Metlife Gets It!

Being able to publicly highlight a good recognition program is difficult.  Most companies do not want their strategy or their process to be duplicated by their competitors so they keep the program design under wraps. 

However, this month at the Incentive Magazine web site they highlighted a program installed at Metlife – and boy – have they got it right.  I’m not sure if I could do it better.

The spokesperson for the program, Tommy Lee Hayes-Brown says the program is directly responsible for:

• Employee satisfaction scores rising from 3.89 to 4.43 on a one-to-five
  scale between 2003 and 2006.
• Customer satisfaction and
  retention rates growing at roughly the same rate as the increase in
  employees who said on the company’s job satisfaction surveys that they
  felt recognized.
• Justified customer complaints falling
  at approximately that same rate.

The link to the full outline is here… but the highlights are:

• Program has three levels – peer-to-peer, "informal", and formal.  The peer-to-peer focuses on daily recognition between workers.  The "informal" is a nomination process that includes a review process at two levels.  The top tier in the program is their "formal" program that rewards 33 employees out of 3,000 (1% folks.)
• The program criteria – the values to be recognized – is set by top corporate management.  The operation of the program, the vetting of the award nominees and the actual recognition is conducted by rank and file volunteers.
• The program is reviewed regularly and updated as needed.
• The top award recipients are enlisted during the year to provide input on the program as well as other company initiatives, ideas and strategies.

The key practices employed in this program that I rarely see:

Top management setting the stage and then getting out of the way. Once the criteria (or values) are determined it is critical to get the rest of the organization to buy in and move with them.  Letting the employees determine what the behaviors are that reinforce the values is critical if you want the company to actually adopt those values.

They leverage their top award earners in other ways during the year. Often the employee that earns the top award in a company is forgotten within days of earning the award. I myself earned one of the top sales awards at an old company – one for innovative product sales – and the only time it was ever mentioned in a 20 year career was the night I received it.  Go figure.  Using the recipients as sounding boards for other company issues is smart business and extends the recognition event way past the night of receipt.  Good job Metlife!

The program as multiple levels – each with an increasing "difficulty" establishing a scarcity of awards as you climb the ladder of recognition.  Scarcity creates value in many instances.  Recognition is one area where if you over do it – the recognition becomes worthless.  Keeping the top level very small increases the value of the award – and most likely the quality of the people who earn it.  Most people think 1% of the employee population is too small a number – but in Metlife’s case – when the suggestion was made to increase the number of recognition awards at the top level to 40 – it was voted down by the employee-comprised review committee.  They see the value in scarcity!

An Aside…

One comment on the issue of keeping program design under wraps so that some competitor can’t steal it. 

Recognition programs should be designed around the
mission/values of the individual company – something that should be specific to the company and therefore, not real valuable to a different
company.  The structure simply rewards the appropriate employees -
therefore, one of the keys to any recognition program is to start with the
right employee.  Hiring
and recruiting is key to creating the appropriate starting point.  If you think that your reward and recognition program will be able to make good employees out of bad employees think again.  Reward and recognition programs are filters – not fabricators.

Well structured programs can highlight your best employees and create a standard by which other employees can aspire to – but it cannot make a bad employee a good one.  True competitive differentiation comes from the combination of hiring right and rewarding right.  You need both.

So… worrying about giving away your secrets by outlining your reward program is a bit like telling someone 5 of the 11 secret herbs and spices in Kentucky Fried Chicken.  You can’t make it right with half the recipe.