By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Shifting away from too much hierarchy, organizations need to emphasize more dynamic and more human ways of working. The pace of changes facing modern businesses is incredible. Many organizations are finding that those changes require an evolution in management philosophy- away from aspects that were successful during the Industrial Era and toward aspects that allow the organization to be more dynamic. One of those groundswell transformations has played out in the very way that many businesses are organized. The way we work is changing. Crowdsourced performance.

by Traci Pesch. Recognize This! – All employees can benefit from the power of thanks, regardless of job type, function or role. I get asked lot of questions. As a mother, I hear interesting questions like: “Why does Moose’s (our pet guinea pig) nose move up and down and not side to side?” and “If the earth is round, do rainbows circle the earth? And if they do, where does the pot of gold go?” From my 7-year-old, these are excellent, inquisitive questions that help him learn about and understand the world around him. But does it really work for employees in manufacturing facilities?”.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Trends in HR for the year ahead will emphasize empowerment, the employee experience, and ultimately a more human workplace. What will some of the big themes be for HR leaders in the year ahead and how can we begin preparing for them? For some answers, I attended a session at HR Tech based on Josh Bersin’s new report, HR Technology Disruptions for 2017. These trends deeply resonate with the WorkHuman movement and community. In Josh’s analysis, we can see how these trends have emerged across HR functions (see his Figure 2: Evolution of HR systems below).

by Traci Pesch. Recognize This! Simply expressing to others they are appreciated and important powerfully and positively impacts both the giver and receiver of the praise. How do you change someone’s perspective of themselves? How do you change your own perspective of yourself and your mission? One step – recognize someone. Celebrate the good in them. Tell them how they are special, how what they do matters. It really is that simple. The act of recognition – both giving and receiving – fulfills a basic human need, the need to be noticed. The need to be seen. Powerful. You do good work.”

By Derek Irvine. I’m packing my bags and heading to Chicago for the 19 th Annual HR Technology Conference and Expo. It’s a fantastic show for seeing what the future of HR holds and what the leaders of the field are thinking about today. always come back to the office with a ton of energy and ideas. If you’ll be at the conference, I hope that you can stop by a pre-conference session I am hosting alongside Jay Dorio of IBM (October 4 th at 2:30 pm). Later in the week, also be sure to catch Globoforce’s Eric Mosley and David Sparkman of UnitedHealth Group (October 7 th at 9:30 am).

by Lynette Silva. Recognize This! – How your employees experience recognition and appreciation for daily efforts and results can determine the success of your organization culture. Is there an easy and quick way to judge the culture of a company and assess potential for future performance? According to David Novak , former CEO of Yum! Brands, yes. Simply look for telltale signs of a culture of recognition and appreciation at work. Investor and portfolio manager James Dodson’s Parnassus Workplace Fund bears this out. The fund regularly outperforms the S&P 500 by 4%.). Great job!”

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! – The practices that make a workplace more human are also the ones that can position a company to successfully adapt to future change. Many companies are struggling to keep pace with emerging skills gaps. This is according to a recent interview in Harvard Business Review with Cathy Benko, Vice Chairman at Deloitte. She points to the need for companies to move away from industrial-era practices, focusing instead on more fluid and employee-driven approaches. The process starts with empowering employees to take a wider view of their work.

by Lynette Silva. Recognize This! – Our world is highly networked today and will become more so in a more secure fashion. Leaders must help ensure we retain our humanity as we become at once more connected and more secure. I’ve just finished a book that’s possibly frightened me more than the Exorcist. And that’s saying something. What’s the book? The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune and Survival in the Age of Networks by Joshua Cooper Ramo. picked up this book after seeing it listed by four CEOs in a McKinsey article on “What CEOs are reading.”. What does that mean? What won’t work?

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Failing to address disruptive behavior by high-performers can actually hurt overall productivity. Leaders should focus on creating a culture that encourages everyone to contribute instead. What should a leader do when one of their most productive employees is also the most disruptive? It’s a challenging question that gets at the costs versus benefits of retaining that employee. Many of the costs might be difficult to fully measure. Rather, it is about creating a culture and employee experience where everyone can work to their full potential.

by Traci Pesch. Recognize This! – The sport of gymnastics offer several lessons we can apply to make work more human. My daughter did gymnastics for 6 years. It’s an intense sport for which, unless you’re deeply in it, it is hard to understand the level of commitment necessary. Gymnastics is a unique sport, but some elements are the same for all sports that offer us lessons for the workplace, too. Superstar” is relative. Yesterday’s superstar is today’s team player. Look at Gabby Douglas. In the 2012 Olympics, she won the gold medal in the individual all-around competition. Certainly not!

