April 2012 Blog Posts (21)

Recognize This! – CFOs say communication and recognition are most lacking in employee management.

What do Chief Financial Officers – those charged with managing the money – say is most lacking in employee management? For more than 1,400 CFOs from US companies who were asked just that in a recent survey by Accountemps, the answer is simple – communicate more and say “thanks.”

Most…

Recognize This! – A vibrant, positive culture of recognition that delivers bottom-line results must be real to all employees, not just a few.

The rise of the importance of organization culture in the last few years has been quite striking. No, wait. That’s not true. The rise in the realization of the importance of culture in the last few years has been striking.

Culture – the spoken and unspoken rules and mores by which an organization functions – has…

Recognize This! –Saying “thank you” and remembering our attitude is a choice should be lessons we all learn and never forget.

An interesting book that was quite popular in America in the late 1980s was All I Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. The book was a collection of musings, including the title piece, which gave referenced key life…

Recognize This! – Excessively high productivity cannot be sustained without intervention.

One of the major outcomes of the Great Recession is a dramatic increase in employee productivity. This is not surprising as the employees who survived round after round of layoffs naturally picked up the work of their former colleagues.

Now the question becomes how sustainable is that increased productivity over time? Sure, employees who feared they might be next on the…

Recognize This! – Lack of complete and total understanding of your recognition & reward activities globally opens your organization to financial risk.

Thought it’s a bit like choosing which of your children is your favorite, one of the most important services my Insight consulting team offers is our recognition program audit. Just hearing the word “audit” makes people think of long, boring…

Recognize This! – Employee of the Month programs create competition and resentfulness, not appreciative work environments.

Compensation pros – when you think of base pay in today’s organization, do you think in terms of guaranteed annual increases or in some form of pay for performance?

Most realize the former is the method a century old, while pay for performance in some guise is the far more modern approach. Yet, these same compensation and benefits pros…

Recognize This! — Jack Welch puts company culture ahead of results. Do you?

When you hear the name “Jack Welch,” what do you think of first? “Neutron Jack,” famous for an (often misunderstood) employee differentiation method that resulted in the bottom 10% of performers being let go annually? A powerhouse industry captain who helmed GE for…

Recognize This! — “The enemy you know” isn’t a good enough reason to keep relying on a broken process that demoralizes employees.

Eve Tahmincioglu ran a story on MSNBC.com today on just this topic. Jumping off of results from the…

Recognize This! — You can’t have a meaningful discussion about performance, goals, and successes in an environment of fear, dread and anxiety.

How do you feel about performance reviews? Personally, I think the annual performance review (as most commonly implemented) is broken. It’s too infrequent, too fraught with anxiety and fear (for the manager as well as the employee), and too ineffective at doing what it is supposed to do – deliver solid, actionable praise…

Recognize This! – Stereotypes or fear of failure should never impede your goals for strategic employee recognition.

I’m honoured to share with you today a couple of recent article on recognition and reward programs in which I’m cited.

Incentive Magazine, “An Online World for Retailers and Catalog…

Recognize This! — Bottom-up recognition and feedback leads to far more data points for more accurate decision making.

Many long-term readers of my blog know I started out blogging on the GloboBlog, the blog for my company, Globoforce. About a year ago, I switched over to blogging here on…

Recognize This! — Exponential Engagement enables and energizes employees to drive two times the operating margin.

Once again, Abhishek Mittal has pointed us to an excellent resource on the next step in employee engagement – exponential engagement in this video:…

Recognize This! – It’s not “engagement” if it’s not freely and willingly given.

What exactly is “employee engagement?” Most definitions I see somehow reference “discretionary effort.” But my latest favorite definition of employee engagement comes from the HR Capitalist,…

Recognize This! – It’s not “engagement” if it’s not freely and willingly given.

What exactly is “employee engagement?” Most definitions I see somehow reference “discretionary effort.” But my latest favorite definition of employee engagement comes from the HR Capitalist,…

Time and Attendance automation not only benefits hourly workforces, but white collar environments, as well.



The benefits of automating time and attendance processing in businesses with hourly employees are obvious and many. From guaranteeing accurate calculations to reducing time theft to eliminating paper records, time accounting systems like At-Trac from LBi are proven to reduce overall payroll expenses by as much as 8%, according to studies by the American Payroll…