Be
AMAZING
27
2013
Trends inRecognition:
Four Best Practices to
Positively Impact Employee
Success
The reality is many companies are doing this today.
They’re not just allowing peer-to-peer recognition and
opening it up to every employee, they’re actually
allocating budgets to allow any employee to recognize
and reward any other employee on a weekly basis, or at
their discretion. Crazy? Not at all.
The fact is, once you identify the key behaviors that
promote your company values and drive Employee
Success, the act of peer-to-peer recognition has many
valuable benefits. These include:
✓
Amplify the daily reinforcement of behaviors your
company believes in
✓
What gets recognized, gets repeated, so you’ll see
more of those behaviors
✓
Recognition drives employee’s intrinsic motivation,
increasing their engagement
✓
Quickly identify key performers – and high potentials
✓
Weed out non-performing employees
✓
Begin to identify potential leaders who embrace
recognition and do it naturally
Think of how powerful this is. Assuming you can trust the
employees you’ve hired (and if not, why did you hire
them?) you have leveraged the whole organization to
promote desired behaviors on an ongoing basis.
And if you don’t think people will participate, think again.
There are hundreds of successful companies we’ve
worked with that have implemented a program and have
seen tremendous usage and measurable success beyond
their wildest imagination.
Trend  1: Embrace Peer-­‐to-­‐Peer Recognition  in Every Direction.
Trend 2: Recognize Performance,  
Not Presence
Companies are making a shift. Even more, now on the heels
of the financial crisis, organizations are scrutinizing budgets
and ensuring there is a return on investment on all costs.
One of the costs under scrutiny is annual years of service
programs. It’s a $46 billion market in North America that
arguably isn’t providing any value to organizations. If you
think that’s a harsh statement, ask yourself if you’ve ever
worked any harder, or stayed with a job an extra day to
receive a long service award. It’s also doubtful that service
awards will be a draw for candidates in the recruiting
process.
So what’s the problem with years of service programs? All
they do is reward people for sitting in their seat and
breathing. In fact, every employee, whether they’re a top
performer, high potential, average or non-productive
employee, gets recognized and rewarded equally.