Dan and the Certificate: How to Effectively Map Rewards to Behavior
So you have a reward and recognition program. How can you be sure that the rewards you offer are effective in making your employees feel recognized?
Well, you can start by properly calibrating reward levels to the behavior you want to encourage. This is sort of a follow up to my last post, on e-thanks. I thought first I’d share this 30 second ad from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.
It’s funny because it’s true.
And all kidding aside, this is a perfect example of why best practice recognition programs include tiers with different award levels to mark different levels of contribution. Dan—fictional or not—is not very different from any of us when it comes to how we think about rewards.
My guess is Dan wasn’t expecting a specific reward for his perfect attendance, or he likely wouldn’t have stuck around so long. So that’s not what has him kicking over plants.
No, what’s burning Dan up is this: his company is going to the trouble to recognize him, but offered such a lame reward in return for his great work ethic that they’ve cheapened his contribution. The message they sent is his effort is worth… well… pretty much the paper it is printed on. Clearly, Dan would have preferred NO reward to the certificate he’s offered. The certificate, which the company intends to be appreciation, is actually a demotivator.
Here are a couple of best practice tips on aligning rewards and recognition with behavior, to help you can avoid scenes like Dan’s:
- Always offer multiple tiers of reward so that employees can adequately recognize different levels of effort. Six tiers of reward (not including no-value e-cards or cash) is the optimum number according to our Insight team, as too few award levels tend to make people gravitate to very low and very high awards, or not award at all.)
- Offer rewards at distinctively different award levels so nominators can more easily discern what award level to give.
- Try to avoid or minimize rewards that are seen as low or no value, like certificates and e-cards. If you use e-cards, make them the lowest tier appreciation, for lower level effort, and try to limit them to 10% or less of your overall reward volume.
- Cash awards should be limited to $1,500 and above. Smaller cash awards tend to get lost in a paycheck and spent on bills and other items that have no “stickiness”–that is, they are not spent on items or experiences that will extend the recognition moment.
- Clearly communicate to your employees which kinds of behavior corresponds to each tier of recognition–so they are recognizing at the right levels. (Hint: A certificate is not the right reward for 15 years of perfect attendance.)
- Peer-to-peer award does NOT equate to e-thanks with no value. Make sure employees are empowered to reward each other with awards that carry value, or their enthusiasm and inspiration for appreciation will fizzle.
Making the effort to calibrate reward to behavior will make your recognition program a lot more effective and your employees a lot happier.
Plus it’s a lot easier on the plants.
As content marketing manager for Globoforce, Darcy Jacobsen spends most of her days submerged in blogs, tweets, reports and other delicious information about the current state of employee recognition and engagement. Her goal is to find the good stuff and pass as much of it as possible on to you!
Darcy – My experience with multi-level/multi-tier recognition/reward systems has been that they don’t work and are not sustainable. Here’s why:
Most organizations today have ineffective and outdated performance review systems that lack credibility with both employees and managers. If you buy that premise, then attempting to overlay a reward methodology that requires differentiation of behaviors can be a disastrous proposition. And, the more you attempt to differentiate (i.e. increasing the number of tiers or levels) the more unlikely it is that you will achieve anything close to the desired results.
The other thing that you are doing is establishing a hierarchy of values; that one type of behavior is more important than another. Success is achieved through a variety of attributes, in varying degrees, the emphasis of which my change over a period of time. Trying to rank those attributes can be a very challenging, if not impossible, exercise.
Then comes the communications challenge, which, like the performance review dilemma mentioned above, most companies struggle with on a regular basis. So, not only are there significant challenges with differentiating a hierarchy of behaviors, but, even in the unlikely event that they can, trying to effectively communicate that differentiation in a way that people can feel good about is something very few could achieve.
As to the sustainability issue, most reward programs are administered on some type of cycle: monthly, quarterly, or annually. Even assuming that one can configure the type of program you are advocating, eventually the candidate pool is going to dwindle, and in the interests of continuity selection criteria may be compromised. When that happens whatever credibility the program had will rapidly deteriorate, and it becomes viewed as a political, rather than meaningful, exercise.
Effective supplemental reward programs are simple, easy to communicate and understand, and administered on an ad hoc basis so that recognition can occur on a real time basis.
Interesting take, John.
But I would argue that establishing a hierarchy of values is EXACTLY what you want to be doing if your aim is to use recognition to help communicate to your employees what behavior the organization most values, and what your “must-win battles” are (to borrow a phrase from the Hay Group). Certainly ranking each activity specifically is a bit much, but the tiered approach is simply a way to make sure you’re calibrating the reward fairly to the behavior. If you’re offering the same reward to a guy who helped hang posters in the cafeteria as you give to someone who puts their heart and soul into a six month product launch–I think you are facing down a pretty significant morale problem.
As for the issue of sustainability, I’m definitely not suggesting a quota-based or cyclical reward system–quite the contrary. The recognition system that works best doesn’t have to reach for a dwindling candidate pool– because a best practices system is, as you say, real time. It is based on employees being inspired to recognize based on behavior they witness that adheres to company values and goals. That’s really the only selection criteria that matters. =)