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Rideau Recognition Solutions Inc. |
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October 31, 2016 Issue |
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CEOCFO MAGAZINE |
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Recognition and Rewards Programs helping SMBs and Large Enterprises Connect and Build Better Relationships with their Employees |
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Chief Executive Officer
Rideau Recognition Solutions Inc.
Interview conducted by: Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor, CEOCFO Magazine, Published October 31, 2016
CEOCFO: Mr. Hart, “Recognizing people, inspiring greatness” is your tag line on the Rideau Recognition Solutions website. How are you doing that? Mr. Hart: We help our clients build better relationships with their employees by using employee recognition as a part of their employee engagement strategy to form a culture of appreciation. We also help managers understand the principles of employee recognition and create customized training that helps them become knowledgeable and better practitioners of recognition. Managers need to understand the “why’s” and “how’s” of employee recognition and appreciation. We also help our clients use the data that they’ve already collected through the thousands of recognition touch-points or data points to further the company’s key performance indicators or KPI’s. It’s really about creating better cultures within an organization - cultures that will attract people to that organization, retain them, value them and keep them engaged during their career path.
CEOCFO: Where does the corporate world stand right now in realizing the value of recognition? Mr. Hart: I think the corporate world accepts recognition as a basic tool that makes people feel good, however, I want to put a huge asterisk next to that. Traditionally 90 percent of organizations have some sort of recognition program yet, according to Gallup organization, over 60 percent of employees don’t feel valued - they don’t feel appreciated. It’s a terrible indictment of our industry and I believe the problem can be traced back to the difference between rewards and recognition.
Rewards are tangible. It doesn’t matter whether they are cash, gift cards, the gold watch for 25 years of service, travel or some other piece merchandise… all rewards have a monetary value. Most of the providers that started in this business did so because they were looking for channels for their manufactured or distributed products. So, historically recognition has been based on the tangible reward. Rewards were the cake and if recognition happened, that genuine feeling of being valued and appreciated, then that was the icing on the cake.
Real recognition is an intangible feeling, you either feel appreciated for who you are and what you do or you don’t. It is difficult to quantify. What we really need to do is reverse the cake and icing example. Make every aspect of our company about recognizing the people and their behaviors that create a culture of engagement and contribute to the company’s KPI’s. Do everything we can to let employees know they matter to their peers, supervisors, and company. Make them feel appreciated as often as possible for the little things as well as the big things – this should be the cake and the tangible rewards then becomes the icing. Most cakes don’t need icing to be delicious, just as most positive employee behaviors don’t need to be given a tangible reward every time to let the employee know what they did was important to the company. It has to be about creating processes and cultures that use genuine and timely recognition, simple things that anyone at any level can do most every day.
Traditionally companies did some type of recognition because they thought
that when somebody reached a 5, 10 or 15 company anniversary that they had
to recognize that special milestone; you had to give them something
tangible. Today, most organizations still tend to associate recognition with
a reward as opposed to the genuine feeling of appreciation and recognition.
But I do believe in the future that’s going to change in a big way. In fact,
I know that it already is. CEOCFO: How do you work with an organization to structure a program that does what it should? Mr. Hart: The first thing we do when we begin to partner with an organization is a complete diagnostic review. We’ll speak to everyone we can who has a major stake in the recognition plan, this includes the C-suite, line managers and employees. We ask what are your company’s vision/mission values? What pain-points or challenges are you experiencing right now? Is it engagement? Is it retention? Is it customer satisfaction? Is it change management? Really understanding what the vision and mission is, as well as their business objectives, is step one. We then look at and evaluate all of the various recognition programs. We speak to the recipients of those programs, who should be thought of as the “customers” of your recognition program. Do you feel that the current programs have any effect on your engagement? Do the current programs make you feel valued? Do they recognize all your contributions to your peers, your department and the company?
We will then take all the info we collected and do a gap analysis. We’ll take a look at the delta between the company needs and business objectives and how the employees feel about their work and how they feel about their contributions and their value to the company. We will then work together with the company to come up with a plan to bridge those gaps. If you think about the tools a surgeon has at her disposal in the operating room - a scalpel, scissors and a saw. All of these things are sharp instruments and they are basically all designed to cut. But a surgeon will choose different tools to do different things depending on her patient’s needs. She would never use a saw for a cardiovascular surgery just as she wouldn’t use a scalpel to amputate a person’s limb. Like the surgeon, what you need to do is match up the right program to achieve the right solution, and that’s how we help our clients. The most important thing we do is make sure that the recognition programs that our clients are using help them solve their real business challenges. If there’s no linkage between your recognition program and the mission/vision value or objectives, you’re going to end up with what I like to call “Recognition Road Kill” because you become just another debatable expense and not an integral part of the company’s solution to their problems. You need to make sure that your recognition programs are always seen as a necessary investment to the company’s future.
