Page 115 - Build a Culture of Employee Engagement with the Principles

86 Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work

Benefits of Recognizing

Your Employees

The greatest specific benefit of recognition is its ability to repli-
cate behavior, that is, make it more likely to occur again. Criti-
cally, reinforcement makes the behavior more likely to occur
again unprompted. In other words, today’s reinforcement cre-
ates tomorrow’s initiative. Thank an employee for going out
of his way to take care of a customer and he will do so again.
Acknowledge a team member for taking the initiative to train
a new colleague on the computer system and she will take such
initiative again. There is simply nothing more important or valu-
able to a business than the employee who takes initiative instead
of sitting around waiting to be told what to do. Whatever behav-
ior you pay attention to you get more of; the principle of recogni-
tion is as powerful as it is simple.
I know of no other strategy in all of management that yields
a higher return on investment. In my estimate, the ROI is 1:100.
In other words, for every minute spent on reinforcing behavior,
you can expect a hundred minutes of initiative in return. The
following example portrays the real-world benefit of recogniz-
ing and reinforcing employees. Imagine being out of the office
for a meeting and calling to check in with your team. If you’re
the kind of manager who has taken the time to recognize and
acknowledge team members, you get: “Hey boss, we had a prob-
lem, but we took care of it.” If you’ve failed to recognize your
employees, you get: “Hey boss, we’ve got a problem.” Which call
do you have with your employees?