8 Reasons Employee Recognition should be in your FY18 budget

With the end of financial year fast approaching; budgets, planning and focus on preparing for another year dominate. With the quest for every business being, how they plan for a better year in FY18. We’d like to suggest an inclusion:

The only way you’ll have a better year is if your people are aligned, engaged and clear on what you expect of them.

So here are 8 reasons to include a recognition program in your FY18 budget:

Recognition is one of the biggest influencers of employee engagement. Studies show that recognition accounts for up to 41% of variation in engagement. And the benefits of engaged employees have been proven to influence everything from safety incidents, to absenteeism, customer satisfaction and profitability.

It will cut avoidable turnover saving you avoidable costs. For every great employee that leaves your business it costs you at least 150% of their salary to replace them. By the time you have recruited and got a new person up to speed without factoring in the unquantifiable knowledge loss, your business has gone two steps backwards. The average turnover rate is Australia is 16%. Work out yours to see what losing people costs you.

It will provide transparency across the business. Recognition brings the values of your business to life in front of your eyes. Showing you your greatest talent, allowing you to see progress through achievements and get a sense for what is happening in your business, when you no longer have the capacity to relate to every staff member one on one.

You’ll drive connection through Peer-2-Peer recognition. Sometimes the only people there to witness the great achievements of a team member is their peer. Providing them with the autonomy to recognise their peers fuels connectivity. 57 percent of HR professionals in companies that introduced peer-to-peer recognition programs reported higher levels of employee engagement, compared with 46 percent of those without such programs. (Globoforce).

Automate and systemise ad-hoc process into one single bill. Stop ad-hoc, inconsistent recognition happening across your business by standardising the process with Redii. One invoice each month. No chasing managers for receipts and building spreadsheets to track recognition.

Recognition can drive business goals. Unite your team around the single most important thing in your business right now. You can create awards that recognise more than just behaviours. Recognise the completion of a project or the smashing of a goal.

Recognition drives customer happiness. Research shows there is a direct link between the engagement of employees and the experience they deliver for their customers. The impact of employee engagement on customer satisfaction is undeniable: Organisations that have more than 50 percent employee engagement retain more than 80 percent of their customers. (Demand Metric)

Start the new year with a bang and get momentum early. Launching a recognition program is cause for celebration and a fantastic way to kick off the new year. Getting people into a new rhythm of recognising each other generates momentum at the beginning of the year.

So what should you spend?

Best performing recognition and reward programs spend at least $250 per employee per year. Less than it costs you to post a job ad. (Merely the first step in trying to hire a new employee).

Get started for free right now.

Set-up a recognition program and you’ll receive the first 30 days free -plus a handsfree set-up session. We will set up your program with awards, designed to meet your business goals.

Building a Business Case for Employee Recognition Part II

It’s inevitable and (perfectly normal!) for CEOs and CFOs to have differing viewpoints from HR when it comes to where and how money should be spent. We meet many frustrated HR leaders who understand that employee engagement is critical to the success of their organisation, but find it hard to get their board on the same page. Here’s the first of a series of articles to help you build your business case for recognition.

7 ways to secure support for your employee recognition program

Understand your CEO’s world
What’s keeping your CEO up at night? Are they trying to control costs, grow market share, improve customer service or attract the top quality employees to their team? What are their strengths and weaknesses outside of work? How will your recognition program help to engage their workforce and give them peace of mind? Even if we don’t admit it, the most important question that needs answering if we need to support or invest in something is ‘what’s in it for me?’. If you don’t know the answer, find out first.

Also consider how does your boss like to make decisions. Is she a detailed, analytical person who needs stats, proof, facts and pointers to background research or a visionary who needs the big picture in not many words, some visuals and with a clear articulation of the benefits? Present this in the way that your matches their thinking preferences, or better yet, take a whole brained approach to your presentation so you meet the needs of every decision maker on the panel.

Do your research
What are the current needs of your organisation? Arm yourself with hard statistics that paint a clear picture and make sure those facts speak to the concerns that you uncovered in step 1. What’s your current engagement score or net promoter score? What’s your attrition rate and what is that costing your company? Understand the needs of your organisation and use REDII’s resources to help you calculate what it would do to your bottom line if you increased productivity, decreased absenteeism, improved customer and employee satisfaction and reduced your turnover. Don’t expect your CFO to simply ‘imagine’ a better world. Do the calculations and show him what that better world would look like. If you need help in this space, REDII’s Pulse Survey helps paint a clear picture of how your organisation is tracking, and we can help you create a strong case for improvement.

Find what your competitors are doing
This is really part of step two, but we can’t stress it more importantly. Your organisation simply won’t survive if it is not keeping up with competitors in your industry. If the business across the road is thriving, what are they doing that you aren’t? Workplaces with a highly engaged workforce have reported to grow profits three times faster than their competitors, and over two thirds of best-in-class organisations have a formal recognition program in place. If you want to be leaders in your field, adopt the practices of the employers of choice, and start putting people first.

Stakeholder group

CEO, CFO, COO

What’s in it for them?

·   Accurate reporting on investment and payback metrics.

·   Increase in employee discretionary effort and productivity.

·   Efficiencies gained in leadership teams through structured SaaS-driven recognition and reward.

·   Decrease in costs associate with the attraction, development and retention of employees.

·   Increase in brand loyalty and customer satisfaction delivered through increased employee satisfaction.

What they need to do

Sign your business case and/or approve your budget.

Seek HRM initiatives that will position the business for growth.

Be the ‘public figures’ for recognition and reward and promote the initiative to employees continuously for the life of the program.

Stakeholder group

Human Resources

What’s in it for them?

·   Structured view of all recognition activity and ability to pinpoint areas of weakness in alignment to culture and objectives.

