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Bob Nelson
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Published:
September 28, 2015

Recognizing & Engaging Employees For Dummies

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Overview

Improve engagement, productivity, and motivation with effective employee recognition

Recognizing and Engaging Employees for Dummies gives you the tools and information you need to improve morale, productivity, and personal achievement with a successful employee recognition program. Written by a world-leading authority in employee recognition, this book walks you step-by-step through the design and implementation process and describes the incentives that work, the behaviors to reward, and the mechanisms that must be in place for the program to be effective in the long term. You'll learn how to pinpoint the places where engagement and recognition could improve the bottom line, and how to structure the reward for optimal balance between motivational, financial, and organizational effectiveness. With clear explanations and a fun, friendly style, this book is your quick and easy guide to boosting productivity, profit, and customer satisfaction.

Most Americans

who leave their jobs cite lack of recognition as the driving factor. When your employees feel appreciated, they stick around, work harder, achieve more, and drive your business onward and upward. This book shows you how to bring that dynamic to your workplace, with step-by-step guidance and helpful advice.

  • Design successful recognition programs
  • Create powerful incentives for employees
  • Reduce turnover, improve engagement, and drive excellence
  • Foster a happier and more productive workplace

Happy employees are productive employees. They get results. They innovate. They are the force behind the advancement of industries. Effective employee recognition programs are self-sustaining motivational tools that keep the fire lit. If you're ready to spark the flame, Recognizing and Engaging Employees for Dummies is the ideal guide for designing, implementing, and maintaining the program your employees have been waiting for.

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About The Author

Bob Nelson (San Diego, CA) is founder and president of Nelson Motivation, Inc., a management training and consulting firm based in San Diego, California. As a practicing manager and a best-selling author, he is an internationally recognized expert in the areas of employee recognition, rewards, motivation, morale, retention, productivity, and management. He is author of the bestselling book 1001 Ways to Reward Employees (Workman) — which has sold over 1.5 million copies worldwide — and coauthor of the best-selling book Managing For Dummies, 2nd Edition, with Peter Economy (Wiley), as well as 18 other books on management and motivation.
Bob has been featured extensively in the media, including television appearances on CNN, CNBC, PBS, and MSNBC; radio appearances on NPR, USA Radio Network and the Business News Network; and print appearances in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and many more. He writes a weekly column for American City Business Journals and a monthly column for Corporate Meetings & Incentives, among others.
Dr. Nelson received his PhD in management from The Peter F. Drucker Graduate Management Center of Claremont Graduate University in suburban Los Angeles, and received his MBA in organizational behavior from The University of California at Berkeley. For more information on products and services offered by Nelson Motivation, Inc. — including speaking or consulting services — call 800-575-5521. Visit Bob at his Web site: www.nelsonmotivation.com.

Peter Economy (La Jolla, CA) is a freelance business writer and publishing consultant who is associate editor of the Apex award-winning magazine Leader to Leader, and coauthor of the best-selling book Managing For Dummies, 2nd Edition, with Bob Nelson (Wiley), Giving Back with Bert Berkley (Wiley), The SAIC Solution with J. Robert Beyster (Wiley), as well as the author or coauthor of more than 30 other books on a wide variety of business and other topics. Visit Peter at his Web site: www.petereconomy.com and be sure to check out his Free Book Project at: www.booksforfree.org.

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recognizing & engaging employees for dummies

