Horizon Point Consulting

Author: Mary Ila Ward

  • 3 Things to Consider Before Your Employee Rewards System Goes Bad

    3 Things to Consider Before Your Employee Rewards System Goes Bad

    She looks like a precious angel doesn’t she?  They both do, actually, but that’s my three year old, loving on my niece before her baptism.  Picture perfect.

    Flash forward to lunch after the baptism at my brother and sister-in-law’s home.  My husband and I refused to make a special lunch for our kids, telling them that could eat what was prepared. Beef tenderloin, homemade rolls, green bean and roasted potatoes. For this 30 something, the lunch was a major treat. For a three year old, who just wants a peanut butter and jelly, not so much.

    But, if we had possibly succeeded for a split second in parenting by not giving in to our kids’ desires, we failed with our motivation tactic to get her to eat it (which we do quite often). We provided a carrot or should I say, ice cream and cookies. If you eat what’s on your plate, we told her, you can have dessert.  

    She fought us on it, tried to negotiate with us on it, and tried to hold out longer than we could. But we stuck to it, and she eventually brought her plate to me clean.  

    “Can I have my ice cream and cookie now?” she asked.  She looked about as precious of an angel asking this as she did in the picture.

    Fooled me.

    A few minutes later, my brother’s good friend comes in with handful of small pieces of beef tenderloin in his hand and throws it away.   

    “I found this under the baby bouncer,” he said.  “Did someone drop it?”

    Angel turned devil. She had hidden her food, not eaten it.  And downed her ice cream and cookie in record time less she be found out.

    Total backfire.

     

    Are you incentivizing bad behavior with your employee rewards system?

    How many times have the rewards and recognition programs at your company backfired?   

    At the least, they just don’t motivate people towards the results you are trying to achieve.  

    At the most, it causea people to lie and cheat.  Three year olds do it for ice cream and cookies. Teachers and educational leaders have been known to do it achieve bonuses and improved reputation.  Just ask Atlanta.

    So before you go incentivizing certain behaviors at your company, think first about the following:

    1. Do you really need an extrinsic reward to motivate behavior? In most cases, intrinsic motivators- things that are naturally satisfying to someone- instead of a extrinsic motivation- things that people do to receive a reward or to avoid punishment- are better long term motivators.  The best way to do this is to link employees to a bigger purpose and mission and hire people that naturally link their purpose to the organization’s.  A really good example of this can be found in Adam Grant’s study related to call center employees.  (If you’d rather skip the scholarly journal article and get right to the point, The New York Times Magazine article sums it up well or grab a copy of Grant’s book, Give and Take.)

    2. If you think an extrinsic reward is needed, think through possible outcomes before implementation. I’m not sure if I could have found a developmentally appropriate way to intrinsically motivate my three year old to eat her food. Of course that begs the question of whether a reward is even needed or justified for getting a kid to eat. Probably not.  We could have just let the hunger naturally run its course.  And in many cases rewards probably aren’t needed in the workplace for a lot of things we implement a rewards system for.  So, you need to think about these things before implementing:

    • Is a reward even needed?
    • If we don’t implement a reward or punishment, will natural rewards and/or punishment happen?
    • If we don’t implement some type of reward and/or recognition will people leave?
    • Does the reward motivate some but demotivate many?  Google’s $1M Founder Awards are a good example of this.
    • And to that point, does your reward system fit with your culture? Maybe you want to reward only those high achievers and demotivate the ones that don’t perform right out the door.
    • Can you afford it?

    3. Test it before rolling out a full implementation. If you decide the reward system is needed, test it on a sub-set of your employee population before rolling it out to the whole organization. Have outcomes you want to measure it against (like productivity, revenue, etc.) This requires having a control group that doesn’t get the reward structure as well.  Then, you can effectively answer the questions above by having actual results to prove the need. It’s better to fail fast and fail cheap through testing than to have to recant a system after a lot of time, effort and money.

     

    Is your reward system driving the right results?

     

    Like this post, you may also like:

    Experiences Over Stuff: The Better Rewards and Recognition Strategy

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  • Experiences Over Stuff: The Better Rewards and Recognition Strategy

    Experiences Over Stuff: The Better Rewards and Recognition Strategy

    My 1st grader comes out of school most every day chomping on bubble gum. When I was a kid in school, gum at any grade level was strictly prohibited, so this peaked my interest.

    “Where and how did you get bubble gum?”  I asked one day when he got in the car.

    “I turned my penny in for it, my teacher gave it to me.” He said.

    Interesting.

    “How’d you get the penny?” I asked.

    “I helped clean up,” he said.