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! – A social recognition solution aligned to core values helps ensure that those values are lived by all employees and actively managed by leaders. Have you thought about where the core values at your company came from? In all probability, they were developed as a way to successfully drive a specific culture and achieve organizational success. senior leadership team spent a lot of time thinking through all of those relationships and what they wanted the company to be. Far from a straightforward task, developing core values can be challenging.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Encouraging positivity at work can be challenging, but is achievable through a strong culture of recognition and making work human. It’s no surprise that positive workplaces can help contribute to a whole host of beneficial results , from better health to greater productivity. The challenge that many companies face is how to go about creating a more positive and human-centered workplace. It’s often a goal that requires walking on a fine line between promoting a positive culture and ensuring that positivity remains authentic and unforced.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Social recognition can help new employees rapidly feel more connected, engaged, and aligned. The transition to a new job, either at a new organization or just a new department, can be a stressful time. Although new employees are often prepared for the sheer amount of things to learn, they are often far less prepared for the time it takes to ramp up. Part of the challenge is the level of enthusiasm and energy that new employees bring, which can be at odds with the downtime between the initial onboarding activities and achieving full utilization.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Companies that emphasize cultures of contribution rather than hours spent at a desk are better positioned to achieve success. Everyone seems to be much busier these days, rushing between meetings or from project to project, with even less time being spent away from work. It can seem like being busy has become a competition. Recent data has started to confirm some of these perceptions, that the number of hours worked has become a symbol of status and prestige. What exactly is that? As a result, employees are more likely to ask themselves “What value can I bring?”

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Less pure output and more holistic wellbeing, productivity is driven by the employee experience and technologies that can give leaders greater insight. Last week, I wrote about worker productivity from the perspective of economists and the figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In that post, a decline in productivity appears to reflect deep transformations in the employee experience , alongside lower levels of technology and people investments. How is your organization looking into the employee experience and productivity?

by Lynette Silva. Alcatraz – Inside the Main Cellhouse, CC BY 2.0  – By Daniel Ramirez, Honolulu, USA. Recognize This! Respect is a foundational element of working more human, in any work environment. What’s the most inhumane work environment you can think of? Hard field labor in the blazing sun? Dangerous construction or energy work? After listening to an NPR interview with a Mother Jones reporter who went undercover as a prison guard in a for-profit prison, I’m thinking prison certainly makes the list of potentially the most inhumane work environments.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! –. Numbers have come out recently from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on worker productivity, and the conclusions aren’t all that positive. According to the report , productivity has been on the decline in the US for the previous four quarters at an annualized rate of 0.4%. Yet, number of hours worked over the same period have increased by 1.5%. What’s going on? There are a couple of opinions out there, summarized in a recent post I wrote on Compensation Cafe: One argument is that all of that innovation and technology aren’t doing much to help productivity.

by Lynette Silva. Recognize This! Working more human requires we allow our humans to be fully themselves, inside and outside work. You could call me a football fan if, by “fan,” you mean I sit and a read book next to my husband while he watches the Patriots game. But I seem to have picked up more than I realized by this fan-through-proximity method. Being in Patriots country (and a communicator by nature), I’ve noticed how Patriots team members communicate with – or rather, don’t communicate with – the press. Let’s just say the Bennetts don’t hold back on their thoughts and opinions.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Social recognition is a simple, fast solution to ensuring the success of change efforts. One of the broad challenges faced by many of the global companies I speak with comes down to change management. For them, it is not only a question of the ultimate success of a given effort, but also their ability to diffuse those changes rapidly across their global employee base. As markets demand more frequent pivots and increased flexibility, this ability becomes especially crucial. Within such a culture, employees have built a capacity for mobilization and involvement.

by Traci Pesch. Recognize This! – We cannot create more human work cultures if we don’t honor the human need to rest, reflect, and breathe. I’m just back from vacation – enjoying family and friends immersed in sun, sand, and ocean. The ability to step back, relax, and rest my mind certainly made it possible to bring a rejuvenated spirit to my work. And this experience reminded me of recent podcast from NPR’s Shankar Vedantam and Dan Pink (author of Drive ): “What Science Says about Taking a Great Vacation.”. With a second to breathe.”. Sadly, it seems workers hesitate on taking vacation.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! – A combination of coaching and social recognition can help consistent performers to realize their potential and reach higher levels of performance. It has become commonplace for businesses to differentiate between high performers, consistent performers, and those who need more development. majority of programs tend to focus solely on high performers, as those who can bring the most value to the organization. Effective organizations though also need to mobilize and develop the largest of these three groups: the consistent performers.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Growth within a human workplace combines traditional learning opportunities with the recognition of a challenge- and fun-oriented mindset. In today’s post, I wanted to revisit a set of findings from the 2016 WorkHuman Research Institute ROI of Recognition survey. As we explored the sets of practices that contribute to a more human and caring workplace, a concept emerged that emphasized the importance of growth and development. Two parallels are of note. Let’s dig deeper into each of these in turn.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Work styles and culture are more effective when they can each offer something unique, rather than being in full alignment. Some interesting dynamics can be found in the ways that executive leadership styles and culture interact to influence firm performance.  In fact, there are two diametrically opposed ideas on the issue. One suggests that similarity or fit between culture and style is more beneficial, while another suggests the opposite- dissimilarity- might be better. Where is that sweet spot and is it different across levels of the organization?

by Lynette Silva. Recognize This! Regardless of industry or company size, all employees need authenticity, mindfulness and recognition. Why do we WorkHuman? Simple – how else could we possibly work? We are human, after all. And yet, our workplaces or work experiences often aren’t structured to honor, support or encourage the very humanity we bring to the office. During the last two weeks, I’ve had the honor and privilege of hosting several WorkHuman Regional Forums across the United States (check out workhuman.com for additional locations and dates throughout the year).

