Recognition schemes that work...

Staff recognition schemes are fraught with perils and some of those perils and pitfalls will be discussed in my next post. However, a staff recognition scheme can work in an environment where there is genuine trust and caring in the organisation and where staff are in control of the process, so that it doesn't become Big Brother manager patting the good little workers on the head.

But here is an example of a scheme that did work and as you read it perhaps you can guess why.

This scheme was implemented when I was working at a local University a few years back. At the time, I was employed at probably the second lowest pay level of administrative staff, a job which I basically took to support myself while I was working on my PhD research.

The University Registrar decided to implement a recognition scheme and asked for volunteers from our Division to be on the selection committee. I was one of the volunteers along with a half dozen other people from all levels of the division (but no managers) and I volunteered to chair the committee and this was accepted even though I was pretty low on the totem pole and ad only been working at the University for a few months. We were given a fairly small working budget (about $1000 as I recall) and then we asked all of the staff in our division to nominate individuals and teams who had displayed excellence in a number of categories. The decision of the Committee was final (i.e. it didn't require management signoff)

As a Committee, we decided that after reading all of the nominations and their supporting statements, we could have argued forever about who should be ranked where, so we decided that each person on the Committee would get 10 points for each category which they could distribute to nominees however they wanted - for example, they could give 10 points to one nominee or 6 points to one, three to another and one point to a third. The idea of this system was that each person on the Committee could show the strength of their preference but no person on the Committee would have any more influence than anyone else.

We also decided that with the individual awards, we would award a small trophy, a small monetary payment plus a further small monetary payment to their team to pay for a morning tea to celebrate the award. The point of this was to indicate that no individual can achieve much without the support of the people around them.

Finally, on the day of the awards, we organised it so that it was like the Academy Awards, so that we announced the nominees and then opened an envelope and announced "And the winner is...". This was done in conjunction with a barbecue.

Staff we amused, those who won were pleased, and we sent a clear message about teamwork. And because there was no management interference, the awards had credibility with the workers.

Formal recognition is good, but in managing staff my preference is to tell staff that they are doing a good job when they are doing it, not once a year. And even better is to tell a third party about the good job they have done and for it to get back to them. Recognition shouldn't be about reward but about appreciation, something that is sometimes overlooked by the sticks-and-carrots school of management - this is one reason by an awards should be small - they are a token of appreciation, not compensation for doing a good job.