognition focussed on recognising and rewarding employees when they live the culture. That is, when they demonstrate your key cultural attributes (your core values) in their daily work. And since this is the responsibility of all employees, then all employees must be empowered to recognise each other when they see someone living the values or embodying desired cultural attributes.

How is your culture proactively encouraged and sustained in your organisation?

You Cannot Document Your Cultural DNA. You Must Live It.

DerekIrvineGloboforce — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 15:49:00 GMT

Recognise This! – Your culture is alive. You must breathe life into it daily through timely recognition of those living your cultural DNA (your values).

Today, I’d like to share with you a case study on the importance of values and how you make them real. I’m using as my case study company Guidewire Software, which I learned of through a New York Times “Corner Office” interview with CEO Marcus Ryu.

In the interview, Mr. Ryu shares how the six founders of the company created their values and their culture:

“We said we have to consecrate our principles in a document that we will refer to over and over. This will be our DNA and every new person who joins the company will read the document. We put a great deal of thought into this, thinking of it almost like a constitution that will guide our future actions.”

They also not only identified their values, but also gave each one a simple, easy to understand definition.

“We wanted to create an enduring business with a very strong set of values. We chose integrity, rationality and collegiality. Integrity is: simply tell the truth… No. 2 is rationality, which is to make decisions based on facts and logic… The final one is collegiality, which means minimum hierarchy.”

And yet, Mr. Ryu goes on to share this challenge:

“The thing I most dislike in an employee is two-facedness, where they manage up in a very diplomatic and collegial fashion, but they’re a tyrant down. That’s a very common duality that you see in the business world, and it’s pernicious because you may not realise the problem for a long time. One of the great dangers for people in my kind of role is that people are always so deferential to you. They’re always so solicitous and careful about your needs that you may get the false impression that this is just the way they are, when in fact they may be just doing that only in this very narrow context, and they are indifferent elsewhere.

“We’ve had a couple very painful examples where I thought someone seemed very competent, doing a great job, really responsive, and then found out that their team was in agony and ready to quit the company. It was almost a Jekyll and Hyde kind of situation. It was just shocking to me because I would never have detected it on my own. It’s a great challenge in organisations to make sure you somehow provide a conduit for people to get that across.”

Clearly, this kind of behaviour violates the value of “collegiality.” So where did the founders’ plan to create a strong, values-based culture that would “guide our future actions” fall apart? They relied on a document as the primary means of conveying the culture to new employees.

While it’s certainly important to codify your culture and what is most important to you for the organisation to succeed, you cannot – indeed, you must not – rely on a document new employees read (and likely promptly forget). DNA is alive – if you want your cultural DNA to live and thrive, you must breathe life into every day. You must empower all employees, everywhere, to notice and appreciate those values being lived by others.

This makes your values come off a cold document and become real in the daily work – to truly guide the actions and behaviours. The management aphorism “You get what you recognise and reward” is very true. So recognise and reward your values being vibrantly lived, every day.

What values do you see being lived (or violated) in your organisation?

How to Use Words of Appreciation & Recognition More Effectively

DerekIrvineGloboforce — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 18:23:00 GMT

Recognise This! -Words have power. Use words of appreciation wisely.

I’m sitting in a hotel room in New York, watching the morning news. A big story is a change to national spelling bee competition in the US. Now, in addition to being able to spell uncommon, complex words, contestants must also know the definitions in a preliminary vocabulary test. Many participants (and parents) seem to be up in arms over this change – after all, it’s a “spelling” bee, not a “vocabulary” bee.

This change makes sense to me, however. What’s the value in knowing lots of words, even how to spell them correctly, if you don’t know what they mean or how to use them correctly? Indeed, knowing more words and how to use them correctly benefits the learner with expanded knowledge as well as those who may read or hear the learner use those words appropriately because much more information can be conveyed clearly and accurately.

The same is true with appreciation. We all know the words “Thank you.” We all (I hope) know we used use the words “thank you” to express appreciation. But the value of recognition goes so much further.

When we use the words “thank you” appropriately, then expand on them with deeper explanation of what we mean by “thank you” not only do we as the users of the words benefit, but far more do those who hear the words. Consider research featured in the GloboBlog that shows:

“An increasing body of evidence is showing that the employees who are GIVING the recognition and reward may be benefiting as much or more from a recognition moment than their colleagues.”

Think of it this way: Which has more power?

“Hey, John. Thanks! You’re great!”
(or)
“John, thanks for the detailed research you did in preparation for the meeting this morning. Thanks to your diligence, we were able to show the client our commitment to solving their challenges in creative and cost effective ways. I really appreciate the time and attention you committed to supporting this project.”

Words have power, especially words of appreciation and praise.

What’s the best message of appreciation you’ve received or given? What made it exceptional?

3 Lessons for Implementing Truly Global Employee Recognition Solutions

DerekIrvineGloboforce — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 18:00:00 GMT

Recognise This! – “Going global” with your recognition efforts is not sending certificates in English across the globe.

I’m very proud of my team. Right now, they are in the process of recording on-demand training for a global client in 20 languages. That means securing 20 native language speakers, scheduling recording sessions, and producing final training materials – for multiple audiences. And this is just the final step in a months long multi-lingual communications and training effort.

Why do I share my pride with you? Because their effort is a terrific example of what implementing a truly global strategic employee recognition effort really means. Of course, I must also give kudos to our client who, as a global organisation, always communicates everything of importance in 20 key languages across their employee population.

So when a global roll-out of strategic recognition designed to reinforce and proactively manage the company’s strong culture got on the docket, of course they would communicate and train employees on the programme in those 20 languages.

The take-away lessons here for multi-national organisations considering strategic employee recognition:

Go global – Don’t relegate any of your employees to second class status. Launch your strategic recognition programme to all employees at once. Let them know this new approach for appreciation and praise is for all employees, regardless of location.
In language – Little makes people feel more heard and, yes, recognised than having key messages delivered in their own language. If you’re launching a global programme, launch it right. Build excitement for the programme and train in the local language.
In “culture” – Understand, respect and –critically – involve – employees from your various cultures. Perception of and preference for how recognition is delivered varies widely around the world (and we won’t even get into the details of how a congratulatory hand sign in the US is a terrible insult in other parts of the world). Respect these differences and involve participants early in the process

“Going global” with your recognition efforts is not sending certificates in English across the globe nor blindly shipping merchandise tens of thousands of miles only to sit in customs offices.

No, “going global” with recognition is deep, inherent cultural respect as well as appreciation for your employees everywhere. Do it right.

What additional recommendations do you have for global implementations of recognition (or any initiative directly involving and impacting all employees)?