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! — Social recognition is well suited to enable business success in response to growing trends in globalization, social networking, and mobile technology. The modern organization has been drastically transformed in recent years by the confluence of three major trends, each of which has had a large impact on how employees expect to interact with one another. Global boundaries have disappeared, social connectivity has become easier, and mobile technologies have enabled both greater freedom and access.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Successful cultures depend on clearly defined values and aligned, measurable behaviors, both of which are positively influenced through social recognition. Culture can be a tricky thing. The majority of companies have one, whether it is the one they intended to have or not. The intentional versions require active management and the coordination of several moving parts across the organization, attributes that make them somewhat rare according to a recent article on The Economist. It also means making values as measurable as performance.”.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Core projects can lead to greater happiness and achievement, especially when they are encouraged by the organization and aligned to core values. Recently, more and more attention is being paid to the notion of happiness at work. Once considered too soft, a growing body of evidence from WorkHuman speakers, our own research and from leading academic scholars suggests real and tangible benefits that include greater performance and well-being. So what are personal projects, and what makes them core to an individual?

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! – As work roles become more fluid, compensation needs to transform to include solutions that are more social, dynamic, and engaging. came across an interview with Tony Hsieh the other day, as I wrote recently in this post on Compensation Cafe , where he was describing the experiment of holocracy at Zappos and what the implications were for HR practices. One interesting comment stood out when he described his thinking on how compensation was being transformed. That sounds pretty cutting edge! What is your take on how compensation is or should be transforming?

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! – New mindsets that emphasize and recognize effectiveness over effort are needed to replace increasing bureaucracy. Organizations are becoming flatter and more flexible, at least according to conventional wisdom. But in a recent article in Harvard Business Review , Gary Hamel points to data that suggests exactly the opposite: bureaucracy is growing rather than shrinking. Much of that growth, he argues, comes as leaders attempt to address the complexity of the modern business environment. What might that look like? There is little need of extensive bureaucracy.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Culture change can be difficult, but reinforcing and recognizing core behaviors provides small victories that ultimately lead to positive change for the entire company. If you want to start an interesting debate in the office, ask a couple of people this question: “Do you think organizational culture can be changed?”. You’ll get quite a few different perspectives, I’m sure, from one end of the spectrum to the other and probably a whole lot in between. The one feature that most will agree on, however, is that it will be difficult.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! – A culture of generosity is one aspect of a more human workplace that is a natural fit, but also needs to be curated. There are many different ways that organizations can become more human, evidenced by the sheer diversity of ideas across our WorkHuman speakers and thinkers , as well as our own research. One idea seems to sit at the core of several of these approaches: a culture of generosity. What does generosity mean in the context of work? It is a collective tide that can raise all boats. Recognition rather than incentives.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Innovations that spread quickly share an element of face-to-face diffusion, a process that can be amplified through human-centered technology and practices. Not all innovations are created equal. Some good ideas take their time to spread, even within a single company, while other ideas are adopted at lightning speed across companies and even industries. Figuring out what explains that difference has been a challenge for companies looking to move with more flexibility and agility. How would you set up your company to thrive based on the spread of innovation?

by Lynette Silva. BIG , Robert Loggia, Tom Hanks, 1988. TM and Copyright (c) 20th Century Fox Film Corp. All rights reserved. Courtesy: Everett Collection. Recognize This! – As humans, we all bring different personality tendencies to our teams. We can choose how to amplify those that contribute to the greater good. Relationships. We all have them. Relationships with others are a condition of being human. From superficial to very deep connections, we cannot navigate this life without deep relationships with others. That’s no less true for being our most effective selves at work.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Nonfinancial metrics are increasingly used in compensation formulas; recent research and trends in crowdsourced data may improve the value of these trends. Getting compensation formulas right can be challenging, ensuring that leaders maintain a balanced focus on short-term results as well as long-term value creation. Traditional levers in those formulas have been in the form of various financial metrics. Companies are also increasingly turning to nonfinancial metrics as well, to reflect more of a balanced scorecard approach.

by Lynette Silva. Recognize This! – You don’t have to be manager of people to be a leader of people. To lead, relate to other’s needs and always remember where you came from. recently had the opportunity to speak at the Evanta Chicago CHRO summit. It was an honor to be a part of a tremendous roster of industry leaders and speakers. Case in point – Harry Kraemer who kicked off the event at the governing body dinner. took away 5 key lessons and reminders from both Harry’s talk and his book, summarized here. 1. Understand the Key Characteristics of Leaders. Identify and Avoid “Those Guys”.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Implicit norms about being yourself at work are a large part of the power of working human. Have you seen this post circulating on LinkedIn? It’s about a poster that tells new employees with the UK’s Government Digital Service that “It’s ok to…” Some items on that list that are ok to do include: ask for more clarity, depend on the team, go somewhere else to concentrate, have off-days, and have days off. The entire poster is available here.). Many of us learn these types of things over time, all of the “unofficial stuff” as the post says. whole self WorkHuman

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Organizations need to provide strong links between stakeholders to ensure that all can benefit from the business. The Marketplace radio program is running a feature on “ The Price of Profits ” looking broadly at the purpose of organizations. In a recent installment in that series, the host opens with this question: “Whom do companies serve?”. I’m sure that many of you have a gut answer to that question, whether you believe shareholders, customers, employees or the public good to be paramount. Work today is more complex, interdisciplinary, and interdependent.

