Building a Business Case for Employee Recognition

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.

Show them the money
Contrary to popular belief, a recognition program is not necessarily going to cost your organisation more money. If anything, it will make your existing budget work harder and smarter for you (and get your employees doing the same thing)! Research by McKinsey & Co shows that a $1000 bonus or pay increase only shifts employee engagement by 1% but the same amount of money invested in ‘on the spot’ awards throughout the year drove a 10% increase in engagement.

The secret here is the frequency and immediacy of the recognition and reward. Take a look at the table below that shows a typical recognition program. A budget of $32,800 pays for for monthly, quarterly, and annual awards and a dinner for the leadership team, award winners and their partners – but only enables 68 instances of recognition. On the other hand, a program that encourages recognition and reward at any time by any one in the company costs the same amount of money but allows for over 1662 instances of recognition. That’s over a 2444% growth in opportunities throughout the year to engage, appreciate and bump of the morale of your employees, without spending a cent over what you have in the past.

Develop a clear strategy and plan of attack
After showing the board what your business could achieve, show them exactly how you plan to go about it. REDII’s ‘discover, design and deliver’ approach to launching a recognition program allows your to determine when each phase of the program will take place and how to leverage the knowledge and energy of your employees to maximise the impact across the business.

Manage their expectations
It’s important to be realistic about when your business is going to see results. Like any investment, improvement in the areas you identified in steps one and two isn’t going to happen overnight. While an instance of recognition is definitely going to improve someone’s day, the long-term effects on culture and attrition are best measured 9-12 months after launch. It’s better to be upfront about this than to set false expectations. Remember this is a marathon, not a sprint, It’s important that your CEO understands and buys into why investing in your employees actually protects you in the future for if times get tough. If your business wants to stick around for a long time, then it’s ok to commit to a long-term plan.

Ensure your leaders understand their importance
Programs will fall flat if they don’t have the support of the C-suite and management; the people who allocate resources, approve policies and are accountable for their own involvement and the participation of their teams. They will commit themselves to things they have a stake in, so be sure to outline what you need from them and when, and to keep them abreast of progress and the results you are seeing over time. Getting their buy-in at the beginning might be difficult, but keeping them in the loop and emphasising the role they play throughout the journey is critical.

Need some one-on-one advice for building your business case?
Talk to our recognition experts.

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How to keep top performers

4 powerful employee retention strategies on how keep top performers

One of your top performers comes to you and says they’re being headhunted for another job.

They weren’t looking. They were contacted via LinkedIn. They want to stay, really they do, but this other company is offering amazing things.

What can you do?

Plenty, it turns out. Unfortunately, most of it starts long before discussions like this. Find out how to retain and engage your top talent before it’s too late:

Strategy 1. Identify your top performers – and your top flight risks
While it’s true that no-one is irreplaceable, there are always particular employees you simply can’t afford to lose. It’s not just the cost of recruitment, although as you know, it costs 50 to 150 percent of an employee’s yearly salary to replace them.

It’s also about their unique talents along with their in-depth knowledge and understanding of the business.

Do you know who your top performers are? They’re not always the most seen, or the loudest at social events. Often they can be quiet achievers who don’t seek glory.

You can look to your annual reviews, although these can be flawed (see “Is it game-over for the yearly performance management process?”)

This is where an employee recognition tool such as Redii is invaluable. Redii allows you to see who receives the most praise from coworkers and managers. It helps you find those team members that others couldn’t do without.

Create a system for ongoing tracking of this top talent, and make a list of your top performers and biggest flight risks.

Strategy 2. Connect with your top performers
Another powerful employee retention strategy is to create a plan for staying connected with your top talent.

You want to create an open, trusting, ongoing dialogue with them. Firstly, you want them to tell you when they’re unhappy. But secondly, they often have unique insights into problems and opportunities in the business that more senior leaders can’t see.

Meet with them informally. Perhaps a monthly coffee, or a walking meeting. Give them positive feedback and acknowledgement, and ask them to give you open feedback too.

Find out what motivates them. What would help them feel recognised and appreciated?

Strategy 3. Engage your top talent
It might seem that engagement strategies for top performers would be easier than trying to engage a wider employee group.

