Top Employee Gift for this Holiday Season isn’t a Holiday Party.

by admin on December 21, 2012

in Corporate Culture

Giving gifts is all about recognizing people and celebrating events, like the wedding gift to close friends who are embarking on a new chapter in their lives. The intent of the gift is to give something of value, something that will contribute to the couple’s happiness. Unlike this wedding scenario however, giving gifts or recognition to employees shouldn’t be about making people happy. It should be about building a strong culture for your organization. Are your employee recognition programs strategically aligned to improve your culture and your business?

Survey after survey about corporate culture has employees requesting more recognition.  And yet, according to World at Work’s 2011 survey, over 86% of companies claim to have employee recognition programs in place.

Milestone Recognition Programs

By far, the most common type of employee recognition is length of service.  Over 96% of employers utilize this type of program.  However, if this is the only recognition that you are providing, you will get nothing but a fleeting smile on the faces of the zombies in your organization. And your ability to bestow service recognition is soon going to go the way of the dodo bird. The latest information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the average worker only stays at one company for 4.4 years! Have you put all your recognition efforts into this one basket?

Recognition or Reprimand?

Some companies add in performance recognition to their programs in addition to milestones.  Here we typically see dashboards measuring the success of a particular metric. After a period of time we can recognize and reward our employees and teams.  There are two ways to do this recognition.  It can be done positively by focussing on the success I.e. 95% customer satisfaction or negatively I.e. 12% customer returns.  However many dashboards are used to reprimand employees for not meeting targets more so than rewarding them for achieving a positive milestone.  Are you unconsciously providing negative recognition to your employees?

Culture and the Value of Employee Recognition

What’s the real objective of employee recognition if it’s not about making people happy? It’s about making them happy so they’ll be productive! It’s about employee retention and it’s about reducing the costs in your organization.

The best way to do this is to create a positive culture.  In order to do this you must understand your current culture and the kind of culture you need to be more successful. Once you are clear about the employee behaviours that will drive your business forward, focus your energies on rewarding these behaviors. Make behavioral reward a daily thing, not an annual milestone like a holiday party or birthday.

If your business needs innovation, hire and reward people on a regular basis for their creativity.  If your business needs customer service, find people who value service and keep them motivated by recognizing every day acts of service. In this manner you will also be using them as role models for others in your organization.

Connect employees to your business

Providing consistent and timely recognition for behaviours that drive better results is the way to connect your employees to your business. Currently, only 34% of organizations have recognition programs to motivate specific behaviours.  Just think of the competitive advantage you can create if you join this group.  Your employees will appreciate the recognition, you’ll be improving your culture and your bottom line results will be better for it.

How can you give the gift of an improved culture in 2013 to your employees?  

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Preventing Software Implementation Failures due to Poor Culture

by admin on September 25, 2012

in Corporate Culture

If you’re like me you’re sick to death from hearing about the great culture at Zappo’s and Google.  After all, if we had a gazillion dollars in cash flow we’d all build gyms and onsite daycares for our employees, wouldn’t we?  So, when it comes to culture do we all need to be a Zappo’s or a Google – no.  Can we be substantially and dramatically better than where we are today – absolutely!

Culture:  The New Competitive Advantage

Culture is the new frontier of competitive advantage.  With a great culture, your strategies will leap into action.  In addition, if you are looking to implement some significant changes in your organization, understanding your current culture will help you better define your change management programs.  I’ve spent 25 years in the telecom industry and I’ve seen, and experienced,  the impacts of good and bad culture, especially when you’re trying to implement change.

Company A: Good Culture

Let’s look at two companies who are implementing a new software program that will automate their dispatching function.  Company A has a culture that is defined by values like: client satisfaction, making a difference, integrity, teamwork, fun, quality, ethics, and financial stability.  They like to work together to create better experiences for their customers and each other.  When the opportunity for a new dispatch system comes along, they can’t wait to see how they can improve on their current situation.  Getting rid of all that manual work is exciting!  Once they see a demonstration of the product, they start brainstorming on how best to use it.  They come up with a list of policies and processes that need to be adjusted now that information will be flowing in a different manner.  They also take this opportunity to look at more efficient training methods.

When it comes time to launch, there is much anticipation and even though things don’t go perfect on day one, they have the big picture in mind.  Managers, dispatchers, field technicians and back office people huddle at the end of each day to compare notes and decide if the system needs to be tweaked or not.  After all, sometimes it’s just a matter of reinforcing and supporting the change with certain individuals.  After three months, they look back on their previously defined success metrics and celebrate!

Company B: Bad Culture

Company B has a culture that is defined by values like: blame, short-term focus, internal competition, buck passing, risk adverse, customer satisfaction, information hoarding and profit.  It’s a culture dominated by fear.  When their opportunity to implement the new dispatch software comes along there is significant resistance.  No one wants to be blamed if things don’t go right so they are reluctant to participate on the implementation team.  The demonstration session sets off a conversation about all the issues that could arise.  When it comes time to review policies and processes, the first order of business is to try and sort out who is accountable for each policy and process.  Everyone wants to know what’s in it for them to take on all this extra work.  Management has to do double duty on the change management front to move their teams from awareness to understanding to acceptance.  Finding champions of the project is tough.

Launch day comes, and sure enough not everything goes perfect on day one.  Immediately the chorus of “I told you so” starts up.  Every one steps away and keeps their head down, blaming the IT department, the dispatchers, or the technicians for “screwing things up”.  Efforts to make improvements are done in isolation, and the fix that helps one area turns out to negatively affect another area.  This just reinforces the blame cycle and leaves the implementers even more frustrated as they go back and undo all the work.  After six months, the management team looks back and declares the implementation a disaster.

Understanding the culture of your organization will help you understand how ready your teams are for change.    If you have limiting or negative values in your culture, they may be the very things that are holding back your strategies.  Companies with strong positive values are adaptive and this makes them more competitive and successful.  When was the last time you measured your current culture?  Does your culture set you up to embrace change or resist it?  What can you be doing today to improve your culture for change?

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Culture Eats Strategy For Lunch?

February 9, 2012

Culture Eats Strategy For Lunch? A recent Fast Company blog by Shawn Parr quoted famous management thought leader Peter Drucker in his headline: “Culture eats strategy for lunch”.  How can culture be the trump card in a hand that contains so many high cards like mission, vision, strategy and objectives?  Surely a well thought out [...]

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Did You Make the 2011 Best Companies to Work For List?

February 8, 2012

Did You Make the 2011 Best Company to Work For List? So I’m guessing that your answer to this headline is no? I’m sure you’d like to have your company on the list but it’s not. So what are we going to do about that? Sometimes it’s just too much pressure to read about the [...]

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