·   Ability to report on all facets of recognition activity including accurate spend and frequency figures.

·   Decrease in time administering, monitoring and measuring multiple ad hoc recognition programs and more time to focus on business strategic objectives.

·   Forms part of the EVP crucial to attracting, developing and retaining great people that are aligned to the organisation’s strategic objectives.

What they need to do

Develop and implement the product implementation plan, change management plan and ongoing communications plan.

Be Program Coordinator (or Program Administrator if using software).

Report to the Leadership Team and Executive Board on the critical data and progress against agreed metrics and ROI.

Provide ongoing strategic development of the recognition program.

Stakeholder group

Leadership team

What’s in it for them?

·   Improve team engagement, motivation and morale.

·   Efficiencies in team performance through decreasing undesirable attrition and its associated issues (e.g. time spent hiring, re-training, cultural health of the team)

What they need to do

Provide a view of employee contribution outside traditional performance-management through peer to peer or ‘crowd-sourced’ recognition.  This brings a different (more positive) dimension to performance management conversations.

Lead program implementation through visible advocacy and participation ensuring employee adoption and active participation.

Provide frequent recognition to employees to create cultural change and enhance morale.

Establish a consistent communications rhythm through both ad-hoc and structured meetings and celebration moments.

Stakeholder group

Employees

What’s in it for them?

·   Heightened awareness of the organisation’s values and the critical behaviours linked directly to these.

·   Alignment to the organisation’s operational objectives or strategic goals and a clear understanding of how values aligned or behavioural recognition contributes to reaching these.

·   Increase in job satisfaction/motivation ensues willingness to deliver discretionary effort.

What they need to do

Impact loyalty and advocacy of employer brand

A critical part of the total rewards package.

Participate in the employee-led design process.

Participate in some level of training to understand what core behaviours look like in action how to recognise these in a meaningful way.

Create a culture of recognition every day by actively participating in peer-to-peer recognition program and storytelling of recognition moments

Company values can make or break a business

Delving into values

Type ‘our values’ into Google and you get pages and pages of results of businesses telling you what their company values are. Spend some time analysing them and the results are disappointingly bland. Imagine for a second that you are a contestant on Family Feud; of a survey of 100 companies, what do you think the most common company values are?……you probably got them all right.

Having values your employees and customers value is one of the most powerful business tools, but too often company values seem to fall into one of three camps:

Genuine – these values are timeless, they are not aspirational. They define your culture and who you really are, both individually and collectively. “When your core values are clear, you’ll attract like-minded people to your organisation. Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business, by Gino Wickman

Bland – these are values that appear on walls, on folders, in boardrooms but are not lived because they are so common and overused they don’t do a good enough job at differentiating the company. Therefore, average attracts average.

Artificial – these are not really values at all. They are more like PR statements or a behaviour they want to see. Take Uber’s value of ‘always be hustlin’; is it a value? How many employees personally value day in day out hustling? How do customers feel about being hustled?

When values go wrong:

Values are at the core of any culture; carefully selected values define the ‘what’, the ‘who’ and and ‘how’ in business. Values determine the types of projects you prioritise for growth, the people you hire, and how you deliver your product or service to your customer.

‘Too often the concept of culture is lumped in with the “soft stuff” category of business. In reality, it’s just as important as the legal, technological, and financial aspects. Culture is the operating system that runs the business. If your company’s culture isn’t carefully nurtured and cultivated, it can quickly become your biggest liability and ruin even the grandest vision.’ Robert Glazer, Business.com

The impact of Uber’s ‘values’ and the sort of behaviours it licensed under these ‘values’ led to customers creating a social #deleteuber campaign. You can never underestimate how powerful your internal culture will impact your customers. Thinking the two are not linked will eventually trip you up.

And as ex-uber employees are finding out, ‘values’ travel with them. The list of places you have worked and for how long can form a picture of your personal values.

Quoted in an article from the Guardian. ‘Leslie Miley, a veteran software engineer who previously worked at Slack, said that he absolutely takes what he called Uber’s “asshole culture” into account in hiring decisions. Seeing Uber on a résumé does not stop him from interviewing a candidate, he said, but it does prompt him to ask “pointed questions” about how they would handle workplace issues.

“To be perfectly honest, I don’t want to work with someone who did well in that environment,” he said. “If you did well in that environment upholding those values, I probably don’t want to work with you.”

Is it enough to make a serious dent in your business growth? Yes. How much so? Time will tell.

So how do you make sure your values will ‘make’ your business and not break it?

Values come from the top. If the actions of the CEO and leadership team are not in line with the values of the business then you’re fighting an uphill battle.

Bring your values to life. What do they actually mean to you and your employees? The story and folklore around the values is as important as the words themselves.

Hire based on them. Ensure prospective employees are always asked a question about your values. Ask them which of them they identify with and to provide examples. Those that don’t take the time to read them automatically disqualify themselves.

Recognise when you see them. Allow employees to recognise each other against the values. Celebrate the behaviours you want to see and all you will get is more of them.

Fire based on them. Use them as the criteria against which you hold people to account. In many cases, breaching contracts, bad behaviour, and poor attitude stem from complete disregard for values.

And finally, sometimes it’s just great to read some values that inspire you……so here are our current favourites…..

The Salvation Army – Today over Yesterday, Together over Alone ,Truth over Fear, Grace over Judgement, Proactive over Reactive, People over Paperwork.

Criterion Conferences – We hunt opportunities, We believe in each other, We are agile, bold and courageous, We collaborate to produce great results, We are fun loving and being wonderfully weird, We are passionate about quality.

Kemp Strang Lawyers – Go the Extra Mile, Play as a Team, See it Through Other’s Eyes, Be real – Be Yourself, Work Hard – Go home.