Why employee recognition schemes fail - Part 2: The nomination process

One of the reasons that Recognition Schemes fail is that there are many biases built in to the nominations process, even if the people doing the nominating are employees themselves.
Some of these biases include:

• quiet achievers (people who come to work, do their job and do it well without any fuss) are unlikely to be nominated simply because they don't even make it onto the radar.
• self-promoters - There are staff who actively self-promote, who draw attention to every good thing they do, while minimizing or draw attention away from the things they do less well or fail to do at all. This makes such staff more salient than other staff who may be bending all of their efforts to just doing a good job rather than to big noting themselves. Self-promoters may be more likely to be nominated because everyone is aware of what they've done, even though they may have done no more than anyone else. (On the other hand, blatant self-promotion may also result in a lower likelihood of nomination because no-one likes them.).
• friends nominating friends (self-explanatory)
• mutual nominations or circular nominations (with staff nominating each other)
• underperformers who have done one outstanding thing - People may perform well in a high visibility task, but have otherwise poor performance. In fact their neglect of their normal work may have contributed to their more public success. To reward them for this would send a poor message: that the day-to-day work is unimportant, that only high profile tasks matter.
• people working on high profile projects - Staff are sometimes recognized for doing a task or project that they were selected to perform, so it was the job they were being paid to do. There is no way of knowing how well any other person might have performed in the role had they been given the opportunity or whether the person’s performance is outstanding relative to what could have been achieved. So there is an opportunity bias in recognising anyone for project type work.
• workload bias - The people doing the nominating are the ones who have enough time on their hand to do such a nomination. So in general a smaller proportion of nominations would be expected from the busiest, highest volume work areas than from low volume work areas. To a degree, the proportion of nominations from an area could be more indicative of over-resourcing for that area than great performance and it may be that what that work area considers great performance would be considered mediocre in a higher volume area.
• recency bias - nominations may be made on the basis of things that have recently happened rather than on things that have happened throughout the period covered by the awards.
• cynicism - work areas that are cynical about the whole thing may submit less nominations

Any or more likely all of these things are likely to affect the quality of nominations being received by any selection committee and tend to undermine the credibility of the whole process. Managers sometimes assume that staff aren't aware of such biases but in general staff are better aware of them than the managers and as a result recognition awards tend to become a fiasco.

However, at least if the employees do the nominating rather than the managers, there is at least a perception that there is some equity in the process and an absence of favoritism.