Resolve to maximize recognition efforts in the workplace

By Pierre Battah

Are you getting the recognition you deserve? Are you a master recognizer? It is New Year’s resolution season and I suggest you consider maximizing your recognition efforts regardless of your role at work, in the community and at home.

The value of recognition in the workplace has long been touted but often dismissed as a soft HR issue. The data suggests otherwise as it is a hard line business and organizational issue not to be taken lightly with significant impact on both individual and organizational performance.

The link between recognition and employee engagement is a well proven one and the link between engagement and virtually every meaningful metric in organizational life is also pretty clear. Nudge your engagement scores up and whatever you measure will likely move in the right direction, be it profitability, productivity, absenteeism, workplace accidents, you name it.

It is my observation that many employees feel unrecognized and many managers feel ill-equipped to recognize employees. I also believe it’s about our ability, and ultimately our accountability, for going beyond the basics to something more meaningful. As HR generalist Teena Robichaud from the highly successful New Brunswick based Imperial Manufacturing Group said to me “Recognition is beyond thank-yous … it is about saying something when you catch people doing things right, it’s about making people feel valued and appreciated on an ongoing basis.”

Clearly the recognition recipe needs to go well beyond “years of service awards” and the “employee of the month.” According to Cindy Ventrice, author of the 2005 book Make Their Day: Employee Recognition that Works, effective employee recognition is split three ways: 50 per cent from the boss, 30 per cent from peers and 20 per cent from employer programs.

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