Why employee recognition schemes fail - Part 3: The selection process

In Simpsons episode Brother Can You Spare Two Dimes Mr.Burns awards Homer  the "First Annual Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence" and a US$2,000 prize in exchange for a legal waiver against any claim for his radiation induced sterility.

In most Employee Recognition Schemes there is a complete lack of transparency and no-one knows whether the selection of the winners is a matter of legitimately recognising excellence or whether it is more a matter of quid pro quo. (It isn't just Employee Recognition Schemes by the way: the same doubts concern honors lists and knighthoods in Commonwealth countries and comparable awards in other countries.)

This lack of transparency is even more problematic in organisations where there is not a lot of trust to begin with. And it is further multiplied when there is management involvement or interference in the selection process (as described in a previous post.) And the fact that guidelines as to how the winners will be chosen are not made publicly available just raises more suspicions.

Then there are issues with things such as suspected quotas ("Last year we gave it to someone from that Division so we can't give it to someone from that Division this year") or the fact a person may win who everyone knows (apart apparently from the selection committee) causes more problems to the organization than they solve.

And the perception that the selection process is unfair and biased simply leads to disgruntlement and disengagement from the process.

The take home message from this is that where there is no trust to begin with a recognition scheme that is not open and transparent will simply serve to increase distrust and cynicism.

Why employee recognition schemes fail - Part 2: The nomination process

One of the reasons that Recognition Schemes fail is that there are many biases built in to the nominations process, even if the people doing the nominating are employees themselves.
Some of these biases include:

• quiet achievers (people who come to work, do their job and do it well without any fuss) are unlikely to be nominated simply because they don't even make it onto the radar.
• self-promoters - There are staff who actively self-promote, who draw attention to every good thing they do, while minimizing or draw attention away from the things they do less well or fail to do at all. This makes such staff more salient than other staff who may be bending all of their efforts to just doing a good job rather than to big noting themselves. Self-promoters may be more likely to be nominated because everyone is aware of what they've done, even though they may have done no more than anyone else. (On the other hand, blatant self-promotion may also result in a lower likelihood of nomination because no-one likes them.).
• friends nominating friends (self-explanatory)
• mutual nominations or circular nominations (with staff nominating each other)
• underperformers who have done one outstanding thing - People may perform well in a high visibility task, but have otherwise poor performance. In fact their neglect of their normal work may have contributed to their more public success. To reward them for this would send a poor message: that the day-to-day work is unimportant, that only high profile tasks matter.
• people working on high profile projects - Staff are sometimes recognized for doing a task or project that they were selected to perform, so it was the job they were being paid to do. There is no way of knowing how well any other person might have performed in the role had they been given the opportunity or whether the person’s performance is outstanding relative to what could have been achieved. So there is an opportunity bias in recognising anyone for project type work.
• workload bias - The people doing the nominating are the ones who have enough time on their hand to do such a nomination. So in general a smaller proportion of nominations would be expected from the busiest, highest volume work areas than from low volume work areas. To a degree, the proportion of nominations from an area could be more indicative of over-resourcing for that area than great performance and it may be that what that work area considers great performance would be considered mediocre in a higher volume area.
• recency bias - nominations may be made on the basis of things that have recently happened rather than on things that have happened throughout the period covered by the awards.
• cynicism - work areas that are cynical about the whole thing may submit less nominations

Any or more likely all of these things are likely to affect the quality of nominations being received by any selection committee and tend to undermine the credibility of the whole process. Managers sometimes assume that staff aren't aware of such biases but in general staff are better aware of them than the managers and as a result recognition awards tend to become a fiasco.

However, at least if the employees do the nominating rather than the managers, there is at least a perception that there is some equity in the process and an absence of favoritism.

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!