365 Ways to Motivate and Reward Your Employees Every Day With Little or No Money by Dianna Podmoroff

Author:Dianna Podmoroff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: motivation, reward, employees, productivity, profits, morale, challenge, recognition, business
Publisher: Atlantic Publishing Group
Published: 2013-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

Setting Up Your Recognition Program

“Recognition is something a manager should be doing all the time--it’s a running dialogue with people.”

Ron Zemke, Senior Editor, Training magazine

Now that you are armed with lots of theory, in-depth understanding and practical solutions for employee recognition, it is time to build a recognition program that meets the needs of your organization. This process is best done with a three-stage approach:

1. Assess your current recognition efforts.

2. Identify and plan your recognition strategy.

3. Acknowledge that your recognition plan requires continuous evaluation.

Assess Your Current Recognition Efforts

When you are trying to assess your current recognition practices, you need to go directly to the source. This is not an exercise for you and or your management team, because you will almost certainly view your level of recognition and appreciation much differently than those on the receiving end. There are a number of reasons for the difference in perception—be assured the differences are there. Common problems related to ill-perceived recognition include the actual delivery of a recognition message, problems with what gets recognized in the workplace, the overall recognition culture, degree of communication, and fairness of the recognition. Any effort you make toward recognizing and outwardly appreciating your employees is to be commended, but you can’t give yourself a whole-hearted pat on the back until you know what your employees think and say about your efforts when they talk among themselves or with friends and family.

In order to obtain a complete picture of your recognition efforts, it is also a good idea to assess employee satisfaction with the various factors that coincide with recognition and motivation in the workplace. For instance, you can’t support a high-recognition culture if you don’t communicate well with your employees. A workplace that doesn’t encourage diverse expression of one’s opinion is not likely to support and use recognition or motivational practices. A high-stress-inducing workplace will discourage motivational efforts of which recognition is one of the most important. It is more than just direct recognition activities that count, it is entire atmosphere, practices and workplace culture that need to be examined before embarking on a recognition program designed to improve or enhance positive employee motivation.

The best way to gather this type of information is with a cross-reference survey whereby you and other managers complete a recognition practices inventory and then have your employees fill out the same survey. What this process will reveal are the areas in which you are already doing a good job with recognition and areas where you are falling short. Perhaps what you, your colleagues and senior management consider appropriate and highly effective are not at all well received by your employees. Or maybe you think you are doing a good job of communicating with your employees when in fact their perception is much different. You need to uncover these inconsistencies and then develop a plan to remedy them in order to build a strong recognition culture and a highly motivated workplace.

The following is a survey example that you can use or adapt

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