CHEAT SHEET

Recognition is the primary driver of all employee behaviors. Therefore, you should make sure it’s the primary driver of employee engagement in your workplace. This Cheat Sheet includes articles that show you how to make this connection. Here you can find suggestions, advice, and tactics you can use to recognize engagement, to get the results you want, and to tie your recognition efforts to your company’s core values.
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Managers have lots of questions when it comes to rewarding and recognizing employees. Sometimes, these questions even stop people from trying to do something inspiring for their employees, but you shouldn’t let these questions stop you because each question has plenty of answers. Here are ten of the questions (and answers) people most frequently ask when trying to implement and continue their recognition efforts: If I recognize one person, doesn’t that mean I’m not recognizing everyone else?
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The great thing about employee recognition and engagement is that it doesn't have to cost you anything. A national survey of thousands of employees was conducted to find out what motivates them at no cost to their employers. Here are the motivators employees said were most important to them, in order of popularity.
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Recognition has undergone significant changes in just a few generations. By far the most significant current trend in employee recognition is the impact technology is making on the topic. Following are ten other major ways recognition has evolved in today's work environments. It's decentralized and informal In the past, corporate headquarters or the human resources department was responsible for designing and implementing incentive programs.
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One of the key principles of employee recognition is that you get what you reward. This idea seems simple enough, but often, managers and executives inadvertently reward the wrong behaviors. The following table shows you how to recognize to get the desired results; it also warns you about common “misrecognitions.
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The link between employee recognition and employee engagement occurs on several levels: first, through reinforcing specific desired behaviors; second, through recognizing specific desired results; and third, through recognizing specific desired end states — that is, the environmental culture and core values you’d most like your company to be known for.
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Managers may say people are their most important asset, but unless they show that belief in their daily interactions, employees won’t feel important. The employee-manager relationship is key to maintaining a happy and productive work environment and a harmonious, engaged team. To sustain a culture of recognition and engagement in the workplace, managers must keep up with current trends and shifts in the manager’s role: The changing role of today’s manager: Managers have fewer ways to influence employees and shape their behavior (being coercive or authoritarian is no longer an option).
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One key element of successful workplace recognition is tying your recognition to your company’s core values, mission, and vision. To create the workplace culture you want to obtain, you should systematically recognize the specific values that are core to your organization. You can see examples of how to recognize and reinforce some of the most common organizational values in the table that follows.
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Successfully recognizing your employees (and even colleagues or bosses) in the workplace can be challenging. Following are some concepts you should implement, along with a few real-world examples of companies that, let’s just say, struggled to do it right! Do make recognition timely. Don’t wait to recognize; make sure you give praise, rewards, and kudos immediately after the accomplishment occurs, or as soon as possible after.
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The following discussion outlines some recent changes in what employees expect in the workplace and explains how managers can more effectively help to motivate today’s employees. Every employee wants to be magnificent. Every employee starts a new job excited about doing his or her best. Yet for many employees, the initial excitement of the job quickly wears off, and their motivation dissipates.
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Want to drive high-potential employees crazy? Micromanage them. Micromanagement is a severe management style that undermines employee initiative, crushing the spirit of employees wanting to do a good job. If you constantly find yourself in situations where you are giving your employees details on how to do obvious tasks and then checking on them constantly to see whether the tasks are done properly, you might be a micromanager.
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Managers recognize the wrong people and recognize people for the wrong things; the chosen awards can turn out to be meaningless or even insulting to those who receive them; and recognition tools and programs can be ignored altogether. Here are some of the most common demotivators that can be inadvertently built into an employee recognition program: Unclear expectations: Sometimes, due to poor design, planning, or communication, employees simply don't know what to expect from the recognition program.
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To influence employee attrition and reduce employee turnover, managers must measure employee job satisfaction and engagement on an ongoing basis. Enter the stay interview — a new strategy that companies are turning to in force. These interviews give employers a chance to have conversations with high-potential employees about what they like and don't like about their current jobs and what would keep them in those jobs longer.
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After you've assigned high-potential employees real, meaningful work, the next strategy is to find them a mentor — a senior executive in the organization who can advise, coach, and counsel the HIPO. Typically, a mentor is in a different chain of command so that the relationship can have some objectivity as well as give the participants the ability to candidly discuss challenges in the HIPO's reporting relationships.
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Organizations invest millions of dollars to identify and develop high-potential employees (also known as "high potentials," or "HIPOs") within their workforce. There are three primary challenges with high-potential employees in any organization today: high turnover, low engagement, and "troubling" performance.
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Here are a few key terms related to employees and the workplace that you'll encounter in any discussion of employee engagement and recognition. If you are uncertain of their definitions, read on: Engagement: The simplest definition is tapping into employee discretionary efforts, that is, an employee's willingness to go above and beyond in doing his or her job.
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The best way to think about planning, executing, and improving engagement is a concept drawn from the work of W. Edwards Deming and the total quality management movement. It's called the Shewhart Cycle, adopted it here as the PDRI cycle, which stands for "Plan, Do, Review, and Improve." Read on to find out how it applies to improving your engagement culture.
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Today, the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, Generation Xers, and the Millennials work side-by-side, which means that companies need to create incentive programs that motivate a workforce that, at times, spans some 50 plus years — a task that is, needless to say, challenging. Companies that meet this challenge head-on gain a distinct competitive edge in retaining as well as attracting the talent they need to be successful.
