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A recent Towers Watson report Turbocharging Employee Engagement - The Power of Recognition from Managers demonstrates the significant impact manager recognition has on engagement.

There are three components of engagement: rational (employees understand what they're supposed to do), emotional (they are passionate) and motivational (they voluntarily work longer hours).

Not surprisingly, an engaged employee who understands his or her job, cares about the company and works weekends creates more business value than a disengaged employee.

Engagement is primarily driven by three things: 1) leadership quality; 2) development opportunities; and 3) a feeling of autonomy (aka 'trust').

We know this.  Few companies have a plan in place to increase shareholder value by acting on it but it's fairly common knowledge.

Less well-known is the  significant role direct supervisors play in the engagement mix, which was the key finding of the Towers Watson report:

Even companies that do nothing to stimulate employee engagement in terms of skilled executive leadership or providing development opportunities can boost engagement by almost 60% if managers recognize and appreciate employee performance.

So, this is where I tell you to go recognize your employees, right?  Not exactly.

First of all, employee recognition is an acquired leadership skill just like any other and requires a bit more discipline and effort than saying, 'Hey, Bob, nice job on that, uh... thing you did.' 

The kind of recognition that drives employee engagement requires managers to comunicate frequently and candidly with employees, define clear performance objectives, trust people to do their jobs, hold them accountable, praise sincerely and reward performance consistently and fairly.

So, manager skill is one potential barrier to employee recognition that can be addressed with training, mentoring, experience or if necessary, removal.

The other barrier is where most organizations miss the boat when it comes to employee recognition: They focus on the how of recognition rather than the who.

Imagine an employee who just completed a critical project with high quality.  The manager praises the employee's work both privately and publicly and refers the employee to executive management as a high potential.  The employee feels highly engaged and ready to work even harder next time.

That's really great but what happens next?

A.  Executive management smiles on the employee for being a high potential and starts thinking of possible career paths that include the manager's job.

B.  Executive management smiles on the manager for promoting employee engagement and starts thinking of possible career paths that include a larger span of control.

If you chose A over B, I'm afraid you just killed your recognition program.

In today's competitive economic climate it takes an unusually secure manager to hold a high performing employee up to the limelight where someone might start wondering if the employee could do the manager's job.

It isn't enough to recognize employees. The key to a successful recognition program is to recognize managers who recognize employees.  

Picture courtesy of pixabella.com.

Laura Schroeder is a Compensation Strategist at Workday, headquartered in Pleasanton, CA.  She has nearly fifteen years of experience designing, developing, implementing and evangelizing global Human Capital Management (HCM) solutions and holds a certificate in Strategic Human Resources Practices from Cornell University.  Her articles and interviews on HCM topics have been published in the US, Europe and Asia.  She lives in Munich, Germany and enjoys cooking, reading, writing, kick boxing and spending time with friends and family. If you want to read more from Laura, check out her talent management blog Working Girl or follow her on Twitter @WorkGal.

Comments

[Drew Hawkins]

I would agree with this. Recognition should have an effective trickle-down effect to really work. An effective program shouldn't skip over anyone.

[Laura Schroeder]

Thank you for commenting, Drew. I completely agree - talent management strategies that forget to factor in the leadership competence and human feelings of managers will be less effective overall.