Employee Recognition Community

Social media is certainly becoming a powerful factor in today’s world and in individual lives. The current social networking phenomenon is more than just a trend... it's a revolution!!!

So a few of us thought we should get on the social media revolution movement and proposed the creation of an employee recognition community. We discussed some guidelines around how we saw it functioning.

Here’s what we drafted:

* Create an authentic recognition community.
* Provide a source for member to member service and active contribution.
* Provide a nonpartisan free recognition community.
* Enhance and improve employee recognition

We knew once it was up an out there it would take a life of its own. After all, social media is all about connecting, contributing, and reaching out to other like minded people.

Will you become a part of this new community? Will you share what you know? Will you ask questions so we can all help?

If you are as passionate about recognition as I am, pop on over to the Employee Recognition Community and join right now!

Development of Trust for Authentic Recognition

How do we really create authentic and "real" recognition? Managers and employees alike are concerned what "others" think when they attempt to give positive feedback to a fellow worker.

The secret behind giving Real Recognition is building trust first so that giving of recognition is perceived and received correctly.

How do you do that, you ask?

Development of Trust can be formulaically shown using the following attributes as:

Consistency : Credibility : Trust : Relationship

Let’s look at each of these attributes.

Consistency

You need to prove to people you mean what you say and you do what you say you will do. This will require the following types of behaviours:

Behaviours
Prioritizes relationships (BlackBerry, Outlook, planner; Post-It Note(R) reminders); Self-discipline and self-management; demonstrate in speaking, writing and actions respect and recognition; values driven;

Credibility

By being consistent in your actions and words to people you work with displays a level of credibility in everyone’s eyes. It means you can be counted upon. To develop greater credibility means living the following behaviours:

Behaviours
Purpose driven; principle based; respect and common courtesy; valuing people for who they are and what they do; being transparent; being available; appreciative; calculated risk-taker;

Trust

Once you have demonstrated consistent actions proving yourself to be a credible person, you are likely to be a strong candidate of someone who can be trusted. Further characteristics necessary for being trust-worthy may include:

Behaviours
Confident; caring; right intentions; ethical decisions; admitting when wrong; immediate corrections or restitution of wrongs; logical and emotional; right results; right reasons; belief in others and self;

Relationship

All of these attributes and behaviours lead to the formation of positive relationships with those around us – those at work as well as at home. We display all of the above behaviours and many others, as well as these relationship focused skills as well, i.e.:

Behaviours
People focused: caring, concern, authentic, listening, action oriented, sincere and specific, kind acts, genuine positive feedback, encouraging, affirming, meaningful giving.

Consistency : Credibility : Trust : Relationship

These four attributes and some of the correlating behaviours shown above, are foundational qualities and skills needed to be able to give authentic recognition that can be positively felt.

Real Recognition is about Emotions

Real Recognition is an emotional response – it’s all about feelings.

Consider these facts from brain science research: First off, emotional data or stimuli, receives the second highest priority for processing in short term memory. This means that emotions can actually take over the rational processing of the brain. They tend to impact upon the conscious memory.

Recognition Significance: Powerful and meaningful expressions of praise and appreciation touch the “heart” of a person more than the rational and logical side of our mind. Is it any wonder that 59 percent of people we surveyed re-read Thank You cards they’ve received simply because they want to recall the feelings of being acknowledged?

Now, building upon this emotional connection, look at the execution of recognition giving, how you give it or how events are planned and perceived by the awardees. Brain research shows that events associated with strong emotions, whether good or bad, are usually more easily recalled.
So how you give the award, the staging, the music being played, etc. can all trigger emotional memories – positive or negative.

Recognition Significance: Plan out very carefully how you will present your recognition. Personalize the delivery and orchestrate the atmosphere of the recognition event with attention to detail that will make this memorable for the recipient. These emotional memories tend to be compared in the unconscious memory of past experiences.

So be very mindful that in giving recognition to those we work with and those at home, we are creating trigger points of experiential memory.

Let’s all outweigh any negatives from the past by creating a positive emotional response by giving those around us Real Recognition the right way.

Perceive to Receive

Why the act of recognizing Jane and her correlating positive reaction does does not yield the same results with John is a fascinating study of cognitive perception.

Our brains have greater impact upon successful recognition than we think.

Note, the act of giving recognition is a new stimulus, or set of information, for the brain to process. In fact, the brain goes through a minimum of four steps to process such information.

Register and Compare
So Bob approaches John and thanks him for getting a monthly report completed within three days after the end of the month. The first thing our brain does is looks back within the memory bank to compare this information of being “thanked”. Novel experiences are hard to process as there is nothing to compare to it to. Similar experiences from the past can actually be ignored and become status quo. This is especially the case when we give the generalized statements like “Thanks for getting this report in on time,” or simply “Great job!”

Calculate Causation
Our brain then goes into detective mode and tries to observe and perceive this data of “recognition received” to figure out the “why” – “what does Bob really want?”, “He never thanked me before, why now?”, “Why is he always so trite?” And based upon whatever past experiences we have had we actually formulate a theory for the cause for this novel or oft repeated expression of acknowledgement.

Predicting Outcome
Based on our formulation of a theory we predict what will be the outcome from the expressed thanks. “I knew it! – Bob just wants me to get another report done for him”. Or it might end up being, “Wow! Bob is becoming pretty genuine with everyone around the office. Looks like he has changed!” When we generate a correct hypothesis our brain can resume a more placid state and ignore such interactions. When we can’t seem to put things together, then something else happens.

Cognitive Dissonance
Cognitive dissonance is the process of dealing with discomfort of two contradictory ideas at the same time. “How come Bob is being nice to me all of a sudden?” So we end up having a motivation drive to put some order to our attitudes, beliefs and behaviours. We do this by either changing or justifying our attitudes, beliefs and behaviours. So the ideas we hold in our brain about people, places and things are pretty locked in until proven otherwise.

So as you can see it takes our brain quite a bit of processing to perceive recognition actions or words as actually recognition. We had better make our attempts at recognition giving more “brain friendly” by doing some things like the following:

1. Always be specific with expressing what the person did and how that made a difference.

2. Strive to be consistent with your recognition giving behaviours so it cannot be misinterpreted.

3. Understand where other people’s brains are at and prepare to address people’s (their brains!) concerns.