Do you recall that old saying: “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”? Are you having any difficulties retaining good people? Are you spending a lot of time and money on finding replacements? Perhaps you need to spend a bit more time and attention on the talent that you already have in your backyard – give them a reason to want to stay – it is much less expensive than having to replace them.

There have been 3 times in my career when, upon being advised of my resignation, my manager asked me: “Why are you leaving? We have great plans for you!”. My response in each case was: “Sorry but you forgot to tell me about them.”

I recently wrote about the SEEK’s Inaugural Australian Workplace Happiness Index Survey – see the blog here.

It found that the top three causal factors affecting Australian workers’ happiness were “purpose” and “their manager” and “day to day activities”.

New research undertaken by Gallup and Workhuman evaluated the relationship between recognition and turnover by tracking the career paths of nearly 3,500 employees from 2022 to 2024. They found that “well-recognised employees are 45% more likely to have changed organisations two years later”. Would that be true in your organisation?

The five pillars of “strategic recognition”

Through the research, Gallup and Workhuman identified 5 essential pillars of what they call “strategic recognition”. These are:

1. Fulfilling employees’ recognition expectations (the amount you receive makes sense)
2. Authentic (it isn’t just a checklist thing)
3. Personalised (one size doesn’t fit all)
4. Equitable (it’s given fairly without playing favourites)
5. Embedded in an organisation’s culture (its integrated into the day to day)

They claim that recognition practices that meet only one of these pillars delivers 2.9 times the level of employee engagement that no pillars would deliver and that, if 4 or 5 pillars are in play, the engagement level can be as high as 90%.

Inadequate reward and recognition is a prescribed psychosocial hazard

With the advent of the positive duty to eliminate or control psychosocial hazards, your reward and recognition practices are in the spotlight from compliance and risk management perspectives. That adds another layer to this question of why proper recognition of employees is important, doesn’t it?

The Model code for managing psychosocial hazards at work published by Safe Work Australia in 2022 describes “inadequate reward and recognition as:

• Jobs with low positive feedback or imbalances between effort and recognition.
• High level of unconstructive negative feedback from managers or customers.
• Low skills development opportunity or underused skills. 

The code and most of the research is focused on the feedback that people get in relation to the work that they perform and recognition of their skills and work contributions.

But is that all that there is to reward and recognition? I think it represents just the tip of the iceberg

Do you have the right approach?

When an employee comes to work with your organisation, they bring with them a lifetime of experiences, learnings and talents and their own cocktail of personal circumstances, needs and beliefs. That is simply because we are all human and all have our own individual journeys.

Most workplace’s formal reward and recognition programs don’t consider that – they just focus on technical job performance – ie the outputs. There are commonly  standard processes that people go through periodically without variation or recognition of diversity and often with subjective scoring systems that have little (if any) allowance for contextualisation to an employee’s particular circumstances.

As Gallup and Workhuman’s third essential pillar states “one size doesn’t fit all” yet most reward and recognition systems in our workplaces are “one size fits all”.

The fifth pillar is about it being integrated into the day to day. Performance reviews are just processes that happen periodically whereas the reality is that our emotional receptors are active all of the time and there are so many different ways in which we feel recognition for good or bad in our interactions with others every minute of every hour in every day.

Gallup has long advocated continuous coaching as the ideal model for employee engagement and high performance.

The “Engage for success” model of employee engagement from the UK similarly incorporates continuous coaching with weekly catchups as a key component of the “Engaging Management” pillar in that framework.

We agree and, what’s more, we think that is just the start.

My epiphany

One of the greatest learnings in my life was the incredible impact that a positive, personalised and multi-faceted approach to performance and development had on the development and wellbeing of one of my children.

The Big Picture Education program practised at Croydon Community School in Melbourne’s outer-east delivers curriculum through the lens of a child’s passions with learning aligned to the individual child’s strengths and capacities and life situation. It recognises the whole of the student – not just their ability to do the work set under the year’s curriculum. It helps children to find their true selves, get comfortable in their own skin and build confidence in using the personal assets they have ie to be themselves authentically. It should be in every Australian school.

That was one of the key inspirations for me to learn more about positive psychology and develop our whole suite of PosWork programs.

Our approach to recognition

It is embodied in our EngageMentality coaching model in a few ways.

Firstly, I identified the key components that make up an employment experience and set these as the lenses through which we address individual performance, development and recognition. These lenses are:

1. Roles  – the job that I do plus any of those other responsibilities that I might take on as a leader or an employee or safety representative or first aider, etc
2. Relationships – I rely on certain people for certain things and others rely on me for certain things
3. Values and behaviours – the behavioural attributes that we want to see practised in our organisation to make it respectful, inclusive and high performing
4. Strengths – using the VIA Character Strengths framework to use a strengths-based approach which optimises opportunities for me to use my signature strengths and to work on and be supported with my lesser strengths
5. Wellbeing – using the PERMAH workplace wellbeing survey, build on my psychological safety, life balance and overall wellbeing.

We explore and address each of those items through a process of:

1. Positioning – doing a stocktake of where I sit in each of those areas
2. Planning – identifying the actions that I want to take for my performance and development, timelines for doing that and supports that I need and any people who are involved
3. Performing – implementing my plan and catching up with my manager each week for a coaching session
4. Presenting – providing me with the opportunity to showcase my achievements in performance and development and areas for further development

The coaching conversations simply involve asking and answering these 4 questions in the context of each of the 5 coaching lenses:

1. What has worked well (celebrate)?
2. What has been a struggle (recalibrate)?
3. What has changed (update)?
4. What are we going to do about all of that (activate)?

Conclusion

Recognition involves a lot more than just giving people occasional performance feedback as I have set out above.

It is essential that we recognise all of the individual and contextualise the way we do stuff to who they are.

We also need to ensure that day to day behaviours are consistent so that people feel safe to be themselves and can flourish by design.

If you would like to explore the ways that we might be able to help you to make yours a great workplace, please call us on 1300 108 488 or email info@poswork.com.au.