5 Ways to Turn Your Recognition into Results

Recognition and reward programs are seen as an important tool used to drive employee engagement, increase retention and improve productivity. The majority of Fortune 500 companies have strong recognition programs that are designed to align cultural values, behaviors, accomplishments and results across the entire organization. However, an emerging trend is to leverage the recognition program as a tool to drive strategic and financial goals of the business by involving everyone who can directly impact those goals.

Results-based recognition is an engagement methodology that delivers incremental value to an organization by aligning employee efforts toward strategic initiatives. Teams and individuals have visibility to specific and measurable goals and are rewarded based on achievement. The programs are funded from incremental gains to the business and can vary in duration.

Most importantly, the methodology is built on two key principles of behavioral economics:

• Social influence, which indicates that social norms of a group influence how we act, and

• Idiosyncratic fit, which is when employees perceive the rewards as being achievable because they can earn them just by doing their job a little better.

  Cross-functional alignment toward an objective is a best practice in these initiatives. In order to achieve high-level strategic goals, programs can include both sales and non-sales employees whose efforts can impact the goal. In one example, a leading pharmaceutical company was striving to achieve a stretch market share goal for a product that had been on the market for just over a year. In addition to the goals for their territory sales specialists, BIW designed a program to align the efforts of the entire team supporting the product franchise.

• Clinical research associates had targets for completion of the study for an important new indication.

• Manufacturing and supply chain teams had goals related to stocking and product availability.

• Marketing had goals related to the development, approval and production of materials to support sales efforts.

• Sales training had goals related to product training.