CEOCFO: Would you give us a concrete example of engagement to illustrate the process? Mr. Hart: Data analytics is the new teacher and driver in our industry. Data, and subsequently, the analysis of that data is helping leaders become better people managers. We found that it’s much like the Academy Awards; if you get nominated for an Academy Award, every movie that you’ll appear in afterwards is going to mention that you are an “Academy Award Nominee” – it adds something positive to your résumé and will be referred to again and again. If you win the Academy Award, you’re going to now have the prestigious title of an “Academy Award Winner” or “Oscar Winner”, and it will help increase your earnings and further elevate your film career. We found that if you nominate someone for an award, it will have a positive effect. If the person actually receives the award, it’ll have an even bigger effect. But the fact of the matter is that just being nominated does something wonderful. It boosts a person’s ego and makes them feel better about themselves and the work they are doing for their company. I think this is incredibly important! Based on all the research we’ve done on recognition and the behaviors and feelings that are tied to it, we’ve actually put in systems that are based on what we call “Social Recognition,” which is a little like Facebook, within an organization. The system allows you the opportunity to send an e-card or a virtual card to recognize something someone has done. These cards are often linked to mission/vision values or business objectives, but they can be used for almost any reason. It could be a social card recognizing a birthday, years of service or congratulations on buying a new home, birth of a baby or just a simple thank you.
We know from our research that if you’re looking to drive customer satisfaction, programs like Social Recognition has more impact than giving points that are tied to monetary value. I think that a lot of companies are actually spending millions and millions of dollars on rewards when the reality is (and research proves) that it’s not needed. They could be doing things that are much simpler and redirecting the money to educating managers on how to treat their people better. If I care about you, you’re going to care about me and if I teach your managers how to care about their direct reports, you’re going to get better performance. These are not just claims about what we think a well-thought out recognition plan can do - we’ve proven it scientifically.
CEOCFO: Are companies turning to you because they understand the depth of your approach? Are they sometimes surprised at how you come up with a program for them? Mr. Hart: Rideau is considered to be a thought leader in our industry. I think that our position has always been sort of counterintuitive since our company started out as a merchandise provider. We were founded in 1912 as a line manufacturer of emblematic jewelry and like most recognition companies; we got into this business looking for a sales channel for our manufactured products. Over the years we’ve realized that it’s not about the reward; it’s really about creating cultures of appreciation and recognition and using the reward to reinforce that. So we went into organizations that might be spending millions of dollars on rewards and showed them how to redirect the money they were already spending into educating managers how to treat people better. I know our suggestions were a surprise to many companies!
The analogy I like to use is a car. You’d never give your teenager the keys to your car before you send them off to driver’s education classes where they would get the theory of driving a car. Then they would take driving lessons with an instructor to begin their driving experience with an expert. They would then practice some more at home with mom or dad until they were ready to take the driving exam to get their license. Only after they got their license would you consider giving them the keys to your expensive car! What we’re doing with managers is creating these incredibly costly recognition reward systems then wish and hope they drive results and don’t wreck. We’re not giving managers the theory of why recognition is important and how to do it properly. What an effective recognition system needs is the theory component and the practical piece, before giving them the keys. Now managers can go out and start recognizing the right way. Recognition, if done improperly, can actually be damaging. If I’m giving out gift certificates to everyone over and over again without tying them to specific recent behaviors, without letting the person know how much it meant to me – a lot of employees will look at that as manipulation or think, “What crummy task is he going to give me this time”? There’s a zone when recognition is best. It’s crucial that recognition be authentic, timely and properly done. We need to educate people on how to do it and too many companies don’t.
