Employee Engagement Series

Previously, we published an article titled “Simplifying Employee Buy-In…” (click the link to read), which was great overview of some of the typical components in a company culture that facilitate positive employee engagement.  This article is the last in a series intended to unpack those concepts a bit further.

Recognition and Rewards

In this series we have talked about ‘communication’, ‘creating a culture of continuous improvement’, and most recently ‘training and support’.  It’s fitting then that we wrap this series up with the topic of recognition and rewards.  If we get the other things right, then we should see more of the behavior and productivity we desire from our team; so it’s important to catch people doing the right things and recognize them for it.  Here are a few Do’s and Don’ts that we think you should consider as you think about this topic.  Let’s start with the Don’t.

Don’t – Pay for Performance

This can be a VERY controversial topic among business leaders, however, in the context of IT Services companies, specifically when thinking of our technical and administrative staff positions (it’s different for salespeople), we believe having bonus plans tied to productivity or CSAT or other data points can be a very risky proposition when it comes to behavior.  For a few reasons.

• Different Roles Beget Different Metrics – Service Desk L1 Techs, Systems Engineer II, III and Security Engineers all play very different roles in the support relationship with your customers and because of that, it should be expected that we can’t always use the same metrics to measure effectiveness. For instance, a L2/3 technician usually is working the more “hairy” issues and the amount of time and effort required for resolution is often significantly higher than less skilled roles.  So, expecting an L2/3 to close the same number of tickets as an L1 technician is way off track and would quickly turn into a demotivator for your best engineers.  Tying compensation to improper metrics like this can also be a guaranteed way to lose your best people.
• Incentivizing Specific Performance Metrics Can Create Bad Behavior (Unintended Consequences) – It might seem like a good idea to pay for performance. The problem lies when we start paying people to hit certain billable targets or CSAT scores as an example.  This type of incentive can make short-term impacts but perpetuating these types of bonus cultures have proven to cause negative behavior over time.  For instance, closing tickets more quickly might seem like a good thing, but the quickest way to close a ticket is to mark it closed without truly solving the client’s problem.  This isn’t the behavior we want to reward.  So, we must be careful with pay for performance programs as they are fraught with problems.  Additionally, we should want our engineers to work smarter, not harder, and while we should be fair when addressing after-hour work, we need to be careful about bonusing based on billable hours.  This is where the analogy of the Arsonist / Firefighter can come into play.  And you don’t want that!
• Expected Behavior Shouldn’t Merit a Bonus – On a related note –if it’s our best practice to achieve certain metrics like: XX% utilized time, accurate and timely time entry, XX+% of CSAT at the highest rating, then we shouldn’t bonus people for it, because it’s expected. Bonuses are for over and above action.  You don’t want to create the expectation that you must pay people beyond their base salary to meet expectations.
• Bonuses Shouldn’t Take the Place of Competitive Base Pay – Most people get into the IT business because they like systems, they like problem solving and they like to bring order out of chaos. These are generally people that understand IF > THEN statements.  IF X is true, Then Y is the result.  One could argue that bonus heavy compensation plans are very demotivating for people who are wired this way.  Frankly, one could also argue that 90% of all people don’t prefer incentive programs and this is why 90% of the industry keeps it simple.  We think you should too.  Using bonus plans or incentive programs to make up for a below market base salary is also a great way to lose your best people to a “more stable company”.

Do – Recognize People Publicly and Encourage Teammates to Recognize Peers

In one of the earlier blog posts we talked about the concept of praising people publicly and correcting privately.  It is critical that you look for opportunities to catch your teams and individuals doing the right things.  Even if you aren’t hitting the goal metrics spot on, it’s still wise to recognize and celebrate progress.  Team achievements are great opportunities to bring people together.  Find opportunities to pull the team together either in person or virtually and celebrate a milestone achieved or even landing close.  Buy the pizza or mail the gift cards for pizza and set aside a little time to hang out and talk about things that have gone well.  Encourage respected individuals on the team ahead of time to recognize an individual peer or two.  If you are the owner of the company, your praise is worth a ton, but praise from peers is worth even more.

On the topic of recognizing and rewarding individual “above and beyond” behavior, here are a couple tips:

• Rewards don’t need to be significant (again assuming your base pay is already competitive). The act of recognizing someone publicly is something very few companies do well and if you tie a small gift with it that has some thought in it once in a while, that is HUGE!  If you can tie the gift to something they care about or are interested in personally, that is next level!
• Consider a “traveling trophy” if you have a decent sized team. This is a great way to encourage peer recognition.  Think about a quarterly or monthly recognition for the best monthly CSAT performance or best Peer Helper or any number of things.  The key is to make at least one of these types of trophies a vote of the peers.  It’s a way to get everyone to start looking for the behaviors you value and start competing for it.  It’s a win all around.  Ideally, it’s a physical object that can actually travel to the person’s work desk. (think thrift store bowling trophy with some tape and black marker over the name plate).  If there is trust among your team, this can be a really fun exercise for team building.

Do – Use Data To Enhance Your Review Processes

Annual reviews (more frequent is even better) are a great idea to help your staff feel like you are paying attention to their progress, to their career goals and their performance but it can be a daunting task to do this well.  Above we mentioned that it can be risky to incentivize specific metrics with compensation.  However, it’s extremely important that you use data to inform your performance evaluations.  We emphasize the word ‘inform’ because the data shouldn’t be the end of all, be all to determine staff performance.  You have eyes and a brain, which matters too.  However, if we leave the data points out, it can be really hard to give concrete feedback to someone on where they need to get better or to recognize what is going well.  Data helps us tell the story with authority rather than opinion.  Don’t miss out on the gold mine of data that is in your ticketing system to help you coach your people and to make sure you aren’t wrongly playing favorites in your evaluations.

Take One Step Now

As always, don’t see this as an overwhelming list of “to do’s” for you as a leader.  Pick the one thing that jumped out at you and give it a go!