The New Era of Strategic Recognition

Engaging Multigenerational and Multicultural Teams in the 21st Century Global Workforce

Evolving 20 th Century Tactics to 21st Century Strategy

In its latest global workforce engagement study, research firm Towers Perrin found senior management’s ability to demonstrate genuine interest in employees to be the top engagement driver globally.

Clearly, intimately knowing employees and showing appreciation for their efforts with tangible recognition moments drives performance. But managers of increasingly distributed global teams struggle with to appropriately recognize team members. Peers often have no formal means to acknowledge each others’ efforts. Why is this difficult when the commercial employee incentives and recognition industry is more than a century old?

In the 20 th century, employee incentives programs grew into company-logo item and catalog-based merchandise powerhouses designed to appeal to the generations of employees who appreciated the selection of catalogs. A concept that worked well from the 1960s to the early 1990s, merchandise catalog incentives are now outdated in the new century. Today’s sophisticated consumers with their ever-increasing wealth already have everything that typically appears in the catalog – at a cheaper price and higher quality.

For today’s global workforce of four generations of employees and countless cultures, a catalog representing reward selections chosen by a committee of product suppliers and corporate team members cannot offer meaningful and relevant rewards for a group of thousands of people from baby boomers to Generation X and Y, conservatives to hedonists, and cultures too numerous to describe.

The 21 st century solution is a global strategic recognition program ideally suited for communicating the business strategy, eliciting desired behaviors based on company values, and recognizing 80-90% of employees frequently and consistently anywhere in the world. Indeed, along with clearly defined metrics to measure success against stated objectives, these are the features of a strategic recognition program that leave the old-school tactical incentives model in the dust.

But communicating to all employees everywhere, across four very distinct generations, requires careful planning and deliberate execution to realize the full benefit of strategic recognition.

Engaging Four Generations of Employees

Managers face the unique challenge of motivating across generations with dramatically different work styles, company expectations, performance goals, and personal time needs. The Silent or War generation (born 1925-1945) and the Baby Boomers (born 1945-1964) may be of retirement age or nearing it but many are choosing to continue to work for various reasons. Generation X (born 1965-1981) is also called the sandwich generation with both their own children and aging parents to care for while also balancing their careers. Generation Y (born 1981-2001), also known as the Millennials, are taking the workforce by storm with vastly different expectations of the workday, their bosses, and their contributions.

Managers cannot discount the Silents and the Boomers simply because they are viewed as soon to leave the workplace. Not only do these employees have the years of experience, the industry and customer knowledge, and the wisdom of “having seen it all,” they also have the desire to keep working long past the typical retirement age. For the last decade, managers and recruiters have been told to expect a drain on resources as these workers retire. However, just as many studies, reports and articles have been written about these generations’ desire to keep working. Silents and Boomers are accustomed to being given an assignment to complete within specified guidelines and do not necessarily expect feedback other than to verify the project was completed as required.

GenX and GenY, however, need a direct communication style with timely feedback, frequent encouragement and recognition of their efforts. These generations are more team-oriented, enjoy change, and need to respect their leaders to follow them. GenerationY, sometimes called Generation “Why?”, especially needs to understand the value of their work for it to be meaningful and connected to a bigger picture than just the task at hand.

Engaging Employees from Global Cultures

Managing globally dispersed teams is no easier. In multinational corporations with teams drawing on resources from numerous countries and in companies that may have extensive global supplier or outsourced networks, managers must step carefully to get the best effort from all team members while honoring and respecting cultural norms in work styles. For example, appropriately motivating and recognizing members of a team becomes complex when some members may place greater value on working long hours while others may value completing work tasks efficiently to allow for more personal time.

Strategic Recognition: Rising above Tactics

These factors of multiple generations and cultures in a rapidly expanding global economy require an entirely new model for motivation and recognition. The unproductive tactical employee incentive programs common during the last 100 years offered no reliable means to measure and track program success, consolidate a globally distributed recognition budget into a single line item on the balance sheet, or cater equitably to global employees.

Strategic recognition programs reinvent the old-school incentives approach of costly, inefficient, and culturally imperialist programs that ship preselected merchandise worldwide. Strategic recognition instead offers global opportunities for awards that are culturally relevant and personally meaningful. These programs go beyond simple pats-on-the-back to act as a major communication channel across an organization, bridging the boundaries of culture, generation and position to permeate the company’s vision, values and critical messages for success throughout the company.

Redefine Recognition for the 21 st Century

Successful recognition in the 21 st Century is a strategic initiative with actionable objectives and measurable results that weaves appreciation into the fabric of a company’s culture. These programs are based on the company’s values to convey the company’s critical messages and a consistency of purpose worldwide. Strategic recognition is frequent and timely to meet GenX and GenY needs while avoiding the micro-management pitfalls abhorrent to the Silents and Boomers. Well executed recognition is available to all, equally. These four facets of strategic recognition address the unique engagement needs of the multi-generational and multicultural workforce.

