Designing Rewards and Recognition - A Case Study

 #DesigningRewardsAndRecognition

One of our clients was trying to implement a rewards and recognition framework for almost two years.

When we were called in, the mood in the room was not optimistic.

We took the project and did design to rollout in 40 calendar days.

Step One: Brainstorm and Design

Sharing with you the interview guide we used to help the client clarify their thoughts.

1. What do you want to reward.

2. Why do you want to reward it.

3. At what frequency.

4. What is the budget.

5. What are the keywords associated with this award. A person who wins this will be ____.

6. This will be valued by employees because __.

7. Who will decide the winner and on what criteria.

The thing with RnR is, that for every winner in a universe of N people, there are N-1 losers. So, every reward's criteria have to be 100% transparent to establish the credibility of the process.

Keeping this in mind, we worked with the client at every stage, asking supporting questions until the process was absolutely clear.

Step Two: Rationalise and Prepare for Rollout

The next step was to rationalise the list and arrive at a schedule of implementation. 

Obviously, through brainstorming, we would have arrived at a list that is at least 2x the intended number of awards being planned. 

So, the awards were rationalised and the list pruned. 

The most challenging aspect at this stage was reminding the client that the budget of the award is not just the trophy/cash component but also the cost of administration, selection, communication. 

We also needed to connect the process to other HR portfolio items like career planning, Upskilling, Performance Management, Payroll, etc. at the design stage itself, so that the rollout is seamless. 

#WordOfCaution

Even if the leadership is very enthusiastic, creating awards that exceed a sustainable budget means that someone will find a valid spanner and succeed in reducing or removing at least a few awards - but taking away the trust on the entire mechanism. So, we had to tell the client to stick within the budget, even when they were ok to "go above and beyond a little bit." 

Step Three: Communication and Rollout 

The next step was to plan the communication preceding and during the rollout for each recognition. 

Once this was done, the rollout of the selected RnR elements was done on a single day. 

During the rollout, the entire focus was on the recipients - what would they be like, how might this help them in their learning/career journey. The entire speech was about the employees and their growth. 

The rollout was a success. 

*Some elements of the process have been disguised/modified to ensure client confidentiality. 

On Work Life Balance

 Just because you work for yourself doesn't mean you don't report to a tough taskmaster. 

Work life balance is a function of who you are, not where you work. 

I have had the fortune of working with many people who maintained a healthy balance long before it became a thing. And here are some things that are common to all of them - 

A. They always prioritised their time. If you needed to meet them, you needed to send them an agenda and enter the room prepared. 

B. They respected other people's time as much. If you were OOO, there would be no calls, no messages, and no emergencies. They would insist on you doing a good handover to a colleague so that you can take your PTO both guilt free and interruption free. 

C. They included the families. They tried to create at least 1-2 events per year where families got to meet each other. 

D. When they were with you, they were ONLY with you. They made you feel like a real human being, not one of the gadgets they interacted with. 

E. This is the best part. It was very rare for them to be behind on their deadlines. They left office, and they left it with work done. 

F. Most of them were empathic leaders. 

The luckiest break in life was having these leaders around one at the very beginning of one's career. So, one got the right role models early on.

#WorkLifeBalance 

 Topics: Employment and IP law

The Case of Pia

“And… Send!” Pia gleefully said to herself as she pressed the Send key on her laptop. She had reasons to be happy. She had just responded to Amita, the lousy HR person who had participated in making her life miserable at Yuvi, her ex-employer.

Pia had joined the team a little over a year ago. She was a very enthusiastic content writer who brought her bubbly personality and inherent enthusiasm to her work. Her content was always positive, funny, and most importantly – successful.

Her posts got great engagement and her witty one-liners were often shared.

This led to her bosses noticing her within 2 months. The CEO, Apsara, had invited her to coffee in her office!

Over coffee, Apsara had been genuinely interested in getting to know her. She had asked about her family, hometown, education, hobbies, everything!

Just as they were at their last few sips, an idea had suddenly occurred to Apsara – “Pia, I have an idea. Would you like to do a Masterclass for the rest of our content team? This will do two good things – one, instead of being jealous of you, they will start to see you as a natural expert, and also understand how you are the tops in whatever you do. Two, it will help you share some of that bubbly personality with others while adding “Training” as a skill on your resume. How does that sound?”

