Effective Practices: Rewards and Recognition
The growing stakeholder approach to management focused on aligning the interests of customers, employees, supply chain and distribution partners calls for rewards and recognition strategies and tactics to help break down siloes. This article highlighting rewards and recognition is based on an excerpt from a chapter in Enterprise Engagement: The Roadmap, the Enterprise Engagement Alliance’s textbook on the implementation of stakeholder management.Click here for links to RRN Preferred Solution Providers.
Managers responsible for attracting, retaining and motivating employees must identify the right combination of compensation, benefits, training, rewards and recognition to optimize the organization’s efforts. The mix of such tools impacts employee behavior, beliefs and happiness, and so determines their output. Much like chefs who need to use the right ingredients to bring their well-crafted recipes to life, managers must understand the crucial importance of each “ingredient.” Too much or too little of any one element can be detrimental to the company’s attraction, retention and engagement objectives.
Skeptics of rewards and recognition programs, such as quality management guru W. Edwards Deming, Professor Alfie Kohn, and others, correctly criticize improperly designed programs that create competition or focus on outcomes over process. No one denies that poorly designed incentive programs can result in unintended consequences, the impacts of which can be severe.
Nevertheless, dozens of researchers have demonstrated that, when properly designed, rewards and recognition work. Programs that reward collaboration and success as part of an overall transparent process that addresses all the key levers of engagement— a sense of mission and purpose, capability, autonomy, inclusion — and foster positive emotions and cultural attachment are unlike most any other organizational tactic. In other words, success depends on a deep understanding of how to use rewards as a medium to affect people positively in alignment with communication, learning, community and more.
The inevitable question, therefore, relates to the “how” of the matter. How do managers determine the right mix of ingredients to design motivational programs custom for their respective businesses?
Click here to the full Enterprise Engagement: The Roadmap chapter on effective rewards and recognition practices.
How RRN and Brand Media Coalition: Your Partner in Success in Incentives, Rewards, and Recognition
Published by the Enterprise Engagement Alliance at TheEEA.org
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