Pat Townsend & Joan Gebhardt
EXCLUSIVE ONLINE COLUMNISTS

Your assignment, as the newly appointed head of the company's quality effort, is to make recommendations about the organization's recognition efforts. The CEO has heard all manner of mixed reviews about your organization's recognition system.

What follows is a three-part template for assessing the state of your organization's recognition program. An interesting approach might be to have various individuals at different levels of the organization record their scores--with your promise that only their pay level will be attached to their answers, not their names. Those individual score sheets might be augmented further by having various employees discuss the items and agree on scores. That should give you plenty of data to back up your recommendations so long as you ask all of your participants to record the specific score for each category and subcategory. Simply giving a total score will be no help, for as with all measurement in a quality process, the objective here is to determine ways to improve, not just to highlight problems and punish those standing nearby.

Part One:

Give your organization up to 10 points in each category (60 points possible):

* Recognition is not viewed as compensation.

* There are no winners and losers.

* Recognition is not manipulation.

* Recognition is not based on luck or fate.

* Not all successes are based on quantitative measures.

* Gratitude is timely.

Part Two:

Give your organization up to five points for each sub-category (25 points possible):

* Recognition is given in a number of ways:

--There is both individual and group recognition.

--There are financial thank yous.

--There are symbolic thank yous.

--There is public recognition for achievement.

--There is an element of spontaneity, humor or fun.

Part Three:

Give your organization up to five points for each sub-category (15 points possible):

* Recognition is a personal experience:

--Upper management is involved in saying thank you.

--You personally say thank you.

--Employees say thank you to each other.

As you can see, building an effective recognition program requires both a solid underlying philosophy and a extensive set of specific practices. Any prescribed program will be short-lived unless the senior managers understand and believe in the purposes for making the investment--in time, money and energy--involved in saying thank you.

In brief, there are two primary reasons for saying thank you, and as with so much in both quality and leadership, one of the reasons is emotional and one is rational. The emotional reason is that the person being thanked deserves it (assuming that the program is well-defined to thank the correct people). He or she has done something particularly well and, as a result, she or he deserves the emotional rush that comes from being thanked. The rational reason is that if employees truly feel thanked (i.e., they do get that emotional buzz), they will do more of "it"--whatever "it" was that earned them the gratitude.

What makes it hard is that different people "hear" thank yous in different ways, which is the reason for the subcategories in Part Two. The thank you that truly excites one person may cause a second person to giggle uncomfortably, and leave a third person wondering what just happened and why.

Building a varied recognition program that represents a good investment and furthers the goals of the overall quality process often costs less money than was previously being spent on various prizes and contests. As with so many other aspects of a quality process, however, the senior leadership of the organization must understand that they can reduce their investment of company finances only if they increase the investment of their own time.

The closing argument in favor of your newly proposed recognition program based on input from throughout the company and your own research? It's a great deal of fun and it is a proven money-maker.

In 1988, the managers of Trident Precision Manufacturing company of Webster, New York, decided to concentrate on saying thank you to their employees. That was their only significant change in their procedures and philosophy between then and 1996, when they won a Baldrige Award. By 1996, the average Trident employee was receiving some form of recognition or public praise nine times a year. The impact on the business? Revenues quadrupled, average revenue per employee increased 73 percent, employee turnover dropped from 41 percent to 5 percent, and defect-free production rose from 97 percent to 99.994 percent.

Saying thank you is not only the right thing to do because your mother told you to; it's also very good for business.

One possible resource: our book, Recognition, Gratitude & Celebration (Crisp, 1997).

About the authors

Pat Townsend and Joan Gebhardt have written more than 200 articles and five books, including Commit to Quality (John Wiley & Sons, 1986); Quality in Action: 93 Lessons in Leadership, Participation, and Measurement (John Wiley & Sons, 1992); Five-Star Leadership: The Art and Strategy of Creating Leaders at Every Level (John Wiley & Sons, 1997); Recognition, Gratitude & Celebration (Crisp Publications, 1997); and How Organizations Learn: Investigate, Identify, Institutionalize (Crisp Publications, 1999).