Spending money to make money

So this week I have been quoted as saying “recognising your people is not about being ‘nice’ it just makes good commercial sense”.

Recognition has always been one of the drivers of what I consider makes a healthy and high performing business. In all my years of working with, being in, listening to and visiting businesses, I can tell immediately, those committed to recognition and those that believe their people get paid  to show up  and that’s it. It’s the latter that more often than not are wanting me to give them some wisdom on how to build a successful business.

For me, engaging both the hearts and minds of people in my businesses is essential. I want them onboard with the vision, living our values and aligned to our goals. To practice gratitude at work is really important.

I’ve always used peer led recognition to bring this to life. Recognition that comes from those with whom you work the closest are the truest reflection of alignment to company values and it’s these stories that build a culture of recognition and unite teams in or out of the office.

Building everyday recognition into your business is a change journey – one that typically starts with the simplest form of peer led recognition – a Thank you.

More and more businesses we are talking to are installing public ‘thank you boards’ either physical or online up around their workspaces with the sole purpose of celebrating wins more often and in a public way.

By inviting your team to practice of recognising each other you will begin reaping the rewards that come with frequent recognition, your people will feel empowered, motivated and mostly importantly awesome all whilst learning from each other WHY of your business and the part they play in delivering it.

Peer led recognition programs are becoming more and more commonplace in many organisations and we know firsthand the impact they have on culture.

But how can we use recognition to align people to the strategic plan? OR what happens when you visit the plan and find things aren’t actually going to plan?

As leaders, utilising “results driven recognition” or “tactical recognition” can help to keep your people focused and motivated toward shorter term objectives.

Tactical recognition and or incentives are commonplace when you find you need to change behaviours quickly in order for your business to deliver to plan. They are a great way to generate positive results in a fairly short time frame.

In our business we work to a trimesterly rhythm. This rhythm allows us to be extremely agile in how we approach the overall business plan and the trimesterly strategic objectives that fall out form this.

Every trimester each business has a set of Core Objectives (which I work closely with the leaders of each business unit on setting) and it is from there that each leader will work with their team to set their quarterly objectives.

The most important thing we do in this process is work with each team member to understand how their quarterly objectives feed into the plan and what will motivate them to succeed.

In consultation with my team I realised that having the opportunity to ‘let their leader know’ when they had achieved one of their objectives and furthermore having that moment celebrated was really important to them.

Because one of our values is ‘Get Sh$t Done’ I thought it would be really great for our people to be able to earn a ‘Get Sh$t Done’ badge (as well as some points) every time they completed an objective.

They loved the idea and for the first time are able to get excited about celebrating achievement of objectives with the whole team seeing their award and congratulating them.

Redii.com simply wants to see that people (no matter where they work)… feel productive, noticed and go home proud of what they achieved and where they work.

It’s easy to set up a Redii program to build a culture of recognition. And, then when you are ready, add a tactical layer to it and see how it impacts the ownership and delivery of KPI’s.

We design programs like this every day, so have a chat with the Redii team about designing yours.