Why employee recognition schemes fail - Part 1: the management motivation

In Simpsons episode Deep Space Homer Homer is the only employee who has never won the "Worker of the Week" Award; he is sure he will win but Mr.Burns gives the award to an 'inanimate carbon rod'.

What lesson does this hold for us?

Frequency and easy availability devalues awards

Well to begin with what value does an award have if everyone wins it at some time or another. Almost by definition recognition is about recognising performance which is superior or exceptional in some way. The frequency of recognition undermines any value in recognising at all. People tend to value what is rare and what is earned. They don't tend to value things that they know they will get sooner or later without exerting any effort.

A friend of mine told me about a practice in his organisation where the minutes of meetings of the top management always contain a section in which there are about 20 examples like the following:

X thanked Y for their excellent work in doing Z

i.e. where dozens of people are thanked for relatively trivial contributions. Where everyone is recognised, effectively no-one is genuinely recognised. And when staff read these minutes they roll their eyes and think to themselves how self-congratulary they are.

Everybody has won and all must have prizes
~ the Dodo in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Cynical manipulation

And this raises the question of why management wants to recognise employees. What is its intent? What is it intended to achieve?

It isn't intended to make staff feel good. It might make the 'winners' feel good, but more likely than not the 'losers' feel bad or are indifferent to the whole process.

It may be intended to encourage other staff to aspire to similar levels of performance. However people also tend to devalue what they know they will never get regardless of how much effort they put forth.

The winners of awards may have had more resources to help them than other staff (resource bias). Or they might have been tapped on the shoulder to do a project that other people not chosen might have done as well as or better than that person (opportunity bias). Or they may be working in a job with a higher profile than other workers (profile bias). Or they may just be management lackeys (favoritism). None of these things provide anything that may be achievably aspired to.

And on occasion the motivation has nothing to do with the staff at all.

Another friend of mine told be a story about a manager who saw that in the strategic plan that the division of which their unit was a part was required to put in place a staff recognition scheme. So purely to be able to tick off that it had been done and more importantly that they had done it and other managers in their division hadn't, they went ahead to set up such a scheme. It had nothing to do with staff and everything to do with playing politics.

When staff become aware of such things, you can't really blame them for being cynical.

The takeaway from this is that an employee recognition scheme needs to have the right motivation.

And what is the right motivation?

It beats me. I have yet to see anyone justify any value in such a scheme, even 'successful' ones (successful in the sense that they had no adverse effects) don't seem to have any clear motivation.

If you think of something, let me know!