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1501 Ways to Reward Employees
By Bob Nelson
Workman Publishing, 2012
580 pages
List price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-0-6878-2
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A deli made a deal with its employees: Help us cut food costs, and we will split the savings with you. Employees found $30,000 in savings and got a $15,000 reward to share.
A Midwestern company unable to foot the bill for bonuses sought a way to let workers know executives cared. So the executives pledged to clear snow off employees’ cars at least once a month, all winter long.
Departments at Ben & Jerry’s headquarters get a grant if they develop great ideas. Departments can use the grants to buy what they want for themselves—such as popcorn machines.
Popcorn, cash, a snow-covered boss … whatever form a reward takes, employers that actively recognize employees find that recognition reaps business benefits. According to 1501 Ways to Reward Employees author Bob Nelson, research shows that employees who receive recognition at work are seven times more likely to stay with the company than those who don’t receive recognition, and 11 times more likely to “feel completely committed to the company.”
In this handbook for employers, Nelson outlines why employers need to ramp up recognition and why money alone isn’t the strongest motivator. He reviews the excuses managers give for not recognizing employees, from “I don’t know how” to “I’m afraid I might leave somebody out.”
But five trends will push employers toward recognizing employees, Nelson notes:
- Employers must compete for fewer skilled workers.
- The youngest generation of workers expect rewards from employers and will move on quickly if those rewards don’t materialize.
- Employers must figure out how to motivate the increasing number of contingent workers.
- Greater use of virtual employees and virtual teams means employers must ensure that those workers feel connected to the company by more than computers.
- Globalization requires employers to find ways to motivate an increasingly multicultural workforce.
Nelson writes about ways to give day-to-day recognition, tips on creative recognition for teams and groups, the use of activities as rewards, rewards tailored to specific achievements, and more, all presented so that users can look up not just the rewards but the companies that now use them successfully.
The book gives pithy but detailed lists of ideas, drawn from employers’ real experiences in a wide variety of industries. Among the topics:
- How to make rewards part of the company culture at all levels.
- Pitfalls and benefits of cash rewards, plus ideas on rewards to substitute for cash.
- Ways to use “specialty items”—gifts such as wearable items—more creatively, and ideas for items beyond the usual coffee mug.
- Ideas for nonmonetary rewards from trips to tickets to free parking.
- Eight ways to praise a team, and dozens of ways to reward teams and groups and help them develop cohesion, from simple and inexpensive rewards (cookies, applause), to group activities such as movie night, to special event tickets.
- Specific rewards for specific accomplishments, such as “employee of the year” programs or on-the-spot awards.
- Ideas for creating or improving employee suggestion programs.
- Advice from employers on how to use formal reward programs and tools.
 Quiet
By Susan Cain
Crown Publishers, 2012
333 pages
List price: $26
ISBN: 978-0-307-35214-9
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Charisma and collaboration sound like positives in any business setting. But in Quiet, author Susan Cain argues that companies’ focus on charismatic leaders and extroverted employees is actually shortchanging those companies. They are undervaluing their introverts.
Cain examines the development of the “extrovert ideal” in American culture and business. This ideal holds that making an impression on others, being outgoing and social, and communicating constantly matter. Being introverted, working alone and preferring solitude are seen as unusual, even unproductive.
The book examines how an overemphasis on collaboration at work “kills creativity.” Cain looks at the example of the earliest days of the computing club that spawned Apple and says, “You might conclude that people who hope to be innovative should work in highly social workplaces. And you might be wrong.” Then she delves into the work done by the shy, introverted Steve Wozniak in isolated time at midnight or early in the morning. The club gave a sense of support, but the creativity came from individuals working solo.
Cain decries a “New Groupthink” that “elevates teamwork above all else.” She offers research showing that solitude can fuel creativity and is essential for the deliberate practice of skills.
She adds that the right working conditions for this kind of practice are “surprisingly hard to come by” in today’s workplaces. Office design has pushed employees together in spaces that are increasingly open and have less and less space per worker. The focus on teamwork has created peer pressure to be a team player, even if teamwork reduces creativity. Cain says decades of studies show that as working groups get larger, performance declines and the number of ideas declines, too.
The book offers readers an understanding of how introverts and extroverts differ and how introverts can better navigate a workplace that operates on extroverts’ terms. Readers learn how introverts and extroverts think and how they react to rewards and risks. Introverts tend to think more carefully and stay on task better, and extroverts tend to use a “quick-and-dirty approach to problem-solving” and focus on what’s immediately around them.
Should introverts try to be more outgoing at work? Is it even possible? Cain and the researchers she profiles say yes, people are “capable of acting like extroverts for the sake of work they consider important.” Through self-monitoring techniques and careful evaluation of a job (does it offer ways to be yourself at least some of the time?), introverts can be more extroverted at work.
Cain includes advice on how introverts and extroverts can better communicate with each other.
Take this informal 12 question quiz, adapted from Quiet by Susan Cain, to find out if you are an introvert or an extrovert.
 HR at Your Service
By Gary P. Latham and Robert C. Ford
Society for Human Resource Management, 2012
194 pages
List price: $27.95
ISBN: 978-1-586-44247-7
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HR at Your Service views HR through the lens of customer service and examines how HR can better assess its customers’ needs and deliver those services effectively. Using examples from organizations known for good customer service, the book applies those techniques to HR’s own service delivery strategies.