by Lynette Silva. Recognize This! – Our humanity is strengthened through the support and care of fellow humans. This weekend, I took my mother to the airport at 3:30 in the morning. While a ridiculous hour to be on the road, I’m grateful. On the way home, the TED Radio Hour was on NPR. Just as dawn was starting to break, I got to listen to Boyd Varty share the South African concept of Ubuntu. Who’s Boyd Varty and what’s Ubuntu? Good questions. Boyd Varty is a South African who grew up on the Londolozi Game Reserve where his role was to “take people into nature.” How powerful. How human.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! – A strategy that includes evidence-based business cases and ground-up moments of positivity can help shift companies away from leaders who manage through fear or pressure. Of the recent webinars that I’ve given and attended, there is almost always the inevitable question from someone in the audience: “how can an organization become more positive when leaders there believe that the best way to motivate people is through pressure or fear?”. Transforming it into a more positivity-driven approach requires two complementary approaches. What has been successful?

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! – A guaranteed income could bring substantial changes to the world of work, from increased meaning, to crowdsourced compensation, to more freedom. But will it work? Experiments in basic income are beginning to happen across the world, with the potential to change the way we work. When technology can increase productivity while lessening the need for human workers, observers question whether the former industrial model of employment will continue into the future. major question remains: what will take the place of work, and what will people do?

by Traci Pesch. Recognize This! Regardless of role or level, we are all responsible for making work more human for ourselves and our colleagues. “We make work more human.”. What’s your reaction to that statement? Do you cheer along in belief we can and are doing just that? Or do you scoff, saying to yourself, “This is business. We’re here to make money, not happy employees.”? My position is simple. Not only can we make work more human, we must make work more human. In honor of the life that was legend, Muhammad Ali, I support his statement, “Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare.”.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Companies can create cultures that encourage meaningfulness through the impact that social recognition can have. One of the more powerful ways to make the workplace more human is through establishing meaning and purpose. For many HR and business leaders, that task can seem abstract and challenging to achieve. On one hand, we all know meaningfulness when we see (or experience) it, but scaling meaningfulness across an entire organization is another thing entirely. Meaning occurs when work impacts others more than just the individual worker.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Ongoing creativity requires a delicate balance of specialized and diverse knowledge, which can be supported through human-focused workplace practices. It’s true that generations matter to organizations, but perhaps not in the way you might be thinking. Despite the intense focus on the Millennial generation in the news, workplace dynamics tend to be driven much more by age (namely, how long a given group of employees have been in the workforce) rather than a specific generational category per se.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Figuring out the right culture means balancing high-level goals alongside assumptions about how best to achieve those goals. One of the few remaining areas of competitive advantage available to businesses is unleashing the potential of human performance at work. More often than not, doing so requires establishing a strong culture that reinforces employees’ collective ability to improve themselves and do their best work. culture of recognition, on the other hand, assumes workers are motivated to bring their entire selves to work and strive for their best work.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Performance reviews need to reflect the relationships of performance, and stop treating it like a contract. Read most any article on the transformation of performance reviews and you will immediately come across a line about how universally disliked they are. It seems that no one would object to getting rid of them immediately, but somehow data suggest that very few companies are actually going that far. Talking over this issue with a few colleagues recently, an analogy to school grades was brought up.  What might that look like in practice?

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Science has transformed workplace happiness from a nice-to-have to a compelling imperative, but it needs to start with alignment, positivity, and progress. What comes to mind when you imagine what a happy workplace might look like? company full of optimists who are always smiling no matter what’s going on around them. bunch of employees enjoying a game of pool or lounging in fun spaces. Or is it a group of workers that are driven by meaningful work and are always ready to positively contribute to those around them. Who wouldn’t want to have more of that at work?

by Traci Pesch. Recognize This! Much of our own human behavior was learned as children. Let’s think carefully about how we are teaching our children to be human. WorkHuman 2016 in Orlando was a powerful, exciting experience for many reasons, not least of which was the opportunity to be with, learn from and share the experience with other amazing humans. have too many lessons learned from WorkHuman to fit into one post, so I will focus on a key takeaway that impacts two of the humans I care about most in this world – my son and daughter. We don’t think about it; we just do it. See human.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Internal talent mobility can reinvent the traditional career, but will require a shift towards more flexible solutions like social recognition to be successful. Long gone are the traditional employee expectations of having an entire career play out within a single organization or even within the same functional area. Instead, modern careers are much more kaleidoscopic, comprised of transitions between a number of different employers and increasingly, across functional boundaries as well. How do you think talent mobility would work in your own organization?