    I realized his teacher was using a method that is hot in HR now regarding employee rewards and recognition. Many systems allow bosses and peers to give employees points (i.e.- pennies) to cash in for things the employee (or first grader) desires.

    When I was in his class for open house a few weeks later, I realized that his teacher’s system is even more like the rewards and recognition tech systems on the market today.  You can save up your points (pennies) to earn bigger prizes. Four pennies gets you trip to the treasure box for a toy.

    My son never brings home a toy. He is still chomping away on bubble gum whenever I pick him up from school. Maybe he can’t ever earn more than one penny because he hasn’t done enough to be rewarded, but he is a child that gravitates towards instant gratification instead of the delayed variety.  As soon as he gets the penny, he cashes it in.

    And some of your employees may be like him, whereas others may hoard points or pennies for greater rewards.  Today’s tech-based rewards systems play to

    1. Personality and
    2. Personal preferences related to what “stuff” is most desired

    in an automated way.

    But this way still feels somewhat impersonal for some strange reason.

    The latest- and I think more interesting- trend in employee rewards and recognition revolves around experiences.  Because let’s face it, who really needs more stuff these days? We are flooded with stuff. And experiences are highly personal.

    I got a chance to see Blueboard in action at the #HRTechConf competing for the prize of the Next Great HR Tech Company.  They won my vote. They are reinventing the rewards and recognition space by focusing on a scalable and easy to use rewards system that gives away experiences not stuff.   

    And, wouldn’t you know, my 1st grader’s school is onto this trend too.  At their Fall Festival, many of the silent auction prizes were for experiences with different teachers at the school. Go get ice cream with Ms. Smith. Get to build a Lego farris wheel with Mrs. H. (aka- Lego Lady- we love her!).  

    You would guess correctly if you assumed that these door prizes had the highest bids placed. Forget the basket of actual Legos, parents know their kids would rather have an hour of Mrs. H’s undivided attention with the Legos.

    So I don’t know what came first- schools catching onto this motivational trend or companies. But, I’ll say, the experience of Vegas with my husband and the #HRTechConf with colleagues has been a much greater reward and motivator than the purse that I for a split second thought about buying while here. I’ll save my pennies for the next experience.

    What do you value more- stuff or experiences?

     

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  • 4 Tech Solutions that help you Hire for Fit AND Diversity

    4 Tech Solutions that help you Hire for Fit AND Diversity

    Most people live in an “or” world.   Whether we like it or not, we think in terms of always having to choose between two or more options or paths, rather than thinking in terms of “and”.      

    I was reminded of this when hearing the CFO of Eli Lilly, Derica Rice, speak to a group of college students who have received scholarships he and his wife fund. He told them that he always thought in terms of “or”.  I can have this career “or” that, but not both.  I can have this life “or” this one, but not both.  But one day, he said, his wife told him that he had earned the right to live and think in an “and” world.   

    This is a powerful message to us all, particularly to the minority students he is seeking to help.  I’ve found that it is also helpful to extend his point in inspiring diversity to the need to hire for both diversity AND fit.  

    And technology can actually help live in an “and” world when it comes to hiring for diversity and fit instead of relying on human, subjective judgments.

    Here are four tech companies that are doing just this:

    BLENDOOR  Using technology, Blendoor hides data that’s not relevant (for example name, graduation year and photos) and highlights data that is in order to reduce unconscious bias.

    You can view a video that explains their merit based hiring here.

    TEXTIO– With a slogan that reads, “In hiring, every word counts,” Textio focuses on helping companies write the best job postings.   In doing this, better word choice leads to more applicants, and more diverse ones at that. In particular, the company touts a 23% increase in women applicants.

    This graphic on their website says it all.

     

     

    PYROMETRICS–  Founded by a Harvard and MIT PhD in a Neuroscience team,  the company uses gamification, machine learning & artificial intelligence and unbiased algorithms to match potential employees with employers.  

    You can request a whitepaper from them on gender equality related to the science they use at the bottom of this page.

    HireVue.  When I first heard about HireVue, I thought their key value proposition was to reduce recruiter time in hiring, in particular interviewing.  Upon learning more, I realized they are also helping to reduce bias in hiring by using data (according to their speaker at HRTech, a 15 minute interview generates more than 25,000 data points) to identify best-fit for companies.

    You can read more about how using their (and Pyrometric’s) artificial intelligence helped Unilever increase their diversity hires by 16% (among other positive outcomes) here.

    Choose to live in an “and” world and the possibilities for solving problems are endless.

     

    How do you kill two birds with one stone by thinking “and” instead of “or”?

     

    Like this post, you may also like:

    You can hire for fit AND diversity: How the most innovative companies hire right

    Diversity and Inclusion in My Eyes and in the Eyes of My Children 

    What is Diversity and Why Does It Matter? 