Pia had been thrilled.

Within two weeks, she had prepared a course outline and some course content. Another two weeks, and she was ready to roll!

The training head sat with her on her course for a while and suggested that she should use innovative training content like memes, cases, puzzles, as assessment instead of and old-fashioned test at the end of the program.

This took her another month to prepare, but finally the Training head had been absolutely delighted with her work and had given the Go Ahead!

Pia ran this course for the first batch and it was a smash hit!

The CEO called her and hugged her. Then, she encouraged Pia to add “Trainer” to her Linkedin profile skills.

The second batch was a runaway success too. After that, Pia’s course had been added to the induction for all content team joinees. She ran the program every two months.

Pia thought it was natural to expect that this would lead to a promotion or at least a raise.

However, neither was forthcoming. When she tried to broach the subject with her manager, she got the usual spiel about how everyone needs to show commitment to advance in their career. HR was not much helpful either.

In short, Pia became the de facto subject matter expert of her team, but that translated into no role, salary, or even designation change.

That, and other things at work led to Pia slowly getting disengaged from her workplace.

8 months into the role, she started looking around and in a couple of months, she found a role that suited her better.

She resigned and her resignation was received with.. well, resignation.

The boss made some customary noises about being disappointed and her having a bright future with the company, but made no real effort to retain her or even ask for her real reasons for leaving. Amita, her HR Business Partner, was equally distant and uninterested in having a conversation.

Pia completed her notice period, and on the last day, packed her bags and left.

Two weeks later, her phone rang.

“Hey Pia.. How are you doing?” A chirpy Amita sounded on the other end.

If Pia was surprised, she did not show it, “Am good Amita. What’s up?”

“We were missing you here ya. Hope you’ve settled in fine at the new place?”

“Don’t worry about that. Why did you call?” Pia asked.

“Well, you know, we needed to run the next training batch for new content writers, and we can’t find your training material!”

“Oh, that’s because I took it with me. It’s not there.” Pia said casually.

“You-took-it-with-you?” Amita repeated slowly.

“Yeah!” Pia replied.

“You can’t do that! You made that material while working for the company, so its company property.” Amita’s tone was not exactly aggressive, but it was getting unfriendly pretty fast.

“Errm, actually, I am the creative owner of this content, so I have every right to take it with me. The company has no right to content that I made as a favour to Yuvi.” Pia held her ground.

“I’ll get back to you.” Amita had been quick to disconnect.

A day later, Pia found an email in her inbox. It was from a legal services firm, telling her that she was being sued for stealing the company’s intellectual property without permission. Since the content had been created by her during and in course of her employment with Yuvi, it was covered under the term “Work Product”. As per law, the intellectual rights to work products created by employees rest with the employer by default. 

 

Pia smiled. She had been expecting this. First, she posted the aggressive email received from Yuvi on Reviewer.com – a website to review one’s employers. Then, she sent an email to her HR, marking a copy to her manager and the CEO. The email said:

Dear Team at Yuvi

The content in question is training material. My designation at Yuvi was “Content Writer”. This role does not include the creation of Training Content. Only work done as part of the role is a work product. This content was created by me – not as a part of my work profile. It was shared with the organisation as an act of kindness. Any content created that is not in my work role cannot be a “work product”. I have kindly allowed the organisation royalty free access to the content as well as my services as a trainer without charging for these services.

If my designation had changed to include Trainer in the work profile, any content created by me AFTER such designation change would revert to the organisation on my resignation as “Work product”. However, both these events did not occur.

Therefore, I am the absolute owner of the training content and methodology, being its sole developer and disseminator.

You are hereby instructed to refrain from the use of the training content, or parts thereof, as well as the unique pedagogy developed for this module. Using any part of such content subjects you to potential royalty payments to the original creator.

This includes but is not limited to memes, handouts, assignments, etc. used in the past as part of the trainings.

Sincerely

Pia.

 “And… Send!” Pia gleefully said to herself as she pressed the Send key on her laptop.

Questions for you

1. Which side do you agree with? Why?

2. If the designation had changed to include “Trainer” without any hike in salary, would the contention of Pia hold? Why or why not?

3. In the normal course of events, under what circumstances should the intellectual property created by employees belong to the employer? Discuss your thoughts.