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! WorkHuman highlighted a new paradigm of organizing in which potential can be unleashed through human connection and empowering work environments. It takes an event as powerful and unique as WorkHuman to be able to hear from Shawn Achor about the power of happiness in the workplace in one keynote, and then to hear from Gary Hamel  in another about why we need to become a little angry to “hack” our organizations around more human ways of working. Although the approaches might differ on the surface, both speak to one basic idea. WorkHuman Click To Tweet.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! – As we prepare for the WorkHuman event next week, I am looking forward to the shared inspiration that the movement has created. As many of you know, next week is the main event of the WorkHuman movement , where we will bring together a full slate of amazing speakers, thought leaders, academic researchers, and industry influencers. personally can’t wait for the rush of inspiration and energy that will come not only from the speakers themselves, but from everyone in attendance actively looking for ways to make work more human. We’d love to meet you in person.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Social recognition can help ensure that “alumni” employees turn prior positive experiences into benefits for their former companies. Today’s employees will rarely spend their entire careers at a single organization. Instead, they will have multiple employers and potentially even multiple careers. One of the chief benefits of this trend is the expansion of professional networks that “alumni” of a company possess as they move throughout their careers. The most powerful drivers, like moments of recognition, will be able to touch upon both simultaneously.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Investments in employees need to account for value, visibility, and level of contribution to maximize their effectiveness. Social recognition is the ideal solution across all three. One of the challenges that some clients bring to us involves getting the right mix of recognition and other investments in their total rewards portfolio. This is an important question because the strength and duration of some of those investments, especially in the form of incentives or bonuses, has been called into question. Visibility. Level of Contribution.

by Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Companies that encourage fun at work, as well as in work, are well positioned to succeed. Outside of our working lives, we are faced with balancing our chores and our hobbies: the routine things that need to get done, and the exciting things we look forward to and that help us grow or build skills. Gary Hamel, a speaker at this year’s WorkHuman , phrased it much better than I in a recent interview with Globoforce: “After all, as human beings we wash the dishes, do the laundry, and take out the garbage—pretty mundane stuff. In short, work needs to be “fun.”.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! – The investments that companies make in employees can be difficult to keep top of mind. Recognition is one solution that communicates the value employees have on a frequent and timely basis. The business world seems to moving faster than ever, challenging employees and leadership teams alike to keep up. These changes are affecting a wide range of HR processes and systems as well. For the sake of argument, I suspect that salary, incentives, and benefits are not top of mind for the typical employee on a frequent basis.

By Traci Pesch. Recognize This! – A sustainable culture of recognition starts with “why” to inform positive spirals between culture and practices. Why does employee recognition matter? What elements make social recognition a success? How do we even define “success?” What types of significant results are achievable through social recognition? These are a few of the most common questions I hear about social recognition. So, why is recognition important?  Essentially, recognition done right, drives top priorities and business results. We’ve thought about this a lot. It’s our passion.

by Traci Pesch. Recognize This! Company culture, career opportunities and trust in senior leaders drive employee satisfaction far more than salary. Have you ever gone down rabbit holes on the web, where you start reading one article, then click an embedded link that seems intriguing, and then do it again in the next article? The next thing you realize, three hours have passed, you missed a phone call with a colleague, and worst, you missed your regular infusion of Diet Coke (okay, maybe that last part is just me). Unsurprisingly, all 25 spots are held by consulting and high-tech firms.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Providing an individualized experience to employees, rather than one-size-fits-all, is a key to making work human and improving well-being. One of the characteristics of modern organizations and the WorkHuman movement at large is making the workplace a more individualized experience as one part of a larger unified and human-centered culture. The primary consequence has been the assumption that what works for one employee will work for the next. One need look only as far as desk arrangements to see progress away from a one-size-fits-all mentality.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Research on best practices can help a company know what to focus on, but leaders need to consider how those practices play out in their own unique cultures and situations. Benchmarks and best practices can give company leaders insight into what those around them are doing, how much they are spending, and how well they are performing. These data are especially useful when aligned with the strategic direction a company has set, ensuring that time and resource investments are directed to where there is the most value.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! – One key to understanding why employees stay is culture, as long as we agree on what type of culture. Employee retention is a complex phenomenon that can be difficult to predict broadly, not to mention down to the level of a single employee. The latter is the topic of a recent blog post I read on HRE Online , which addressed why people leave organizations with great cultures. As the novelty or effect wears off, employees get bored and leave. Instead, the post argues, culture should be used for driving performance. 

by Lynette Silva. Recognize This! – We all have the ability to create more human workplaces for ourselves and those around us, simply by saying thank you. Recently we released our WorkHuman Research Institute Spring 2016 report, “ The ROI of Recognition in building a More Human Workplace,” assessing the attitudes and expectations of those fully employed from their workplaces today. (Be sure to tune in Thursday, April 14, for Derek Irvine ’s discussion with  Sharlyn Lauby of the findings of the report. You can register for the webinar here.). You and your work have value and meaning.”

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Tough times can bring difficult personnel decisions, but it is important to keep an emphasis on the human culture that will help employees weather the storm. Tough times often bring some interesting dilemmas for company leadership. I saw an article out recently from Strategy+Business that argued for strategic hiring during a downturn. Particularly interesting is this seeming paradox of investing in one area of the company while other areas are experiencing layoffs. And yet, like in the article above, it’s a smart decision.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! – As companies change their approach to performance reviews, attention also needs to go into how we can improve the pay discussions that used to go with them. Performance reviews have been top of mind for many in the HR industry and business leaders in general, including this blog , as we collectively seek out ways to either improve or replace the practice. We are to a point where a number of good proposals and ideas have been put forth, but very few have been tested to see how well they play in the real world and which ones can stand the test of time.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Research points to the importance of a caring and purpose-driven culture, leadership support, and values-aligned recognition in creating a human workplace. Globoforce’s WorkHuman Research Institute recently released a report on The ROI of Recognition in Building a Human Workplace. Below I outline several key findings from that report, and describe the steps that organizational leaders can take to create more human workplaces. Here’s how: Put the Right Culture in Place. Have Leaders Carry the Banner. Recognize for Core Values (Appreciate + Give Purpose).

