The Ultimate Employee Engagement Quote

That quote came from a comment to a post by Ben Eubanks on his new blog UpstartHR.  In the post that drove that comment Ben posits that there is a 1000:1 ratio of criticism to praise in today's workplace.

Unfortunately, I agree.

Recognition is a distraction from the real work, like generating sales, containing costs.

The real work?

As long as business managers think this way – it will be this way.  Nothing will change.  I mentioned in my comments on Ben's post that evidence for engaging employees (or other audiences for that matter) through ongoing recognition directly affects results and is freely available and freely implementable – but it is hard.  And therefore it's not done.

Recognizing contribution is a distraction?

Providing positive feedback is a distraction?

I'm not singling out the commenter – they simply pointed out the reality of the situation.  Most managers would agree.  Maybe not publicly – but privately they'll tell you – "I don't have time to worry about their feelings – I have goals to hit, numbers to make.  If they want a trophy – go to a kid's soccer game."

Hey – I'm not about rewarding and recognizing "all" effort – only good effort.  But we've arrived at a place where taking notice of effort and commitment and engagement is now a distraction.

And it's pathetic.  

And another thing…

Another comment to Ben's post hinted at something that has always bothered me about the whole reward and recognition space.  The commenter (again – sorry Victorio – I know we're kindred spirits but your comments really got me thinking) mentioned that because the work is hard it gets relegated to HR…

"…which is why talent management tends to fall under HR’s umbrella. It’s
a hard job that doesn’t get its fair share of respect and resources.
The business leaders focus on the numbers and don’t have to worry about
the human processes needed to impact those numbers. We then become easy
scapegoats when things (meaning people) don’t work well."

I agree that because it's hard and because the word "human" is in it HR gets the task of looking at all these engagement issues.  Relegating recognition to HR is like hiring a proofreader. 

When I was a lowly marketing schlub, we wrote a lot of copy for client promotional materials and individually we were responsible for the quality of the materials.  Then we hired a proofreader and ya know what – the quality dropped.  The quality dropped because us marketing folks stopped proofing our own copy and just sent it to the proofreader.  If a typo entered the copy it was the proofreaders fault.  Hey, I just write the copy – they proof it.  So we now had one person responsible for proofing all the copy which now included more typos than ever because we weren't proofing our own copy.  Even if the proofreader caught 99%% more typos than we did – the fact that the sheer number of typos starting out was higher our overall quality dropped.

A similar thing is happening in the HR space – as HR becomes more responsible for tools of engagement, the rest of the management team becomes less responsible – and the total amount of non-recognition and non-engagement goes up.  (And manager to employee recognition isn't something that can be handled by another department.)  No matter the tools installed or the work the HR department puts into it they will never be able to impact engagement as long as managers see it as "HR's responsibility."

Measure What Really Matters

Until we start holding managers, supervisors, VPs, Execs, C"X"Os responsible for engagement we will never get it right.  Start measuring recognition and start getting engaged!