 *********** 

Terms of Use: 

Please feel free to use with credit to Nidhi Arora. 

 

How to create a Rewards and Recognition Program in 40 days

 I was a part of an interesting project this year. 

An organisation had been wanting to implement a Rewards and Recognition program for over 2 years. 

We went live in 40 days. 

Here is how we achieved it: 

Prework: Industry Benchmark

As consultants, obviously, we get paid to know the industry benchmarks on Rewards and Recognition. If you are starting out on that journey, suggest you spend some time reading up on what other organisations in the same industry, location, and size are doing. 

Step One: What do you want to reward? 

I always say that 80% of consulting is asking the right questions. 20% is using your experience to create the right solutions based on those questions. 

So, the first question we ask is: What do you want to reward? 

This session was held with the CEO and next level. They all listed what they wanted to reward and how they would unequivocally and transparently identify that. 

The second question, obviously, was not easy to answer for most of them, and that is what helped us eliminate the kind of awards that would lead to heartburn later. 

Once the listing was done, we identified the modal values and selected the top X number. These awards were purely behaviour based. You demonstrated some behaviour, you got nominated. As an advisor, I insisted on 100% transparency and clearly recordable data points. Because each award leads to one winner and 99 losers. So you have to be very clear who you put on that stage and ensure that everyone in the audience is clapping because they understand why that person is on the stage. 

Step Two: Ask the People 

The next step was to ask the employees what they would like to be awarded for. 

We ran an employee contest in which everyone was encouraged to share as many ideas as they would like for awards. 

There were, of course, spot awards and awards for the best ideas submitted. 

We picked some ideas from this list too. 

If you use this route, make sure you close the loop by doing the spot and best idea awards within a week of the contest closing. Otherwise, people will not participate next time. 

Step Three: Bringing in all Together

This is easily the toughest part of the project. 

As the functioning HR leader, I had to collate the three lists and choose what we would start with and what would come later in the year. 

We chose 15 items. This list was then presented to the CEO +1 level, and we were able to prune 5 more entries out. 

With that, we were ready to start with a good 10 awards, 5 more to be added within the year. 

A big risk was that 6 out of these 10 were peer to peer awards. Which means that if people did not like the Awards program, we would bomb. Big time. Also, were our people mature enough to understand and give the right P2P awards? 

I decided that it was time to empower the team, and take that risk. We'll see if any coaching is required. 

Step Four: Communication Plan and Creatives 

Do not underestimate the power of this step. Work on an excellent communication plan that does enough communication and repetition. 

Pay attention to the creatives. All your month-long hard work will go down the drain (no exaggeration) if the creatives do not talk to the audience. Please pay attention to the creatives. 

And pay attention to the right communication plan. Send those teasers, prepare those spot awards, ensure that everyone knows what the P2P awards are for, and how to give them. (Especially if, like me, you are running 6 out of 10 awards as P2P). 

Step Five: Launch! 

Have a launch event! Even if its virtual. For multi-location companies, have a virtual event ONLY so that everyone gets to know about the awards at the same time. 

Step Six: Monitor 

After that, we monitored how people adopted. P2P awards had a spot element too, so people could start using the awards immediately. 

Thankfully, we did well. Very well. 

Step Seven: Keep the Fun Pumping! 

The worst thing that can hit any program is boredom. So, ensure that you have scheduled adequate award functions to keep the RnR program fun and relevant. Both physical and virtual events, and the right mix of communication. Too much, and they switch off, too little, and it becomes irrelevant. 

How to do Portfolio Planning for HR

 In the previous post,  we did 3 important things: 

A. Created a vision for the future. 

B. Created a portfolio of all HR services 

C. Created a linkages map to understand how HR interacts and depends on/supports other functions. 

In this post, we will understand how to take strategic discussions using this tool. 

Step One: Bases for prioritisation 

What matters to your business? 

Here are four different bases that you can use, either one by one, or in combination. 

This discussion is ideally between the CEO and the CHRO. Other stakeholders may be present, but only if necessary. This is a very strategy-led, focused discussion. 

You can either use a simple Red-Yellow-Green format, or you can get more detailed and give weightages to these items. 

The first step, of course, is to take the master portfolio and remove what does not belong or is not relevant to the organisation. This step simplifies the visuals quite a bit and is very helpful. 

