Rewards & Recognition

Launch your learning journey with a high energy start!
Join Mike Byam, Managing Partner of Terryberry and Chair of the IHR Rewards & Recognition Board to learn about the Institute for Human Resources (IHR) Rewards & Recognition Workshops and Program! This session will introduce the Rewards and Recognition Community and the Institute for Human Resources (IHR) certification program. You’ll find out about the workshops that will be available, and learn how the IHR certification process works. Throughout this conference you will gain practical ideas and concepts that you’ll be able to put into practice in your business. Because recognition addresses the human need to be valued and to provide value in the workplace, a framework for rewards and recognition is vitally important. In this conference, we will look at why recognition is so important and how it can impact your business objectives. Giving employees recognition for their contributions has been proven to improve retention, enhance engagement and positively impact business performance. You’ll discover how these real results can happen in your business, and find out what the best practices are to use along the way. During the IHR Program, you will also learn how to develop an effective recognition strategy that encompasses Design, Implementation, Review, and Assessment that also connects to you organization’s mission, vision, and values. This will ultimately strengthen the future of your organization.

Psst … Managers, did you know your employees may have concerns they’re not sharing with you? Even at small, tight-knit firms, secrets could exist. Some workers may be dissatisfied and looking to leave the firm, for instance. Others may privately wish they could advance into more significant roles. This presentation will help you uncover secrets your employers may be harboring and learn how to better gauge the pulse of the office environment. Knowing which issues are of greatest concern to your team will allow you to address them, leading to improved morale, motivation and retention rates.

Psst … Managers, did you know your employees may have concerns they’re not sharing with you? Even at small, tight-knit firms, secrets could exist. Some workers may be dissatisfied and looking to leave the firm, for instance. Others may privately wish they could advance into more significant roles. This presentation will help you uncover secrets your employers may be harboring and learn how to better gauge the pulse of the office environment. Knowing which issues are of greatest concern to your team will allow you to address them, leading to improved morale, motivation and retention rates.

In June 2011, PeopleMetrics conducted a large-scale independent research study across a representative sample of employees in the U.S. Sectors explored in the study include Banking/Financial Services, Healthcare, Business/Professional Services, Manufacturing, Leisure/Hospitality, and Retail. The study covered topics related to discretionary effort, retention, advocacy, and the functional and emotional aspects of the work experience.

We received some unexpected results, dug deeper, and began uncovering the “why?” behind these answers.

Benefits of attending this session include:
•       Access to recent, independent, and valid research on Employee Engagement
•       Evidence of the impact of Employee Engagement on business results
•       Examples from other companies who have mastered the Engagement challenge
•       How HR leaders can infuse work with a sense of purpose by outsourcing the demanding task of inspiring a workforce


PeopleMetrics is a research-based consultancy headquartered in Philadelphia, PA. In addition to partnering with organizations across a variety of industries to help them define, measure, and manage their employee and customer experiences, PeopleMetrics also invests in its own independent research to explore trends in employee and customer engagement.

Human Resource executives are seeing that many exciting shifts are happening today in the way employees are valued and managed within their organizations. This is in large part due to the revolution of social technologies and its impact on traditional Human Resource programs. With the rise of social media and its impact on the corporate workplace, we’ve seen significant strides in how social technologies have changed traditional HR functions such as recruiting and talent development, and it’s only natural that our eyes turn to other key Human Resource programs as well.

Historically, the burden of executing a rewards and recognition program has fallen on the shoulders of Human Resources, as it is often seen as the steward of culture and has the overall responsibility for implementing policies and strategies related to employee management. But as we seek new ways to further strengthen corporate culture and engagement, it’s become clear that our traditional rewards and recognition programs are no longer sufficient. Companies who strive to create a culture of innovation must reward and recognize employees in innovative ways. What was once an isolated experience can now become social thanks to the introduction of social technologies.

In this presentation, we will be taking a look at why companies are realizing that traditional reward and recognition programs are no longer sufficient in building a culture of performance and engaging employees, see the benefits and importance of humanizing the reward and recognition process, and learn how social technologies can revolutionize traditional Reward and Recognition programs by making them more social and interactive.

Non-monetary social recognition programs deliver a win-win. Not only are they far less expensive than traditional monetary rewards programs, they are also proven to be more effective in engaging and motivating knowledge workers than “carrot and stick” incentives.

