Why employee recognition schemes fail - Part 3: The selection process

In Simpsons episode Brother Can You Spare Two Dimes Mr.Burns awards Homer  the "First Annual Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence" and a US$2,000 prize in exchange for a legal waiver against any claim for his radiation induced sterility.

In most Employee Recognition Schemes there is a complete lack of transparency and no-one knows whether the selection of the winners is a matter of legitimately recognising excellence or whether it is more a matter of quid pro quo. (It isn't just Employee Recognition Schemes by the way: the same doubts concern honors lists and knighthoods in Commonwealth countries and comparable awards in other countries.)

This lack of transparency is even more problematic in organisations where there is not a lot of trust to begin with. And it is further multiplied when there is management involvement or interference in the selection process (as described in a previous post.) And the fact that guidelines as to how the winners will be chosen are not made publicly available just raises more suspicions.

Then there are issues with things such as suspected quotas ("Last year we gave it to someone from that Division so we can't give it to someone from that Division this year") or the fact a person may win who everyone knows (apart apparently from the selection committee) causes more problems to the organization than they solve.

And the perception that the selection process is unfair and biased simply leads to disgruntlement and disengagement from the process.

The take home message from this is that where there is no trust to begin with a recognition scheme that is not open and transparent will simply serve to increase distrust and cynicism.

And those that don't... (A Cautionary Tale)

A friend of mine told me the following story:

In the strategic plan for a branch of a business, one of the goals was to set up a staff recognition scheme for the branch. About a month before the end of the financial year one of the managers in the branch decided to do something about achieving this goal. Their motivations for doing this weren't particularly laudable: basically they wanted to be able to dot the i's and cross the t's in the plan and to stick it to the other managers who had done nothing. In other words, it was more about self-promotion than genuinely wanting to recognise staff.

So the manager emailed the staff within their unit seeking nominations for awards and asking for volunteers for a committee. So far so good....

But then, as they say in The Bill [UK Police show] it all went 'pear-shaped'.

The committee got together to decide on who should get what awards but for one category they reached an impasse because they couldn't decide between two of the nominees for one category. Now, in that situation, I would simply have said 'Give them both awards', but the committee made the mistake of asking the manager for her opinion. Once the manager got involved it all fell to pieces.

Firstly, she questioned all of the other decisions they had made, and when she noticed that certain people she favored had not been nominated she told the committee 'I haven't made my nominations yet', even though the closing date for nominations had passed and even though her nominations carried no more weight than that of anyone else in the unit.

Secondly, she told the committee that they weren't making the decision; they were only making recommendations - she and the team leaders would be making the final decision.

Needless to say, by changing the rules she totally alienated the committee members and within minutes of the meeting ending, most of the staff in the unit were aware of what had happened. And as a result she undermined the integrity and credibility of the awards.

In the greater scheme of things, the awards weren't that big a deal. If she had stayed out of it, then whatever the outcome of the awards, she could have said "The nominations were made by staff and the decisions were made by a staff committee, neither I nor the team leaders had any influence or involvement". But once she became involved, she could no longer say that and the perception became that no matter who they nominated the winners would be the manager's favorites.

But there was also a further consequence. This manager was already not particularly trusted by staff and there was already a perception that they played favorites in making promotion decisions and also that some of the people that the manager thought were great were absolutely terrible. So by intervening, even though the final decisions were almost the same, she simply reinforced the existing negative perceptions of staff. And she also sent the message that she didn't trust staff to exercise good judgement. As a result, those who volunteered for the committee won't be volunteering again any time soon: it is one thing to be given responsibility for something and quite another to just be the manager's hand-puppet.

And remember, for the manager the point of the whole exercise wasn't even to recognise staff: it was purely self-promotion. But in the end she shot herself in the foot because not only did staff now have an even lower opinion of her but the same staff had friends in other units and so word spread beyond the unit about what had happened.