"We Wuz Robbed" and Other Schemes to Recognize and Reward Sharing

Pondering how (or whether) recognition and rewards can help smash silos and encourage collaboration where you work?  Michael Schrage, MIT Research Fellow, shares a story in his HBR blog post about an organization that tried a simple -- but also clever and fun -- program to spark value exchange within its own firewalls.

A few years back, I helped a large, very compartmentalized and extremely silo-ed global organization launch an internal competition. Its goal was to promote greater sharing of ideas, information, best practice and innovative processes...

The design was simple, clever and cheap: top management would recognize and reward people who demonstrated an ability to cross-functionally get real value from their colleagues and cohorts. We created two complementary yet competitive awards: "Thief of the Month" — a modest prize and high-profile internal acknowledgement for teams and small groups who "stole" an idea or innovation from another unit and successfully incorporated it into their own business; and "We Wuz Robbed" — a comparably modest prize and recognition for having one's group's best practice or process adopted by another internal group.

Schrage notes that the dueling prizes helped create an internal marketplace, prompting both demand and supply, by encouraging employees to "not just to look for interesting ideas to 'steal' but to think about which of their own best practices deserved wider internal promotion."  And all this, as we're made to understand, before intranet social media "sharing" applications had materialized in any substantive way.

The story illustrates not only how a reward plan with a playful and provocative spirit can engage people and help change their behavior, but (perhaps more importantly) reminds us that all the social media platforms and technology tools in the world might not make a difference if someone doesn't call people to the challenge in a way that captures attention and drives action.

Creative Commons image "Thief" by [jeremy]

...And a Happy Evidence-Based New Year!

The year isn't quite over yet (I still have holiday shopping to do and there is the potential end-of-world scenario on the 21st to consider), 2012 has been heralded in business buzz as the Year of Big Data. 

Research suggests, however, that many of us compensation pros (and our HR partners) either didn't get the memo or left it buried in our in-boxes.  Same seems to be true for the related field of evidence-based management and the notion of seeking and using evidence to make better-informed decisions.

What's holding us back ... and how can we make the moves necessary to get on-board the data train?  Check out my post today at the Compensation Cafe for a few thoughts!

Image courtesy of online.wsj.com

Global Salary Forecast: Latest/Greatest via Infographic

Still working on those international salary increase budgets and policies?  The infographic below, which comes to all of us courtesy of Hay Group, is chock full of statistics on global salary increase projectsions.  The data, representing the firm's most up-to-date salary forecasts for 2013, was drawn from the Hay Group PayNet which contains information for more than 14 million job holders in 20,000 organizations across more than 100 countries.

 

Learn more (and get a crisper look at the infographic if you're experiencing any trouble here) at Hay Group's atrium.

Give Employees the Gift of Cash Clarity

Your organizations may be in the midst of planning holiday parties, gifts or special perks -- but know that cash is what's top of mind for employees as the year's end draws near.

A just-released survey by Glassdoor of more than 2,050 U.S. workers shows that what employees want most from their employers during the holidays -- by a significant margin -- is cash bonuses and salary increases.  Results of the survey are summarized in the table below.

This isn't to say that employees don't want to be recognized and appreciated with gifts and perks, or that they don't value flexibility and time off.  They do, of course.  But as economic (and, for many, employment) uncertainty lingers, the sense of financial security associated with cash appears to be trumping everything else.

So knowing this, what are we to do?

For those without boatloads of money to give out at year-end, I would suggest that one of the best things you can do for your employees is to offer them the gift of cash clarity.  Disclose and clearly explain your compensation objectives and priorities.  Detail the purpose and workings of your salary and bonus programs.  Tell them why things are done the way they are.  Share what employees should expect under different scenarios -- this year and going forward.

Fuzziness around compensation provokes mistrust and anxiety - and heaven knows there is already plenty of this to go around.  Give employees the facts and information necessary to understand why they are paid as they are, and what their options and opportunities are to earn more. 

And if your pay program can't stand up to the light of day, perhaps this is a good time to start on a 2013 plan to review and improve it.

