Business Case – Employee Recognition

Recognition Motivates Employees to Set and Achieve Goals

Program
Company-wide Employee Recognition Initiative

Situation
 Anderson Performance Improvement Company (APIC) designs behavior-based reward and recognition programs for Fortune 500 companies. Wanting to leverage their success with helping their clients increase profitability, APIC’s own employees requested the firm develop their own internal motivation and recognition program. The “Leveraging Excellence” program was designed to motivate positive changes in behaviors that would improve each employee’s knowledge and performance. And, it was important to management to measure the program’s results and tie them to company profitability metrics.

Objectives

  • Achieve 60% to 80% participation in personal commitment goals, knowledge-sharing, and collaboration opportunities
  • Improve three areas of performance: work delivered on time; on target,and on budget
  • Achieve permanent behavior changes

    • Solution

    Individual and Team Motivation
    “Leveraging Excellence” showed that performance can be influenced in many ways. An engaging online platform, with multiple opportunities to earn ePoints—redeemable for top-brand merchandise—was created to recognize and reward employees:

  • The “Focus on Your Goals” piece motivated achievement of personal goals related to profitable growth, efficiency, and customer satisfaction
  • The “Learn & Earn” piece rewarded for taking and passing content-focused quizzes on company services, policies, and processes.
  • The “Knowledge-Sharing” piece rewarded for participating in critical knowledge-sharing sessions and quality-focused meetings.
  • Employee teams also earned for on-time, on-target, and on-budget performance.

    • Recognition
     Employees also earned ePoints through On-the-Spot scratch and win cards, and fun electronic “spins” when they were observed by managers displaying these desired behaviors:

  • Collaboration
  • Out-of-the-Box Contributions
  • Process Reinforcement
  • Proactive Quality Assurance
  • Trying Something New

    • Managers were not the only ones reinforcing these behaviors. Employees were also allotted three “gift recognitions” (ePoints) each month that they awarded to their co-workers for the same behaviors.

    In addition to ePoint rewards, employees’ accomplishments and peer-to-peer recognition was shared at staff meetings and two award ceremonies were held semi-annually.

    Results
     The program’s goals were realized and the results were impressive.

  • More than 80% of employees achieved at least one of their personal commitment goals.
  • Close to 60% achieved two of their goals.
  • Participation in knowledge-sharing and collaboration opportunities were also outstanding. The “Learn & Earn” piece had 77% participation and an average passing score of 85%.

    • Performance improvement goals were also realized:

  • On-time work delivery results increased by .1% over baseline.
  • On-target work results increased 3.9% over baseline.
  • On-budget work results increased 6.3% over baseline.
  • Profitability increased 1.38% in one category and 6.91% in the second category.

    • Award-Winning! Based on both the design and end-results, APIC’s program was honored by the Incentive Marketing Association (IMA), which named “Leveraging Excellence” Best in Class in its Employee Recognition category.