Best-Of-The-Best Recognition - This Is How You Do It!

Our team was recently invited to attend the annual recognition banquet for a large and successful healthcare client. What an amazing and powerful night it was to see xxx awardees from all walks of life be recognized for their outstanding actions and results that supported the organization and its patients and fellow employees.


The evening could serve as a primer for “How to Run a Recognition Banquet:”

• Funnel the recognition awardees with the most compelling stories to a cross-functional team to analyze and choose the best individuals and teams.

• Choose those individuals and teams whose actions and results really made a difference

• Throw the banquet at the most elegant venue – in this case, the ballroom of an upscale hotel

• Provide a cocktail hour so the awardees can relax and meet other awardees

• Fete the awardees with a magnificent dinner

• Have the process organized and orchestrated so that it moves quickly and efficiently

• Focus the evening on telling the awardees’ stories and inviting them to the stage to be recognized by their own manager and top management

• Celebrate the passion and emotion while embracing the smiles and tears that spontaneously erupt

• Marvel at how much highly engaged healthcare employees really do care about their jobs, their patients and their co-workers

• Appreciate how rewards and recognition really work in building a true performance culture

• Know that these people’s stories will circulate throughout the organization, providing countless more recognition impressions

How about you? Do you celebrate your best of the best each year?  How do you consistently build a culture of recognition?

Rebooting Recognition is Finally EASY

The term Strategic Recognition has been around for probably 15 years. The concept was to look at Recognition as an important part of the Human Resources function and figure out a plan to, at the least, integrate multiple Recognition programs for synergy, and at the most, truly reimagine the Recognition process to include multiple levels of Recognition that would frequently – short, mid, and long-term – deliver Recognition in a way that improved employee satisfaction and everyday behaviors. It failed pretty miserably, and few organizations took the time and effort to Reboot their Recognition programs.

It failed because the idea was ahead of its time, there didn’t seem to be solid business reasons for improving the Recognition process, and because the web technology of the time just didn’t have the horsepower to easily run multiple Recognition and Incentive programs. At the end of the day, it seemed like a monumental project to corral an organization’s widely spread Recognition initiatives and dollars for a more integrated approach, the potential benefits were seen as soft, and so few leaders were willing to put the time and effort into Rebooting Recognition. Even the name “Strategic Recognition” made the effort sound like a huge and forbidding project.

That didn’t stop a handful of us in this business from spending a lot of time talking about Strategic Recognition, because the benefits of growing productive behaviors, aligning and reinforcing employees with the best ideas of an organization’s culture, and better meeting the critical human need for appreciation were so compelling. There was a quite a bit of talk, but little action.

What is exciting and what has changed in just the past few years, are several key pivot points that have led to an explosion of new and expanded approaches to Recognition:

• As noted last time, research at organizations such as Gallup Consulting, Towers Watson and the Corporate Leadership Council proved the links between frequent Recognition and employee engagement, and engagement and solid business results. This has made the justification for a broader approach to Recognition a solid business case.

• Technology appeared that has made the job of aligning and growing Recognition and Incentive initiatives on one platform easy to deploy while providing ease of use for participants.

• Recognition leadership has appeared in the form of resources such as Recognition Professionals International that offer a roadmap for best practices in what is now being called Workforce Recognition – an accurate description of a multi-pronged approach to Recognition strategy.

More to follow on the new ease and benefits of Rebooting Recognition. . .