We Have Met the Enemy and He is (Quite Often) Us!

Ever wonder what the compensation department looks like through the eyes of the talent acquisition team?  Well wonder no more, pay peeps.  Fellow blogger Tim Sackett gives it to us straight up in his great post Everything You Ever Needed to Know About Compensation.

Let me start by saying I don’t really understand Comp Pros.  Seems like a lot of spreadsheets, market analysis, internal analysis, 48-72 hours of waiting, followed by me getting approval to offer the candidate less than what they originally asked for, followed by the hiring manager sending a nasty email to their line executive, followed by me getting approval from said Comp Pro to offer what I wanted to originally, followed by the hiring manager believing I have no idea what I’m doing.

Yeah, ouch.

There are natural points of tension in most organizations.  Take sales and production as an example.  The production staff are often up in arms because the sales team is promising customers the impossible, and the sales people constantly complain that the production department is unresponsive to customer needs and interfering with their ability to close deals.  Each pushing against the other in an effort to get their job done.

And then there's recruiting and compensation.

To some extent, the tension can be a healthy thing.  Keeps the game sharp on both ends of the stick.  Recruiting staff - often in concert with hiring managers - push the pay envelope, sometimes to its limits, in an effort to nab the hot candidate.  Compensation people push back, hopefully in an effort to see that reward dollars are being spent well and for the right reasons, ensuring that squeezing the balloon in one place isn't going to cause it to pop out somewhere unexpected or ugly.

Sometimes this is healthy.  Sometimes less so.  And sometimes we just have to remind ourselves that pay structures, plans and systems are a means to an end; they not the end themselves. 

Our job is an important one.  Hopefully we do it, when we can, in the spirit of collaborative solutionizing, rather than just dropping obstacles into our colleagues' pathes.

What Job Did You Hire That Pay Plan to Do?

Designing new compensation plans.  Many of us are in the final throes of this activity as we roll into the last month of the year.  Perhaps it would help us to step out of our HR heads for a few moments and take a page from the playbook of Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, author of The The Innovator's Dilemma and How Will You Measure Your Life?, and regarded as one of the world's foremost authorities on disruptive innovation.

Christensen advocates approaching product design and planning with what he describes as a "job-to-be-done" point of view.  As he says:

The jobs-to-be-done point of view causes you to crawl into the skin of your customer and go with her as she goes about her day, always asking the question as she does something: Why did she do it that way?

To illustrate this approach, Christensen shares the story (in his MBA course) of a fast food restaurant that wanted to improve its milkshake sales.  The company tried looking at the challenge using the demographic segmentation approach favored by marketers (who is the typical milkshake drinker?  what do they like in their milkshake?), but had no luck in improving sales.  The company then engaged one of Christensen's colleagues, who approached the situation by trying to learn what "job" the customers were "hiring" the milkshake to do.  He describes the experience in the interesting - and entertaining - video below.

At the center of this experience is a fascinating mind shift, a way to frame design problems in a whole new light.  Perhaps we could benefit from such a shift in perspective as we go about our business, assessing how well our pay programs work and attempting to make them better.

Looking at it from the perspective of one of our most basic "products", the base salary structure, we could ask our key customer, the line manager:

• For what job does the typical manager "hire" the salary structure - what are the circumstances under which they consult it and what are they hoping to achieve?
• When does it do the job well, and when does it not rise to the occasion?
• When do they have to "hire" other tools to get the job they are trying to do done?  What other tools do they turn to and what sort of help do these tools provide?  Or are they forced to "jerry-rig" the structure in order to get the job done?

And yes, we may need to dig and push around a bit (or to use Christensen's words, crawl under the skin) to get to the true job the manager needs to get done, as many of them are attempting to hire that structure to simply help them circumvent salary policy and budgets in order to simply maximize the money they can give subordinates.  Perhaps this can tee up an opportunity for mutual exploration, education and understanding.

At any rate, I find Christensen's framework an interesting one with which to engage our customers in attacking some of our thornier design problems.  What about you?