In this presentation, PollStream president and founder Steven Green will outline the 6 ways that non-monetary, peer-to-peer social recognition pays. Steven will share case study examples of how leading organizations are leveraging social tools in their social recognition programs. Steven will demonstrate that recognition is a currency that has extraordinary value to your knowledge workers. Mr. Green will also share how leveraging the transformational power of social media organizations can change how they motivate and retain employees and how their company can celebrate successes and reinforce corporate culture and values.

About PollStream

PollStream enables the social enterprise for some of the world’s most progressive organizations such as TD Bank, Macy’s, Best Buy and the US Navy. Leading companies turn to PollStream’s hosted suite of tools to foster collaboration, conversation and recognition among employees, customers and prospects.

We’re unlike most other software companies in that our expertise is not only in our enterprise-wide software, it’s with our Conversation Consultants™, organizational experts who work with you to ensure that PollStream solutions become fully developed programs that contribute directly to your most pressing business goals and objectives.

PollStream tools are scalable and quick to deploy within any enterprise system. Let us help you drive results through higher conversion rates, increased engagement, improved conversation flow and innovative social recognition.

Feed My Spirit Not Just My Pocketbook: Why Employees Need Intrinsic Motivation and Not Just Rewards

Boosting performance in the face of these challenging economic times is an essential strategy for organizations today. Economic conditions are not going to improve significantly anytime soon. In addition to the economic challenges, two well-known Human Resource organizations just identified the three top issues facing organizations in the next ten years:
•       Attracting and retaining high quality talent
•       Creating cultures of trust and employee engagement
•       Aligning employee goals with organization goals
These same studies also report how most organizations are doing poorly on all three of these issues. Confirming this is Blessing and White’s latest Employee Engagement Survey. It reports that only 31% of employees are engaged. What can predictably create higher employee engagement? There is a direct correlation between employee engagement and organization performance, employee loyalty, customer satisfaction, and growth.
Optimizing the ROI of the most important asset – people – is more important than ever today for organizations to remain competitive. Monetary rewards, perks, or increased benefits do not fully deliver the key elements for the culture to create employee engagement and therefore it can’t deliver higher performance or higher engagement. As effective leaders we need to know how to create intrinsic motivation along with the typical extrinsic rewards.
In this step-by-step 60-minute presentation, you will learn:
•       The serious unintended consequences of just offering extrinsic rewards
•       Why and how our leadership must evolve to address these enormous economic and human resource challenges
•       The five key elements of engagement that can significantly boost intrinsic motivation and engagement for your team

It's true, many rewards and recognitions programs have failed.

With all of the excitement and possibilities it's very understandable to be enamored with the potential of positive outcomes that can be experienced with a successful program. One way to improve the chance that you can have one of the successful ones is to learn where others have not been successful and avoid their mistakes.

In this session you can learn the top 5 reasons many programs fail so you can avoid them. You don't have to experience the frustration that's felt when a project you are responsible for struggles. Nobody wants that burden. The best way to reduce the chances of you being responsible for a failed project is to know where the risks are and how to insure those risks are understood and included in your planning process. Rewards and recognition programs can be very beneficial for an organization to attract and retain talent while also being a reason for resent, entitlements, and low morale.

Being armed with the potential risks of failure can also be the thing you need to get that Executive approval. Many careers have stalled due to failed projects that only focused on the upside potential. Executives need to know what the risks are, so be prepared.

Learning about what a rewards and recognition program has no chance of impacting is just as important to know as what it might. Is there a possibility your program can fail? It sure can. Is it preventable? It sure is.

A lot has changed in the workplace today, and so has the meaning of years of service anniversary celebrations. It is no longer enough to simply commemorate service milestones, when the bigger challenge is to engage people. Service anniversary programs have limited impact on the employee relationship with the company. While service anniversaries provide a formal way to celebrate tenure, they can’t replace the day-to-day interaction of saying “thank you” and showing appreciation on a consistent basis. While acknowledging an employee’s value at the time of a service anniversary date is appropriate, it can’t be the only time that an individual is recognized. The most recent Maritz Research Poll on Employee Engagement found that employee engagement and trust in organizations are both at all-time lows. Employees are most effectively engaged with real-time, frequent recognition of day-to-day contributions.

We have identified key components that can help to develop a comprehensive recognition strategy that includes acknowledging service milestones:
• Update frequency of milestone acknowledgement to reflect the needs of your organization
• Provide meaningful reward choice
• Leverage the power of rewards accumulation across multiple earnings opportunities
• Bundle milestone recognition with other recognition initiatives such as peer-to-peer and points-based recognition
Service Anniversary programs can complement a recognition strategy, but by themselves they aren’t enough. A true engagement strategy requires recognition of day-to-day behaviors that contribute to the mission, vision, values and culture of an organization. A reward and recognition strategy that allows people to accumulate points for multiple activities is the best opportunity to include years of service milestones in a more integrated and effective people strategy.