However, while top talent is highly motivated, they may not be engaged in your company’s goals. Some are more focused on progressing their career, and this current job is simply one stepping stone closer to where they want to be.

In the informal discussions outlines above in Strategy 2, find out: What are they looking for in a career? What achievements or projects would help them achieve their personal or professional goals? Look for ways to match these with business needs.

Is there an upcoming project that offers an opportunity for leadership development? Are there cross-divisional projects where this person could be involved and add some fresh ideas? Perhaps they could help set up a new program, such as a community volunteering program, or health and wellness initiative. Identify innovative ways to offer new development opportunities to your top performers.

A note of warning: while these development opportunities are intended as positive gestures, they can sometimes be seen as added pressure; as yet more work. Make sure you continue to provide support and acknowledgement, and keep communication open so they can let you know if they’re feeling overwhelmed or under-appreciated.

Strategy 4. Recognise and acknowledge top talent
One of the biggest factors in employee retention and engagement is recognition. Employees need to feel seen and appreciated. This is particularly strong in top performers: their career is important to them, and they’re often putting in discretionary effort to achieve their goals.

Develop a recognition strategy that includes instant “micro” acknowledgement along with more formal and public praise. An employee recognition platform such as Redii makes this easy. Employees can quickly and easily provide praise for a team member on-the-fly, and employees can earn points and rewards every day.

You can reinforce this retention and engagement strategy with real life recognition events. Include certificates or other gift-giving at monthly meetings. Create annual awards ceremonies where the CEO gives formal awards to employees who reach a certain number of points. These events can help create a vibrant buzz and sense of achievement in your organisation.

People first companies changing the world

I recently listened to the Future of Work Podcast by Jacob Morgan. This episode ‘How Companies Can Change the World (Not Just Non-Profits)’ interviewed Bruce Poon Tip the founder of G Adventures.

He tells the story of how he completely transformed his successful travel business to be purpose-driven. Transforming its impact on the world, the type of people it employed and the experience for their customers.

Poon Tip is a big believer that companies and not just non-profits should be seeking to rectify all that is wrong with the world. He believes that traveling is a form of wealth distribution and that those seeking to make a lasting change should consider ‘who’ benefits from the vacations they take.

Cruises and holidays in luxury compounds in some of the most beautiful but poor countries, don’t do enough to benefit those economies. Foreign-owned luxury compounds profits are funneled out and cruise ship businesses often own the destination shopping centres that they ‘stop off’ at allowing people to see the country when they are really seeing nothing of the country at all.

He wanted G Adventures to be different, to have a purpose that allowed the countries his customers visited to benefit. “When people travel with G Adventures they are going to have the chance to shop at local vendors, stay in local hotels and eat at local taverns and restaurants in order to build up the local economy.”

In the podcast he talks about some of the steps he went through to turn the company around to its new purpose and it started with people:

I fired the HR Department
“I fired the entire HR department because I didn’t believe in traditional HR and I wanted to change my business into a ‘people business’.

“I don’t agree with traditional HR, HR is there to put systems in place to take away people’s freedom. It’s to avoid companies from making mistakes really and it also manages to the lowest common denominator, because they spend so much time managing problem employees that they start managing everyone based on the people trying to game the system and it creates a bad company culture.”

“I knew I’d have to totally reinvent all of that if I wanted to change my business.”

I gave away the CEO title to the people
Poon Tip described how he thought the most important title should go to the most important people. And the most important? “anyone dealing with a customer”. Anyone in a customer facing role is now known as a CEO or “Chief Experience Officer”. “I now have thousands of CEO’s” he says. Every tour leader is empowered because they are the CEO.

I created a Talent Agency
“I had to redevelop our philosophy on how we looked at ‘people’. Instead of HR, we have something called the Talent Agency, taking cues from how you manage gifted talent as opposed to managing people.”

We started a Culture Club
“And then we started what we called the ‘culture club’ a department that proactively manage our company culture”. We now know this team as G-Force.

What comes across loud and clear is the critical role played by his team to create a purpose-driven business. Later in the podcast he talks of how his hiring decisions completely changed. Now it’s about hiring people who will actively contribute to the culture, not just those who participate.

It also shows that transformation to a purpose-driven business is absolutely possible. Even for mature businesses.

So how is your business going to change the world?