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There are many factors that impact the design, rollout, and effectiveness of employee engagement efforts. Here is an overview of six drivers of employee engagement: Employee fit: Alignment of employee's goals with organizational goals The number one factor impacting employee performance and engagement is how well an individual employee's performance (and personal) goals align with the overall organizational goals, mission, and core values.
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The first strategy is to get to know your high-potential employees personally and discover their aspirations for the future. There's a big difference between what employers think motivates HIPOs and what actually does. HIPOs tend to value chances to directly influence and direct their own careers, challenging assignments (or even the choice of assignments), and real risks (and rewards!
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A key part of any retention strategy — especially for high-potential employees (HIPOs) — should include adopting flexible work arrangements. Progressive companies are realizing that restructuring full-time work to include alternative work options, such as flextime, a compressed work week, and telecommuting, can be beneficial to both the employee and the employer.
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The influx of the Millennials into the workforce is changing many traditional rules that earlier generations of workers have grown accustomed to. This generation of workers has entered the workforce with different attitudes, expectations, and ambitions than those held by their predecessors. They are considered the best-educated generation ever and the first truly globalized generation of workers.
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To successfully grow employee engagement in your organization, you must make recognition a part of the work environment. Although that's a new concept for some companies, many organizations are getting on board. Case in point: 95 percent of organizations surveyed in the Aberdeen Group's Employee Engagement research reported that they feel employee recognition will improve overall employee engagement.
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Technology plays a pivotal role in helping organizations consistently recognize employee contributions. Currently, most organizations are leveraging existing talent management technologies, such as performance management, learning management, and employee self-service providers, to improve engagement. As the employee recognition market matures, organizations need to consider solutions that specialize in linking recognition to organizational performance by offering capabilities like e-cards and online recognition tracking.
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Organizations struggle to help make employees more engaged when what they really need to first do is eliminate elements that demotivate their employees. Here's a list of common organizational demotivators that you should strive to get rid of in your company: Organizational politics: An environment in which competition for power, influence, resources, and promotions is based on subjective and hidden criteria.
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Getting top managers to practice recognition sets the tone for all managers and sends the message, "If I can make time to do this, no one else in the organization has an excuse not to." Following are some effective strategies for getting executives personally involved in using recognition. Assessing what managers are able to do You have to determine what top managers are able and willing to do and then help structure a specific plan that keeps them to their commitment.
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High-potential employees, those individuals who are thought to have the ability and capacity to be future leaders in an organization, are critical to the viability of any organization. The first step in better managing these employees is identifying exactly who they are. Some companies have a formal process for identifying this group of future leaders that includes systematically pinpointing such individuals, discussing their potential among senior staff members, and closely monitoring their progress over time.
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If you're effective at getting employees to take more initiative, you have to provide them greater autonomy, to help them succeed. All employees need to have a say in how they do their work to make it more meaningful. After you enlist your employees to make suggestions and improvements, you need to encourage them to run with their ideas, take responsibility, and champion those ideas to completion.
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The majority of employees cite increased flexibility in employee work schedules as a top motivator. Furthermore, depending upon the type of work, a flexible schedule can also increase the efficiency of getting the work done. Technology has opened up new possibilities for how employees work. Gone are the days when communication was limited to fax and phone lines or face-to-face meetings.
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When you arm employees with more frequent and relevant information, they're more likely to act on that information in ways that can best help the organization. Honest and open communication shows that you as a manager have both trust and respect for your employees. You can build on that foundation by explicitly requesting and encouraging your employees to get involved in helping the company.
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In many ways, one-on-one thanks is the most important form of recognition in the day-to-day working lives of employees because individual recognition is very personal and, thus, more meaningful to employees. You can give individual recognition to anyone at any time — you don't need permission, have to submit a nomination to a committee, or get approval from top management.
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When employees are encouraged to have more autonomy, independence, and flexibility in their jobs, they need your support; however, in one survey conducted by Gallup, 66 percent of respondents said their managers had asked them to get involved in decision-making, but only 14 percent felt they'd been empowered to make those decisions.
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A great strategy for retaining high-potential employees is to invest in a variety of ongoing learning and development activities for your HIPOs. The best organizations realize that providing employees with opportunities to learn pays dividends for both the firm and the employees. The firm gains workers who are better skilled, more versatile in their work assignments, and motivated because they are challenged and encouraged to grow.
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Job-shadowing (having one person follow another around in his or her job) offers employees experiential, hands-on learning opportunities, and Millennials have a special affinity for it. Shadowing affords a current or prospective employee the chance to be immersed in the actual job environment, making it possible to see an experienced worker apply the skills and traits needed to accomplish the work.
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Although development opportunities are traditional motivators to most employees, during crunch times, such opportunities take on a new sense of urgency. When a needed position is frozen or another position is terminated, how can the work that is left best get completed? When a new project emerges, who in the group is ready to help out?
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Because of their scope and complexity, organizational recognition efforts have the greatest likelihood to go awry. Following are common problems that arise in organizational recognition efforts. Rushing to recognition Although delaying recognition of individuals can cause problems, too little planning when executing organizational-level recognition is also a no-no.
