From Internalconsistency.com, these slides from a webinar highlight how employee recognition empowers employees to perform while management by exception only reinforces compliance. Motivate employees with frequent recognition to create a culture of engagement.
RE Capital's Visionary Leadership under Newman Leech
Â
Recognition that fuels empowerment by @I_Consistency
1. Recognition That Fuels
Empowerment
How Employee Recognition Reinforces
Performance & Creates Motivation
July 30, 2012
By Josh Kuehler
Internal Consistency, Inc.
www.InternalConsistency.com
1
2. Objective
To lay out a synthesized argument that
supports employee recognition as a
performance management model â one that
yields higher performance while creating a
positive work environment.
2
3. Approach
⢠Organizational Psychology perspective
â Organizational behavior
â Systems approach
⢠Scholar-Practitioner=Applying research
⢠Stats joke: In God we trust, all else must bring
data.
3
5. Empowerment vs. Engagement
⢠Engaged workforce
â Discretionary effort
â Emotional commitment to organization
⢠Empowered individuals
â Freedom to choose
â Effort is reinforced
Recognition ď Empowerment ď Engagement
5
6. Do You Really Want
Empowerment?
⢠âYou are now empowered- act
accordinglyâ and then nothing
happens
â Mgmt concludes âthese people really
just want someone to tell them what
to doâ
⢠Barrier to empowerment: When
managing others, the
reinforcement of control systems
â Sends the message âwe really
donât trust peopleâ.
6
7. Harnessing Empowerment
Sharing power with a view toward enhancing
employee motivation and investment in their
work.
(Zhang & Bartol, 2010)
7
9. Meaningfulness
⢠Feeling that oneâs work is personally
important.
â Help employees understand the importance of his/her
contribution to the organization1
⢠Role of Recognition:
â Highlighting the contribution
â Reinforce and emphasize meaning
1. (Zhang & Bartol, 2010)
9
10. Impact
⢠Represents the degree to which one views
oneâs behaviors as making a difference in
work outcomes1
â Opposite of learned helplessness
⢠Role of Recognition:
â Acknowledgement of the personâs role in determining
outcomes
1. (Zhang & Bartol, 2010)
10
11. Autonomy
⢠Participation in decision making gives employees a
feeling of greater control over immediate work
situation and enhanced sense that his or her own
behaviors can make a difference in work results. 1
⢠Opposite of autonomy is supervision, a hygiene
factor.
⢠Role of Recognition:
â Highlights the personâs decision-making ability.
1. (Zhang & Bartol, 2010)
11
12. Competence
⢠Self-efficacy, or belief in oneâs ability to
successfully perform tasks.1
â Managers can express confidence in competence in high
performance.
⢠Congruent with Achievement; a motivator
⢠Role of Recognition:
â Fulfilling self-efficacy. Reinforcing the belief.
1. (Zhang & Bartol, 2010)
12
13. What Lies Underneath
⢠True term is Psychological Empowerment.
⢠While the term is performance management,
it really should be called behavior
management.
â We forget that people are people and behave
(react) to events.
⢠The events in our environment shape us.
13
15. Performance Mgmt Outcomes
⢠MBE and controlling techniques will get you
compliance.
â Rewarding following the rules
â Reduced risk taking
⢠Recognition techniques will get you drive.
â Directly rewarding discretionary effort
â Creates safe environment to explore alternatives
15
16. So how does recognition really
affect a person?
16
18. Herzbergâs Model
Hygiene: Lead to Motivator: Lead to
dissatisfaction satisfaction
⢠Company policy ⢠Achievement
⢠Supervision ⢠Recognition
⢠Relationship w/ supervisor ⢠Work itself
⢠Work conditions ⢠Responsibility
Tame these factors Flame these factors
18
22. Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
⢠Going toward what we want
â Competence
⢠If you donât know where you are going, youâll
end up somewhere elseâ â Yogi Berra
22
26. Role of Recognition
⢠Mgr recognition is a booster shot
â 77% to 91% when high favorable opinion
â 33% to 52% when low favorable opinion
(Towers Perrin, 2010)
26
27. So how can we make giving
recognition easier?