HR needs to be more “client-centric,” authors Gary P. Latham and Robert C. Ford write, which means HR must embrace two basic concepts: Every action is focused on the client, and every client is valued. While HR managers often say they put clients first, they really put their own departments ahead of everything else, and they don’t value all their clients equally, Latham and Ford say.
To achieve client-centric HR, departments need to put service first in strategy, staffing and systems.
- Choose what kind of service HR wants to emphasize. One strategy is a focus on delivering services at the lowest cost. Another is differentiating HR’s services and selling the organization on how HR can help it achieve its goals. A third is creating a niche for HR—a unique role only HR fulfills (and HR contracts out routine HR services in order to focus on the niche).
- Use planning to meet client expectations. Latham and Ford outline the HR planning cycle, including understanding the larger business environment, using brainstorming and focus groups, knowing the relevant technologies and regulations, understanding what the competition offers to employees, and more. Internally, HR must assess itself: What are the HR organization’s core competencies? What are the office’s strengths and weaknesses? Getting input from HR’s clients is key to defining HR’s new mission.
- Create a “client-centric culture.” Employers with strong cultures attract workers who have the same values. The book walks readers through the elements of HR department culture—the beliefs, values, norms and laws particular to HR—and explains how to put client service at the center of that culture.
- Make sure staff are focused on clients. Examples of employees creatively solving client problems illustrate how the right staff keeps clients happy. Latham and Ford discuss how to spot people with a talent for HR service, how to conduct a situational interview tailored to HR situations and how to become an employer of choice for HR professionals.
- Motivate HR staff to give client-centric service. Establish a relationship between the HR staff’s actions and the expected outcomes; measure those outcomes and reward people accordingly. The book includes a checklist of characteristics of a successful HR team, as well as steps toward giving employees authority and autonomy to provide better service.
- Create a service delivery system, and keep improving it. Latham and Ford take readers through the fundamentals of service delivery systems—planning, measuring what happens to clients in each step of service delivery and using the information to improve service delivery continuously.
Also covered: working with clients so that they “co-produce” some of their own HR services.
 Great By Choice
By Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen
Harper Business, 2011
304 pages
List price: $29.99
ISBN: 978-0-06-212099-1
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Jim Collins is known as the author of Good to Great, a best-seller on performance. With Great By Choice, Collins and co-author Morten T. Hansen ask, “Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not?” The answers are surprising, and they go against well-established business myths.
Looking at companies that beat their industries’ averages by at least 10 times—including Southwest Airlines, Intel and Microsoft, to name a few—the book shows how these thriving firms were not headed by bold visionaries, were not more innovative than others in their fields, did not make quick decisions, and did not change as radically in the face of threats as their less-successful counterparts did.
But aren’t business successes supposed to reflect the work of highly innovative risk-takers, willing to stake everything on one amazing product or service? The studies Collins, Hansen and their researchers conducted found that lasting success wasn’t necessarily based on being more creative, visionary or willing to take risks than the competition.
Instead, success was based on three core behaviors, dubbed “fanatic discipline, empirical creativity and productive paranoia.” In Great By Choice, the authors use extensive examples from both successful and bruised companies to show readers how these behaviors can help them build their own great businesses.
Fanatic discipline. This doesn’t mean being rigid or rule-bound. It does mean having clear performance markers and hitting those marks consistently over a long period of time. This formula—compared to a daily, 20-mile march that doesn’t try to go further on a great day but also doesn’t slack off on a bad day—gets a company where it wants to go, one step at a time, while building confidence that the firm’s own actions, and not outside factors, push its success forward.
One unexpected finding Collins and Hansen note is that companies that pursued maximum growth in boom times did worse than companies that marched along steadily and resisted the temptation to expand quickly. “Twenty-mile-marchers” didn’t overextend themselves and were ready when leaner times hit.
Empirical creativity. Research for this book found that the high-performing companies were innovative, but they innovated less than the authors expected and were “generally not the most innovative” in their fields.
Why wasn’t innovation a hallmark setting these firms apart from others? They were applying discipline. Instead of staking their success on one great idea, they tested multiple ideas, trying low-risk, low-cost experiments and assessing their success carefully. These firms used experience and experimentation to ensure that once they launched a bigger product or service, it was the right one. Less-successful firms tended to rush into launching things on too large a scale, too quickly.
Productive paranoia. Even in good times, leaders in the successful companies were preparing for bad times. The example of how Southwest Airlines rebounded immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when much of the airline industry cut operations, demonstrates why preparation works. Collins and Hansen add that the more-successful companies placed limits on the amount and kinds of risk they were willing to take, made deliberate decisions based on facts rather than impulsive choices based on the situation, and focused on recognizing threats early rather than minimizing potential threats.
The book prescribes “durable operating practices” that create a replicable formula for success. Those practices can be called SMaC, for Specific, Methodical and Consistent. Readers learn to devise their own SMaC practices incorporating the discipline, carefully tested creativity and productive paranoia that set apart the highly successful firms. A set of frequently asked questions guides readers on how the ideas in the book relate to those in Collins’ other works.
Compiled by Leigh Rivenbark, a freelance writer and editor in Vienna, Va. |