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Research often helps to expand our understanding of interactions at work and the impact on productivity, even if it does come from dairy farms. First, for all of the skeptics: this is not an April Fool’s Day post. You’ll understand the reason for that disclaimer in a moment, but I thought today would be a good opportunity to look at the lighter side of recognition. Sometimes in the hunt for research, you come across a study that is too good to skip, regardless of how tangential the headline is to what you are actually looking for.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Competencies are one example of how organizations can achieve simplicity by paring down and leveraging everyday practices. I was thinking recently about how simplicity can be applied to improving the human experience at work. The idea grew from Josh Bersin’s report on creating irresistible organizations. In this report, he describes simplicity as fundamental, involving “the removal of formal bureaucratic overhead” while favoring “trust, autonomy, and a focus on cooperation.” As I thought more about it, there is an additional aspect of simplicity to point out.

by Lynette Silva. Recognize This! Successful work teams require a sense of psychological safety, which is key to working human. Newsflash – no person is an island, especially at work. Okay, maybe that’s not much of a newsflash. In today’s complex work and world cultures, little work gets done by an individual contributor working solely on a project all by herself. We are all part of teams working toward end goals. Even within those teams, I doubt any of us work on the same team for an extended length of time. And yet, so many engagement efforts seem to focus on the individual. Click To Tweet.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Employees say that pay is the most important attribute of culture, but looking deeper into why may offer a more complex picture. Managing culture can be a complex challenge for many business leaders, especially in terms of aligning what culture means to managers and HR teams versus what it means to employees. That these perspectives can differ probably isn’t much of a surprise, but new data may help shed some light on where those differences are. HR and managers cite ‘leading by example’ and ‘shared mission and values’ as toping their lists.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! — Inadvertently placing unnecessary rules on employee behavior, instead of offering more freedom, can hurt productivity. couple of days ago, I wrote a post that addressed some recent research on the negative impact that corporate award programs can have on firm productivity. Most of my emphasis there was on the problems inherent in the design of those types of attendance awards, and why such findings can’t be applied to true employee recognition programs. One finding did stick with me, though. which is one of the many books in my current reading list.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! – The negative consequences of specific award programs aren’t likely generalizable to well-designed rewards and recognition programs. recent academic study is catching a few headlines, suggesting that award programs can have negative motivational spillover effects and actually lead to decreased productivity. The study focused on an award program for attendance, implemented by a plant manager in one facility of a commercial laundry company. There are a number of reasons why I am not surprised by the findings once I had the chance to read the study.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Recognition of one’s peers can be daunting at first, but these steps can help employees build their skill and competency to achieve greater benefits. One of the challenges of implementing a social recognition solution is developing employees’ capacity and comfort around peer-to-peer aspects.  Especially where recognition has traditionally or predominantly been a top-down process, it can be difficult for all employees to know exactly where to begin when recognizing the contributions of their peers. Align personal impact to organizational values. When

by Lynette Silva. Recognize This! – All organizational change rides on changing the daily behaviors of the humans first. Company culture. What is it? What does it do? How How can you change it or at least manipulate it? All are questions we encounter often with the organizations we work with regularly. And it’s such a popular topic because leaders realize they are working within a strong and forceful culture, whether it’s the one they want, the one they inherited or the one they’ve “allowed to happen” over time. in Strategy + Business. What is organizational culture? Need additional proof?

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Important moments of innovation occur in the span of everyday work. Social recognition calls attention to these moments and creates a powerful culture of innovation. Reacting to so-called “20% Time” policies made popular by Google and others, a recent article on Inc. argues that innovation rarely comes from protected time or spaces away from normal work. Rather, great ideas “come from busy people who had ideas while doing their day job, stayed late, and tried things.”. First, it may be helpful to understand the rationale behind “20% Time”-type policies.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Organizations can benefit from integrating greater pay transparency with aspects of the organizational experience that also share the emphasis on transparency and participation. Modern organizations seem to be moving towards less structure and more transparency. At times, these shifts are the result of careful and deliberate discussions of leadership teams. At other times, they reflect reactions to external pressure, especially as technology facilitates the open sharing of data and information that was once more closely held.

by Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Organizations increasingly benefit from designs centered on networks of small teams. These models are a natural fit for similarly flexible and empowered approaches to recognition. One of the largest themes emerging from Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends 2016 report is the need for companies to be much more agile. In the face of rapid change and frequent disruption, a full 92% of companies put responsive organizational design at the top of their priority lists. What does the New Organization look like? Effectively Linking Practices with Design.

by Lynette Silva. Recognize This! Attitude is everything in our own success – and potentially in how we impact the success of others. When I think of extraordinary humans, frankly, Hollywood stars don’t usually rise to the top of the list. An exception – Michael J. Okay, I admit to the tiniest of crushes on his Alex P. Keaton character from the TV show Family Ties (and a much bigger crush on him as Marty McFly from Back to the Future ). Undoubtedly, he’s done great work in his “day job” as an actor. Many fight the disease every day with grace and determination. WorkHuman Michael J.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Amid debates around the effectiveness of fixed and variable executive pay, recognition is well positioned to motivate executive behavior and performance. Opinions of executive pay, and whether performance is better under fixed or variable schemes, depend in large part about basic assumptions of what motivates executives. This debate was recently the subject of a pair of articles in the Harvard Business Review , which I discuss in this post over at the Compensation Cafe. What are the arguments on both sides that recognition may address?