27
28. Meaningful Recognition
⢠ARC:
â Action: Here is what was done (behavior)
â Result: Here is what happened because
â Consequence: Here is why that is important
28
32. Reinforcing Performance
⢠If they receive no support or no
reinforcement, the empowerment cycle
breaks and employees feel misled.
⢠When system reinforce individual
empowerment, the process can be
regenerative and dynamic
32
33. Small Shifts, Consistently
Best Buy has already had success in connecting
improved employee-engagement scores to
store performance: it found that for every
10th of a point it boosted the former, its
stores saw a $100,000 increase in operating
income.â â CFO Magazine, June 1, 2007
33
34. Characteristics of Empowered
Employee
⢠Have sense of self-determination (autonomy)
â free to choose how to do their work; not micromanaged
⢠Have a sense of meaning
â feel their work is important to them; they care about what
they are doing
⢠Have a sense of competence
â Confident about their ability to do their work well
⢠Have a sense of impact
â Believe they have influence on their work unit; others
listen to their ideas
34
35. Conclusion
⢠Going toward what you want is more effective
than going away from what you donât want
⢠âAscensionâ approach
⢠External motivation is short term
⢠Recognition calls attention to competence
⢠Consistently applied will transform
environment into encouragement & support
35
36. Resources
â˘Gallup, Inc. (2010). Employee engagement: Whatâs your engagement ratio
â˘Goldsmith, M. (2007). Do you have any suggestions to help me do a better job of
providing positive recognition?, Harvard Business Review.
http://blogs.hbr.org/goldsmith/2007/09/how_do_i_provide_meaningful_re_1.html
â˘Herzberg, F. (1987). One more time: How do you motivate employees, Harvard
Business Review, 5- 16.
â˘Towers Perrin. (2010). Turbocharging employee engagement: The power of
recognition from managers. Part 1- the engagement engine.
â˘Zhang, X., and Bartol, K. (2010). Linking empowering leadership and employee
creativity: The influence of psychological empowerment, intrinsic motivation, and
creative process engagement. Academy of Management Journal, 53, 107-128.
36
Our intention today is to give you a well laid out story that makes the argument for employee recogntion as a performance management model. Weâll show that this model of recognition incorporates the drivers of motivation and make the case that performance is consistently higher with recognition.
Hereâs the approach we take at internal Consistency. Behavior is the focus and we realize that behavior doesnât happen in a vaccuum but instead is a reaction to the surrounding environment. Lastly, we buy into data driven decisions, so weâll provide research and data to back up our claims.
Here is what weâll cover today. Weâll better understand what employee empowerment is, How motivation fits into the picture and then give you some tools to make giving recognition easier to promote empowerment.
Here is a quick description between empowerment and engagement. A common definition of engagement is âdiscretionary effortâ. Discretion means the freedom to choose. And effort must be reinforced if it is desired. And so we see a chain of events. Recognizing effort leads to the choice to continue such efforts resulting in an engaging workforce
Part of having empowered employees is giving them power to take action and make a difference. Here we see Peter Parker realizing the power he has as his alter ego Spiderman. So letâs learn about what makes up EmpowermentâŚ
There are 4 components to an empowered employee. We will discuss each of these components and show how employee recognition highlights each.
Meaningfulness is the âWhy am I doing this?â For those managers overseeing Gen Y employees, this is even more important to highlight. How is this work important Recognition is a response to the previous quesiton. Recognition letâs the employee know that their work IS important. If the work is important to the boss, and attention is given to the work, then it carries more meaning for the employee.
Having an impact in oneâs job is a sense of progress. This is really the opposite of learned helplessness. Recognizing employeeâs outcomes or effort shows that their effort did make an impact⌠on you, the manager. The presense of recognition is a demonstration of impact. You can show demonstrated impact, by offering recognition.