    3 Ways to Embrace Diversity and Inclusion in Career Development

    Creating Community in Your Organization 

  • Laughter is the Best Gift You Can Give

    Laughter is the Best Gift You Can Give

    Returning home from the HR Tech Conference proved to be a challenge when it came to weighing our bags. One bag weighed too much.  How did this happen?  It wasn’t that way coming.

    It was all the swag from vendors!

    I was impressed by the vendors’ creativity in designing their gifts. I didn’t even have to buy a souvenir for my kids. I snagged a backpack for my son, nail polish (bright purple and pink, no less) for my daughter and a coloring book and colored pencils for them both.

    I got a monogrammed luggage tag for me, a personalized t-shirt that states “HR Llama Don’t Want No Drama” with a cool looking llama on it, two mini bottles of champagne, two cool water bottles and the customary hugger for my husband. Why he loves to collect those things, I don’t know.

    But, by far, the best gift was at the Globoforce booth. I like their mission and mindset anyway, so I was planning to stop by their booth regardless. But their marketing took the cake.

    Basically, the way their prize worked was that two young and lively staff members where there encouraging you to spin a large wheel. There was only one actual prize on the wheel which was a paid trip to the Work Human Conference. The rest were phrases that described things that could go on in a typical workplace. They asked me a series of engaging questions to get to know my workplace, then asked me to spin the wheel.

    I missed the conference trip by one tick, but what I got was an improv skit from the two staffers based on the information they got from me and where the wheel landed.  IT WAS HYSTERICAL!

    It was more memorable and a lot lighter (pun intended) than anything I took away from other vendors.   Which would lead me to use them before I used any other vendor in their space.

    Laughter really is the best gift.  Especially when it’s so on point with your mission to make the workplace more human.

    Kudos Globoforce.

     

    What do you do to make your workplace more human?

  • Women, Stay in the Room!

    Women, Stay in the Room!

    I was 24, interviewing for a job in economic development, of which I knew almost nothing about. Moving because of my husband’s job prompted me to start looking in my hometown, and an indirect connection had landed my résumé on the President’s desk.

    Through conversations with the President, I felt like this interview was just the last step before they would hire me.

    The board chair was there. I knew him, but not well. He was the mayor of our town when I was growing up.

    I never will forget what he said to me. “You know, economic development has always been a man’s job.” I momentarily thought, am I in the wrong place? Or in the wrong century?

    He went on to say, “Allison (the person who was in the Vice President role I was interviewing for and was leaving because she was moving) has shown me that women can do this job.”

    Gee thanks. Was he trying to compliment her or me or was he trying to put me in my place? I wasn’t sure. I didn’t yet know how to read him, but I did for the first time stop to think twice if this was the job I wanted. Not because I thought I couldn’t do a “man’s job” but because I didn’t want to work in a place that thought certain jobs were for women and certain ones were for men, and that I would have a higher standard of proving myself because of my gender.

    I took that job, and both the board chair and the President and CEO became an advocate for me. I am forever grateful to both of them.

    As I now sit at the #HRTechConf listening to the pre-conference sessions on Women in HR Technology, I was reminded of this conversation that took place almost ten years ago.

    Cecile Alper-Leroux, VP, HCM Innovation at Ultimate Software, told us after one panelist said she is typically the only woman in the room, to “Stay in the Room.” If women in the workplace want to gain relevance, they need to stay in the room.  Even if a man, or a woman, tells them that the job they are in or applying for is a “man’s”.

    To stay in the room you need to:

    1. Accept the invitation. Don’t let comments, like the ones I heard, keep you from accepting the invitation to a career path, job or simply the next meeting. Show up.
    2. Invite yourself. If you aren’t invited and you should be, invite yourself. If you had value to add, add it.
    3. Invite others. Hopefully, if you’ve earned a seat at the table, you’re helping another woman find her seat. Invite her to come along with you, to the meeting, to the conference, to the career path. And don’t assign her the role of taking notes. As Trish McFarlane said in this panel, “Women often bring each other down.” Pave the way for the next person to stay in the room by realizing that doesn’t require you to exit the room. It isn’t a competition.
    4. Invite your true self to the room. Be authentic – be you. You don’t have to act like a man to do this, or another woman, even if she is the one who invited you to the room. Know what makes you unique and bring that to the table to add value.

    Are you prone to stay in the room, exit, or never show up in the first place?

     

    Interested in learning more about diversity and inclusion? Join Mary Ila at SHRM’s Diversity and Inclusion Conference as she tackles the topic of hiring for fit AND diversity.

    See session information here.