CEOCFO: Are companies looking to you to be an executive coaching, training, and change management guru more than a reward provider? Should they be? Mr. Hart: Yes, they should. I think that we’re associated, as most folks in our industry are, primarily with rewards. People think about us as “The Reward Provider”, but they’re failing to realize that it’s much more than that. What we’re doing today is actually giving out assessments to managers to find out where their people strengths and weaknesses lie. We’re ranking the managers based on how they scored on their assessments to see how they stack up against other managers. Through our software we know how much recognition is being given and which managers are doing it and which managers are not. We can also see how the recipient perceives the recognition, which is extremely valuable information. This is all being tracked with our software. We then use the manager’s scores from the assessment to suggest educational content to make them better people managers. That’s a very important component because if the manager gets it right, we’ve proven without a doubt that their team will increase their performance. Their teams will sell more, have higher customer satisfaction, retention will be better, and so will engagement. It comes down the well-known philosophy that if I care about my employees, they’re going to care about their work, the company and me.
CEOCFO: How do you continue to educate without getting frustrated that people might not understand? Mr. Hart: That’s a great question as well as a frustrating one. I’ve met some HR folks and wonder how they ever end up in HR. But when you speak to people in the C-Suite, generally speaking, they get it. They know intuitively that if you treat people well, they’re going to respond. If you appreciate people properly, they’re going to do a better job. The problem lies in the fact that it is easy to measure an incentive program. Do this, and you will get that and you know exactly what the incentive is going to cost. You can easily figure out the ROI. But the softer stuff, the touchy-feely stuff, is harder to quantify. We like to say, it’s hard to get the soft stuff right. But now with technology, we are actually able to measure those things. We are able to go into an organization and see how much recognition various managers doing. We’re able to go to the employees and measure their perception of that recognition and give them a score that we call an “RQ score” which stands for “Recognition Quotient”. Just like you have IQ or Intelligence Quotient, EQ or Emotional Quotient, the RQ reveals your Recognition Quotient, ranks managers against one another, and links that score to the company’s KPIs.
When you have clear evidence that managers that get it right sell more, have better retention, have better engagement, and have better customer satisfaction, the C-Suite generally buys in pretty quickly. The problem a lot of us have in our industry is that we’re not speaking to the C-Suite; we’re speaking with directors or vice-presidents and others who have their eyes on the recognition budgets and want to cut costs any way possible. They may not have the autonomy or may be hesitate to bring these ideas to the C-Suite. The real value in what we do is in the data. The data can actually tell a story about the health of your company and reveal things not just during an annual employee opinion survey; but you can take a snapshot of your company or department in real time. The work we’re doing is going to transform our company within the next couple of years and I believe it’s going to transform our entire industry in the next 5 to 10 years. People will look at what we’re doing in recognition; look at the type of transactions that we’re using as a real-time barometer on the health of their employee population and see that we’re onto something.
There is an excellent Ted Talk by a fellow called Rainer Strack. He’s the head of the HR consulting practice for the Boston Consulting Group, and he’s looked at the demographic talent crisis that’s coming. By 2030, when all of the baby boomers have retired and exited the workforce, in Canada there’s going to be 11 percent deficit of workers compared to open positions. This is after all immigration is factored in and after all the wonders of technological advancement. Canada isn’t the only place that affected; the coming deficit is going to be global. In Brazil it’s over 30 percent, in Germany it’s over 20 percent, in China they’ve changed the one-child policy because they realize that having only one child per family will not give them enough workers to populate their future workforce because in 2030 they’re going to have a deficit of three or four percent. The Boston Consulting Group went on and did a survey of 200 thousand global job seekers about what the new generation is looking for in a workplace. They had 20 different categories and pay ranked number eight. Great working relationship with your manager was number four, good work/life balance was number three, great working relationship with your colleagues was number two, and being appreciated and recognized for what you do was number one. Boston Consulting Group is not related our industry, so these findings were totally independent.
As I said, you’re going to need to create cultures that attract, retain and engage people. If you don’t, you’re going to have a really serious problem with your workforce. I think the C-Suite understands this. In the United States, it’s going to be right on the neutral zone. There won’t be a deficit, but there will not be a big surplus also. So it’s coming, and people better be aware of it and plan for the future. Recognition is a major driver in creating cultures that attract, retain and engage your employees and your customers. |
“Recognition is a major driver in creating cultures that attract, retain and engage your employees and your customers.”- Peter Hart
Rideau Recognition Solutions Inc.
Contact: Peter W. Hart (877) 789-0449 x240
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Peter
Hart