Autonomy is allowing the freedom to make decisions on how to conduct work. Again, with Gen Y employees, theyâll want to decide HOW to do the work and how to get it done. You can see that the opposite is supervision, which weâll discuss later as it relates to motivation. Recognition indirectly speaks to the personâs ability to decide how to carry out the work. Recognition shows that you as a manager have confidence in the way the employee does his/her work. And speaking of confidence in workâŚ
The final part of Empowerment is Competence. This is likened to Self-Efficacy, which is the âI can do thisâ aspect to oneâs work. Recognition helps to reinforce the belief. It provides support for performing.
As I mentioned before, we apply an organizational psychology approach and what we are really talking about is called Psychological Empowerment. This means that you, as a leader, can take steps to provide mental support for performance. Another distinction to make is what we call performance management. That term sounds impersonal. We should be looking at behavior that leads to performance. Afterall, we are working with people and our surroundings have a huge influence on our behavior. For this discussion, Iâm going to compare two types of environments to demonstrate how they affect use differently.
Letâs compare Management by Exception and continuous recognition. Now this graph is just an example using fake data. The blue line represents what MBE might look like. Something breaks or goes off the rails and then returns to normal. The green line, highlights successes and effort, which is then reinforce and replicated again, and again.
MBE= compliance, by the book, because if you risk something and it doesnât work right the very first time, negative consequenses happen Meanwhile Recognition acknowledges that effort was taken to take the risk, and even if it didnât work the first time, the effort was desired.
Frederick Herzberg studied factors that lead to both satisfaction and factors that lead to dissatisfaction at work. He found these 2 factors. Hygiene factors such as Supervision lead to employee dissatisfaction, while recognition and achievement lead to employee satisfaction. Here, letâs take a look at the results
Going to the left indicates dissatisfaction and bars going to the right indicate satisfaction. You can see that Achievement and Recognition are the strongest motivators, while policies and supervision (which inhibit autonomy) lead to dissatisfaction. Thse are external factors reated to motivation; now lets look directly at what motivation is..
Motivation can come from outside or from within. On the left, we see the too frequently used carrot and stick and on the right we see Daniel Pink, Author of Drive, a great book on what motivates employees. Managers and leaders should steer away from carrots and sticks and incorporate instinsic motivators. Letâs look at some data
Here are theresults from a Towers Watson study looking at the types of incentives and the effectivness of each. Most common: cash based bonuses. Meanwhile there are three other incentives that are more effective. And they point to intrinsic motivation. A secondary benefit is that the more effective incentives donât cost the company any financial resources, which is important in this unstable economy. Hereâs another reason why recognition is better than MBE
Recall that competence or self-efficacy empowers employees. Thatâs because it hits on the âI Canâ. Leaders can use recognition to create a self-fulfilling prophecy by Going toward what you do want instead of away from what you donât want. And the quote by Yogi Berra has never been more true
Iâd like to tell a quick story about going toward what we want. The story goes like this. Officials in Kansas noticed that many people driving across I-70 in the winter would spin out and crash into the powerline poles. I-70 in Kansas is long, flat, and straight, so how could this be? Well as people were spinning out of control, they would notice the poles, not wanting to hit them, focused their attention on the poles, and end up running into them. So, Letâs move toward what we do want. Not away from what we donât want. This is fairly similar toâŚ
Romanticizing the âovercoming all oddsâ stories. The movie Rudy is another great story, but shouldnât be a model for performance at work. Instead we should take the research from Martin Seligman and apply our strengths. Applying our strenghts at work and in our personal lives has demonstrated a strong link to happpiness and satisfaction. Letâs look at some data about strengths
Gallup asked employees about the covnersations they had with their managers, And they looked at how these conversations differed by the levels of engagement. Employees who felt ignored were 40X more likelty to be actively dis