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Research suggests that supporting others is related to greater energy and well-being. By enhancing meaningfulness, employees and employers can amplify these benefits. potential pitfall of engagement initiatives is to overemphasize the role that companies have in motivating employee performance, while minimizing the active role that employees often take in creating and directing their experiences at work. Create meaningfulness at work by helping and recognizing others Click To Tweet. How did they get more energy from doing more at the office?

by Derek Irvine. Recognize This! – To be effective, recent research suggests incentives are best paired with recognition. Whether or not incentive programs are effective has been a long standing question, spanning multiple academic disciplines. Some point to studies demonstrating the motivational potential of performance incentives, while others point to a “crowding-out” of intrinsic motivation when incentives are present. Given the data that has amassed on either side of the debate, where do we stand today? Some recent research may help shed light on this question.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Employee Appreciation Day is a good way to show appreciation… but year-round social recognition is much more impactful. By now, most of you are probably aware of Employee Appreciation Day, which falls on the first Friday in March. The intent for the day is for the leadership of many companies to press pause and express gratitude for the contributions and hard work of their employees. While I can certainly agree with the sentiment behind the occasion, employee appreciation should not be confined to just a single day’s worth of celebration.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Social recognition is about creating “winners” who are strong contributors to the organization, not about creating “participation trophies.”. As recognition consultants, a question we sometimes hear is whether social recognition is just another flavor of the “everyone gets a trophy” or “participation medals” mentality. Questioners are often worried that these practices reward employees for just showing up, create an entitled rather than performance-driven workforce, or encourage other negative consequences. Social recognition a part of human experience at work.

By Brenda Pohlman. Recognize This! — Does your service anniversary program suffer from low expectations? Set loftier goals as the first step in adopting a modern approach that delivers results. Service anniversary recognition doesn’t typically make the news. So the recent story involving an absentee employee in Spain who was exposed by a long service award got my attention. As reported by El Mundo , the employee had been absent from his municipal job for six years while still on the payroll. The topic of anniversary program benefits is a curious one. Click To Tweet. Consistency.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Empowerment removes barriers to unleash employee motivation. For it to work, there needs to be a strong foundation of culture, recognition, and aligned incentives. Empowerment is a great idea that essentially has the organization getting out of an employee’s way- removing barriers, increasing motivation and productivity. But it can be tricky to implement effectively across all employees. Supported by these foundational elements that reinforce desired behaviors, empowerment can become an effective strategy in improving performance across the board. The solution?

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Peer-to-peer recognition is an effective and powerful way to scale up behaviors that align to organizational success. One of the most difficult things for leaders is scaling great ideas, behaviors, or performance- bringing excellence to more people and more places across an entire organization. This is no easy feat, but it can be done with the right culture. One of the best things a company can do is nurture a culture of recognition. To scale a culture of recognition and achieve these benefits requires two important and interacting pieces.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Praising conversations are a key tool for new managers across generations, improving their capacity for communication and relationship building. There is no shortage of skills that new managers need to develop as they transition from individual contributors to leading people for the first time. One of the most overlooked yet essential skills is the ability to have a simple conversation, praising a direct report for behaviors aligned to goal achievement and core values. The value of praise is immense.

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Distinctive cultures may grab headlines, but shared values are what make them successful. And every company can achieve success by recognizing values. Imagine for a moment that your own company’s culture is run like a professional sports team. Performers are highly rewarded for their contributions. Everyone else is deemed unnecessary and cut from the roster, to make room for future performers to enter the role. Salaries are all in the top 10% for the respective job roles. Sound far-fetched? In fact, I was reading a recent article on Fast Co. Here’s why.

by Traci Pesch. Recognize This! Peer recognition serves a critical role, but managers must not abdicate their responsibility to notice and praise employees, too. In my role as a consultant, one of my favorite job duties is traveling to client locations to lead and facilitate strategy sessions. Other than missing an occasional volleyball game or school event for my kids, it’s usually fairly easy to handle logistically – unless my road warrior husband also happens to be traveling at the same time. That’s when we bring in the support team – the grandparents. We missed you!

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Incentives are only effective when they match the timeframes of employees’ motivation to perform. In light of a recent Willis Towers Watson report on the ineffectiveness of annual incentives, I wanted to take a closer look at how and why they motivate employee behavior. For me, it was important to start at the very foundation and really look into what we mean when we talk about annual incentives. As I go into more detail in that post: Operational realities aside, there is even a more basic contradiction in terms underlying this notion of an “annual incentive.”

by Lynette Silva. Recognize This! – The Fourth Industrial Revolution shouldn’t be about preserving our humanity, but letting our humanity guide and direct the revolution and its outcomes. Do you follow news out of the World Economic Forum ? The Forum defines as its mission, “Engaging the foremost political, business and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industrial agendas.” This year, one of the overarching topics was: “ Preserving our humanity during the Fourth Industrial Revolution.   We live in an incredible time. Everything about us is under question.”