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All the attributes just discussed influence Millennial job expectations. According to Pew research, half of Millennials would rather have no job than a job they don't like. So what makes for a job they do like? In a survey of 150,000 recent graduating students from 1,000 universities, research firm Experience, Inc.
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One of the most defining characteristics of the Millennial generation is its significant need for constant feedback and praise at work. This need can be frustrating for other generations to understand, as in, "I just told you last week that you were doing a good job. Do I really have to tell you again?" It's easy to dismiss this need as being a symptom of a generation spoiled by parents who showered them with constant praise and protected them from the harsher realities of life, or to believe that Millennials have frail egos and constantly need to be puffed up.
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In studies of Millennials, one motivator that consistently ranked highest was time with one’s manager. According to Pew research, Millennials are five times more likely to quit if they have poor relationships with their managers. Managers need to make special efforts both to be available and to actually connect with younger employees on a more frequent basis at work.
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When they have done good work or an outstanding job, Millennials want rewards that are meaningful and exciting to them. Obviously, these rewards include financial incentives, although 88 percent of Millennials don't feel money is their main motivator, and 78 percent will work for less if they feel challenged. Millennials who do express a desire to be paid more, however, may have less-than-realistic expectations as to what accomplishments are needed to earn more money, and that's where you can help them out.
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Millennials expect constant learning and personal development and growth, and they expect their managers to serve as coaches and mentors (75 percent of Millennials want mentors). Therefore, Millennials' managers need to take the time to help coach their Millennial employees and, in the process, show them how they can make a positive, meaningful impact at work.
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Millennials are very social and perhaps more peer-group-oriented than previous generations. Most of their upbringing and educational and social experiences has revolved around groups, be it playing interactive video games, participating in group sports, or connecting on Facebook with their friends. Use these generational preferences to your advantage by allowing Millennials to work together on projects and assignments, hosting team-building activities and celebrations — even organizing nonwork social situations such as outings, team sports, or charity events.
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Millennials want and expect to be constantly excited about how they are spending their time at work, and they want to do so on their terms. Sixty-nine percent want more freedom at work, 89 percent want to choose where and when they work; and three out of five expect to be able to work remotely. They are consummate multitaskers, able to do a variety of tasks in fast succession, often utilizing the power of technology.
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Known by a variety of names (Gen Y, the Nintendo Generation, the Microwave Generation, Generation Next, the Net Generation, Generation Why, the Echo Boomers, and the Trophy Generation), Millennials are well-educated, have high aspirations for themselves and their careers, and have a lofty sense that who they are and what they do matters.
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After you get your CEO or upper management to use recognition, make sure you notice and thank them for their efforts. Top managers are no different from other employees in their need to be recognized. If you provide positive consequences for top management's involvement in recognition activities, you'll increase the chances of greater future involvement.
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Recognition is the primary driver of all employee behaviors. Therefore, you should make sure it’s the primary driver of employee engagement in your workplace. This Cheat Sheet includes articles that show you how to make this connection. Here you can find suggestions, advice, and tactics you can use to recognize engagement, to get the results you want, and to tie your recognition efforts to your company’s core values.
Read More
Read More
At any level of recognition within an organization, but especially at the organizational level, it's critical to identify exactly what you're rewarding. If your organization isn't getting the results it wants or the behaviors needed to achieve them, perhaps you're just confused about what you want. It's amazing how many times organizations do what management expert Steven Kerr calls "the folly of rewarding A while hoping for B.
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After you have an overall learning and development plan in place, the next strategy to help retain high-potential employees is to reward and recognize high performance as it occurs. To start, let your high-potential employees know they are special by telling them your plans for them! Sixty percent of employers don't do this, and their HIPOs have no idea there is a larger plan for their development and future with the organization — a real shame because research indicates 33 percent of HIPOs who are not told of their status and the company's plans their futures will seek jobs at other firms.
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All the individual recognition mistakes can also apply to teams, yet recognizing teams provides some additional challenges as well. What makes team recognition especially difficult (and more prone to misfires) is that determining who on any given team is truly performing and who is slacking off can be difficult.
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Constructive use of technology can go a long way toward creating more positive working relationships and a more supportive work environment that better drives employee performance, productivity, and morale. Using technology for rewards and recognition today offers numerous benefits. Facilitating integration with business operations Recognition is becoming an increasingly more important aspect of business productivity, and its scope and application is rapidly evolving to include increased customization, personalization, and accessibility.
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One of the definitions of motivation is "why you do what you do." There are numerous ironies about motivation that make the topic difficult to understand. By examining these ironies, you can better understand the topic of motivation. Following, then, are the top ten ironies of motivation, in order of importance and prevalence.
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Some say that employee engagement is simply the use of discretionary effort by employees. Others say it's all about employee connection or productivity or retention. Still others say that it's simply a score on a survey. Employee engagement is the alignment of individual and organizational goals and values to better drive business results.
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The percentage of engaged employees in the workforce has remained roughly constant at about 30 percent for at least the last 20 years, even though an increasing amount of time, energy, focus, and financial investment has been exerted annually to expand that percentage. Why is this? Assuming that organizations sincerely do care about their employees and not just about business success and profits, four reasons come to mind: 1) measured engagement variables are too intangible and subjective, 2) the focus of corrective actions are misplaced, 3) one size does not fit all, and 4) the management of change is too complex.
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