For example, your portfolio, after pruning, might look like this: 

Now, of these, we have completely outsourced: 

A. BGV 

B. Payroll 

C. Claims and Benefits

D. Compliance 

So, we remove these 4 also. POSH is on autopilot and does not need day to day attention. We remove that too. 

Our portfolio now looks like this: 

Now, we are dealing with significantly less complexity :) 

Base One: Business Needs 

This is a no brainer. If we are looking to enter a new country, global employee management will need to come first. 

Likewise, anything else that is dictated by business strategy is prioritised. 

Base Two: What People Want

This is a more personal prioritisation. 

We pay attention to three main stakeholders: 

A. What the CEO wants 

B. What the CHRO wants

C. What the employees want (as per the last E Sat) 

One simple way to do this is to choose 3 colour shades - White if no one selects it as important, pale blue when one person chooses it, medium blue when two stakeholders choose it, and dark blue when all 3 choose it. 

Here is an example: 

And now, we can clearly see that Employee Information management, RnR, LTM, and Recruitment are our focus areas for this year. 

The beauty of this tool is that it is simple and visual. 

So as decisions get taken, the tool also looks cleaner. 

Base Three: The Urgency -Importance Grid 

This is a brainstorming and discussion technique. The CHRO and CEO discuss and finalise the items that go into the four grids of urgent and important. 

This base is a little confusing, and we would avoid it for the first time. 

Step Two: Fixing outcomes, timelines, and responsibility 

Let us continue with our example above. 

We want to focus on recruitment, LTM, RnR, and Employee Information this year. 

The next step is to simply write out the business outcome we expect each quarter on each of these items. Who will take ownership of these? 

The outcome is the criteria for success. 

For instance, we take a simple example like Employee Information. 

The Quarter wise targets for these in the next two quarters are: 

Q1: All employee information streamlined at a single source of truth. 

Q2: Zero duplication of information across systems. 

Q3: Information lag (the delay between an event happening and the information entering the system) is 2 days or less. 

In Q4, with this tab reaching stability, we can deprioritise it. 

Step Three: Review and Reprioritise 

The ideal is to meet once a month on the HR strategy, so that we know that actions in HR are following our strategy. 

Once a quarter, we can reprioritise. 

This is a self-sustaining mode of HR operations that keeps HR Ops aligned to strategy. 

A Portfolio Planning Approach to HR

Over the years, many HR leaders (and IT leaders) have asked: 

How do we make HR more business focused? How do we speak the language of business? 

How can we communicate better with the CEO? 

In 2016, I worked on and created something called the HR Portfolio Management. 

This is a very different approach to managing HR. 

This approach can: 

A. Help CHROs see and show the big picture to anyone who wants to learn about their work. 

B. Help CXOs communicate about people policies in a language that everyone understands. 

C. Hopefully, reduce the friction that one observes in organisations around HR plans and budgets. 

So, What is the Portfolio Approach to HR? 

In PMI, we learn project management. Several programs come together to form programs, and programs come together to form portfolios. 

In essence, portfolios are the highest level of strategic planning. 

They help us understand where the building blocks of our function lie in the grand scheme of things. 

How do we do this? 

Start by defining the pillars of the Future of Work. 

This should be based on your reading and on your discussion with other HR leaders and CXOs within your organisation. 

I believe that the pillars of the future of work are going to be: 

The Future of Work 

Your list may be different from ours. That's fine. What is important is to have a vision for the Future of Work, and how you intend to participate in it. 

Step Two: The Portfolio 

Usually, when I show CHROs and CEOs the HR portfolio, their eyes pop in surprise. CEOs more than CHROs, to be fair. They do not think that HR covers so many verticals. At most, we think of HR as Talent Acquisition - Talent Nurturing - Talent Management - Employer Branding. 

We think of HR as a Hire to Retire enabler. 

Allow me to share: The HR Portfolio 

Obviously, this list keeps changing. For instance, the Multiple Concurrent Employment node has just been added after moonlighting became a thing. 

Step Three: Understand the linkages 

The next step is to understand the most vital touchpoints of HR with other entities in the organisation. This high-level diagram is very important. 

My diagram below is indicative, but has worked for almost 70-80% of our clients. 

Next Post: How to do Portfolio Planning for HR