1) Values Based
Uniting multiple generations in a multinational corporation behind a single corporate strategy and with a consistency of purpose is not easy, but is critical to long-term success. Leadership needs a consistent method to unite all employees behind the company vision to incite passion in the employees to fully engage in their work, the company and their customers. This addresses the Generation “Why?” need in particular for understanding of how their work is meaningful and connected to something important. Silents and Boomers appreciate the obvious goal-driven aspects of a recognition program structured in such a clear manner. Clearly defining what actions or behaviors are deserving of recognition satisfies GenXers’ need for fairness and equality.

Strategic recognition programs reward people for actions and behaviors that reinforce company values, advance the company’s mission, and execute on the strategy. This dramatically boosts employee engagement by showing employees their worth within the organization as it relates to the company mission.

2) Frequent, Timely and Appropriate
A key consideration of strategic recognition is speed. The recognition moment should closely follow the act that is being recognized to ensure the recipient has at top-of-mind the action deserving of award. Frequency of recognition is equally important. With more awards given, the program gains more visibility thus creating more recognition moments. This ensures a majority of employees are involved, interacting about the company values, and viewing critical company messages through the recognition program.

Twenty-first century strategic recognition programs give employees the reward of choice, catering to the demographics of a global workforce spanning the four generations and their unique needs and desires. Locally based choice goes a step further to ensure the reward will always be culturally appropriate and to the recipient’s taste while avoiding the varying cultural norms that simply cannot be known by every manager everywhere in the world.

For the four generations specifically, Silents and Boomers may choose to use their awards for travel destinations or extended holidays instead of accumulating more stuff. Not accustomed to waiting, GenX and GenY prefer on-the-spot recognition that does not limit them to mandatory “forced choice” from a catalog of pre-selected items. GenXers may choose to share their rewards with their families in the form of playsets in the backyard, bar-b-que grills, or televisions. GenYers may choose altruistic rewards such as donations to charities, or instant-gratification rewards such as meals or entertainment events with friends.

Non-cash rewards in the form of gift cards to local high-value, lifestyle venues also feed the Psychic Income need by taking rewards beyond compensation to trophy award status, giving the recipient guilt-free enjoyment of a high-end luxury item or entertainment event. These tangible symbols of achievement are lasting reminders of that achievement and are socially acceptable to show off, again reinforcing the value of the recognition program across the company.

3) Available to All
Just as fragmented, disparate programs and systems for recognition are an immovable barrier to the financial and cultural return from strategic recognition, so too are programs that target incentives to the top 10% “elite” performers. To do so sacrifices the increased employee engagement opportunities of recognition for all.

Jack Welch and GE blazed a trail with differentiation by mapping their workforce effectiveness into a bell curve of performance. The top performers are not the real concern in this curve. Of course, they must be recognized and rewarded exceptionally for the value they bring to the company through their performance. But it is the middle 80% of employees that require an entirely different management style according to the Welch Way. Welch identified the major challenge with this middle group as keeping them engaged and motivated. This group is critical to the company success and requires additional recognition, feedback and training to continue to deliver and even improve on their performance and level of engagement with the company. As Welch has said in Winning, “But everyone in the middle needs to be motivated and made to feel as if they truly belong.”

Therefore, developing a culture where recognition happens organically and naturally in the middle 80% returns the highest levels of engagement – exactly at the place were the majority of work happens. When strategic recognition principles are made available to all employees, companies can change their imperialist or elitist culture to one that is motivational, encouraging and engaging – resulting in improved performance across the organization.

It is equally important to ensure globally distributed employees have access to the same recognition opportunities as their counterparts in the country of the company’s headquarters. A 2008 World@Work survey found only 39% of international or global employees participate in all or most of the same recognition programs as their North American counterparts. This imperialist approach most certainly demoralizes and disengages employees in those outlying global locations.

In a truly global company, all divisions in all areas of the world believe themselves to be equally valuable to delivering on the company’s stated mission. Global strategic recognition programs ensure program execution plans – including reward options and equity of award values – are relevant and valuable in those international locations. Deployment of the program itself must happen globally, preferably in all locations and divisions simultaneously.

4) Measurable
There is only one way to ensure a strategic recognition program touches 80% to 90% of all employees across the organization while reinforcing the company values – measure results against predetermined objectives with clearly defined metrics.

The 2007 Deloitte/The Economist study found while 88% of the business executives and HR leaders surveyed think that people issues are vital to their business today, only 23% of the executives believe HR currently plays a crucial role in strategy and operational results.

This is a critical error when implementing strategic recognition programs. As with any strategic initiative, success requires a clearly defined management methodology based on the principles of operational excellence, clear targets for frequency and budget, meaningful measurement and reporting functionality, and managers that are held accountable for targeted award activity.

The secret to enjoying the benefits of 21 st century strategic recognition: appreciate the differences in the cultures and generations of your all employees and – based on your company values – recognize their contributions appropriately and frequently. Then measure for success.