Many employers believe it’s unnecessary to reward employees for a job they are getting paid to do, but what employers need to understand is that materialistic reward systems are not at all the same as recognizing employees …

This is exactly what I talk about in my speaker program on You’re The Person I WANT To Keep: Employee Motivation and Engagement. You must praise people when they do an exceptional job – when they knock the ball out of the ballpark. Yet, praise – recognition for doing an exception job above and beyond the call of duty – is frequently not mentioned, paraded in front of peers, or given an appropriate round of applause.

And that’s a complete turn-off to your best performers. They’ll start leaving over time when required praise is not given.

When was the last time you gave your employees praise for an exceptional job well done?

Do you keep a list of every major accomplishment for the entire organization day by day – whether the accomplishment was by a team or an individual? If you don’t know who is making great impact in your organization, how can you praise? If you don’t praise, how can you expect your employees to be satisfied, motivated, turned on, and engaged?

Starting tomorrow, begin making a list everytime someone in your organization EXCEEDS expectations (I guess this means you need to start defining expectations). Within minutes of hearing of this extraordinary achievement, some executive should be patting that individual on the back and giving sincere and heart-felt praise. This tiny, almost trivial activity will generate a cultural revolution within your organization. Try it for a few months and see if it doesn’t dramatically improve employee satisfaction, performance, and engagement.

Barry Deutsch

Read the full article on www.presentaplaque.com for the details for giving praise as a key component of a non-monetary reward and recognition system.

Let’s continue down this path of Employee Engagement. Here are a few additional articles you might want to read regarding employee engagement:

• Provide Employee Recognition Through The Social Network (lockergnome.com)
• Is Your Grass Greener May 2010 (slideshare.net)
• The Current State Of Company Loyalty and Employee Engagement (slideshare.net)
• 3 Reasons Why Employee Engagement is a Scam (AuthenticOrganizations.com)
• Recommended: How Can HR Help Drive Up Employee Engagement? @ StumbleUpon (fredzimny.wordpress.com)
• The Power of Social Media: An Employee Engagement Project (socialmediatoday.com)
• Employee Engagement (punkrockhr.com)
• Daily Engagement: Baseline Data and Goal Setting (myventurepad.com)
• Craig Newmark: Getting serious about giving rank and file more power (huffingtonpost.com)
• Getting serious about giving rank and file more power (cnewmark.com)

We talk extensively about Employee Engagement in our Vistage Group Presentation “You’re the Person I Want To Keep”. Our experience over the last decade is that very few companies actively implement programs, activities, and process to embed employee engagement into the fabric of their organizations.

If you don’t start doing it NOW – what’s the risk as the economy starts to improve and more employees start to look to see if the “grass is greener” somewhere else?

Barry

David Zinger is another of my favorite bloggers with great insight to improving employee engagement, culture, satisfaction, and commitment. He writes a Blog titled “David Zinger Employee Engagement“. In a recent blog posting, David writes about Adam Bryant’s weekly column in the Sunday New York Times called “Corner Office”.

Adam interviews various CEOs and Presidents in his weekly column on topics of leadership. In one of these columns, he interviewe arbara J. Krusiek, CEO of the Calvert Group on Career Ladder? It’s Time for a New Metaphor.

I would highly recommend reading the blog posting or the original article in the Corner Office Column.

There are a few great nuggets to take back and think about implementing within your company to improve employee engagement, excitement, passion, satisfaction – not to mention retention.

Barry

Evil HR Lady is one of my favorite blogs to follow. Suzanne Lucas, the funny and sometimes frank HR Guru behind Evil HR Lady, recently wrote on her blog asking for samples of Your Favorite or Least Favorite Policy.

I almost doubled over in laughter reading some of these Dilbert-ish comments.

What are the tribal policies that are in place in your company or organization that make you want to go home and either laugh till you cry, or cry while pounding on the wall? Where do these come from?

How many of your employees are turned off to your culture when they hear, read, see policies that have no grounding in common sense.

Why do you put policies in place that cause your employees to question your sanity?

File this one under “How I Encourage My Best People to Leave and Join My Competitors”.

Barry Deutsch