By Derek Irvine. Recognize This! — There are people at work whose contributions we might miss. culture of recognition helps to make sure we don’t. came across a recent New York Times Corner Office article with Walt Bettinger. He is the CEO of the Charles Schwab Corporation and shared a powerful lesson he learned as an undergraduate student. He was enrolled in a business course in his senior year and was laser-focused on maintaining a perfect grade point average. It all came down to the final exam, for which he spent a great deal of time studying and memorizing.

by Derek Irvine. Research is split on what happens to the motivation of people who see others get recognized. One solution is to simply recognize everyone. There is quite the interesting debate shaping up among researchers looking into the motivational potential of recognition. The specific question under investigation focuses on the impact that recognition has not on recipients, but on the motivations of the people surrounding those recipients. Simply put, if I see you being recognized for excellent work, will I be motivated to step up my game or not? In two simple words: include everyone!

by Derek Irvine. Recognize This! – Employees choose to give more and behave in desired ways based on the environment they are being asked to engage in. Employee Engagement Is Dead! Long Live Employee Engagement! What sounds like a non-sequitur may not be. Last week on Compensation Cafe I blogged: “Is Employee Engagement Moot in Today’s High Stress Work Environments?” ” in which I reflected on the seeming stagnation of employee engagement stats in the research across many organizations. argue: No, the error lies in how we are  pursuing  employee engagement.

by Derek Irvine. Recognize This! — Recognizing cultural contribution instead of cultural fit is a valuable way to reinforce the contributions of “Originals.”. recently caught a piece on the Marketplace Morning radio program, interviewing Adam Grant (one of our WorkHuman speakers from 2015!). He was sharing some of the interesting findings from his new book, Originals. think like most of us, Adam initially expected that the nonconformists at the center of the book- the ones driving innovation and upturning the status quo- would be passionate and risk-taking types.

by Derek Irvine. Recognize This! — Whether you favor a competitive or humane workplace, or something in between, a culture of recognition can be valuable. More and more is written these days about the best ways to interact with each other in the workplace. And more and more, very different camps are forming and battle lines being drawn to convince you which techniques and tactics are superior. In one camp are what I call the brutal realists. These are the folks that are proud of cutthroat cultures and believe in the inherent, zero-sum competition of business.

by Derek Irvine. Recognize This! — The hierarchy of needs can have a lot of value, but only if we really understand how needs are fulfilled in the workplace. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has staying power. It may often be reduced to an oversimplified pyramid, as I’ve written about before, and has its share of critics , but there is a silver lining! The longer a theory hangs around, the better the chances that folks can return to the original thinking, debunk common myths , and pick out the true value of the thing. Where do we stand right now? What does recent research say about Maslow?

by Derek Irvine. Recognize This! — Aligning individual behavior to core values can be a challenge, but recognition is one way to win over that last mile. Those who know transportation logistics or supply chain management are very familiar with the “ last mile problem.” Fans of online retailers may also have some personal experience with this challenge: a package is sitting in a distribution center in the next town over instead of on your doorstep. There is an analog to this problem in the business world when it comes to executing strategy.

by Derek Irvine. Recognize This! — Accountability requires a clear mental map for achieving results. Recognition enables everyone to share that same map. How do I get my people to be more accountable for results?” is the essential question from a recent post over at Harvard Business Review. It’s the kind of question that usually follows some type of failure at work. Someone misses a project deadline or comes in over budget. Forecasted performance goals go unmet. suspect systemic accountability problems actually have to do with a lack of clarity and coherence. Here’s why.

by Derek Irvine. Recognize This! — No single approach to meeting employee needs serves all employees all the time. Typically, I’m not the type of person to keep score. Then an article in Huffington Post about a SCORE acronym for what matters most to employees caught my eye. Click over to Compensation Cafe for the full post and why I disagree with the author’s assertion that Stability and Compensation are less important to high-performing employees than Opportunity, Responsibility and Environment. Read the post for the rest, and tell me your take in comments.

by Derek Irvine. Recognize This! Trends are often captivating, but it takes a unified vision to see how they all can fit together to work for you. If you are anything like me, you enjoy the articles of trends to watch in 2016, what HR should look like in 2020, and what the blue chips are up to. There are so many interesting ideas, it can be hard to know what to pay attention to, let alone what might be a fit for your own organization’s style, culture, and strategy. In a Perfect World…. Imagine you are given free rein as an HR professional for your company over the next year.

by Derek Irvine. Recognize This! — Employees who engage their authentic selves at work contribute to unparalleled employee and customer experiences. I was reading a recent Forbes article that discussed the distinction between employees’ authentic engagement versus scripted service in creating an unparalleled customer experience. One quote from that article really jumped out at me. “Of course, this [creating authentic engagement] is more challenging than doing things by rote: challenging for the employee and challenging for the manager.”. Why is it so hard?

by Derek Irvine. Recognize This! — Pressing pause gives employees time to reflect on their own work and the work of everyone around them. Social recognition brings power and frequency to those pauses. A new year, a new chance to buckle down, focus on priorities and get to work – right? Actually, now may be a good time to pause, sit back and reflect instead. In my post today on Compensation cafe, I explain why. These are the same principles behind everything from mindfulness  to leadership and high-potential development.