Every manager wishes for a motivated, productive team. The problem for many team leaders and managers is that they don’t know how to make this wish a reality. Many organizations promote individuals who are subject-matter experts but have little experience effectively managing people or teams. Leaders are hungry for information that will help them advance the development of their work groups, and themselves.

The relatively new discipline of positive psychology – the scientific study of human flourishing – has spawned new areas in the study of organizational and managerial effectiveness. Exciting new research looks at positive organizational performance, climates, strengths, and leadership practices in organizations that lead to cultures of excellence.

Through this webinar, Dr. Martin will help HR professionals and managers in practically any field, focus on employees’ strengths and accomplishments. Leaders will learn to effectively coach employees to play to their strengths, thereby enhancing employee engagement and helping teams thrive. This webinar will explain the new science of positive psychology and how to utilize its principles in effective management and performance coaching. It will also help leaders remind themselves of key managerial principles to enact that will produce more creative, productive, enthusiastic and loyal team members. In today’s economic climate, employee retention of top talent is critical, and this webinar will help managers not only retain top talent, but attract new talent seeking an environment in which to prosper.

Objectives: Managers will be better able to:
•       Focus on solutions
•       Coach employees to develop their skills
•       Utilize the tenets of positive psychology to improve employee engagement

Facebook is proving to be the ultimate engagement tool for incentive programs. Tom Taraci, CEO of Taraci Motivation and a veteran in creating incentive programs for leading national and international organizations including including Merrill Lynch, Westcon, Ryland Homes, Jerzees and Morgan Stanley, will share with you how you can take full advantage of the world’s number one social media network and create a world-class incentive program. During this web cast you will learn how to fully harness the power of Facebook, including the following:

How to host and run your incentive programs on Facebook – With recent technology advancements, it’s now possible to engage all of your employees directly on Facebook.

How to communicate company messages through Facebook and other social media outlets – To help ensure your employees are focused on reaching set company goals, you can now communicate consistent messages through social media that support your incentive program.

How to increase the number of employees following your corporate Facebook page – Facebook is the perfect venue to connect with your employees from around the world and Taraci will demonstrate how you can make your corporate page an attractive “like” option.

How to motivate your employees around the world – The global power of Facebook offers a tremendous opportunity for international corporations attempting to motivate team members around the world.

What about using other social media outlets for an incentive program? Taraci will also share with you the latest on how you can improve your incentive programs by tapping into the power of Twitter, LinkedIn and Google +.

Organizations and relationships are complex. Every single person depends on every other single person to successfully carry out his or her task to deliver a promise to the Customer! If one person fails to keep the integrity of the promise, the whole team can fail.

In professional sports, players get drafted because they have demonstrated their skills and attitude on the field of play. Only the BEST get drafted to the pros. The same applies to business and the recruitment process. We invite people to join our team because we have evaluated that they are a good fit and we believe that they can contribute to our success. When you see a quarterback get sacked over and over (as we have here in Chicago) it makes you wonder what’s going on. What’s wrong with that front line? Are they fully engaged? Are they giving their best? How did they ever get drafted in the first place?

In business research has demonstrated that Engagement is only 1/3 of the pie for high performance. And, engagement can fall short if we are not making an effective, authentic emotional connection with our managers and team players.

During our session you will learn:

•       The 3 key ingredients to high performance

•       What really drives the motivation to excel and give our best
       Dan Pink gave us valid research and so has….

•       The specific areas of performance to reinforce

•       How to give positive feedback/recognition that works

•       The kind of experiences that strengthen and reinforce the emotional attachment employees have with their jobs and the relationships they have with other people

Life and recipes are filled with ingredients that spice up our experiences. We have learned what works. It’s how we play the game that makes a difference. One small change, one added detail, can be the new spark in our engines.

Join us as Michelle continues to explore the concepts of the Human Value Connection and Enrichment Leadership – and learn the actual best practices of successful leaders who have discovered how to align and grow interpersonal relationships across their organizations to drive bottom line profit with Enrichment Leadership practices. Company case studies featured in this session include a wide range of industries, for-profit and non-profit sectors: Johnson & Johnson, McDonald’s, Mayo Clinic, Aflac Insurance, American Red Cross, Edward Jones Investments, and SAS. These actual examples will be interspersed with corresponding research from the FORUM for People Performance at Northwestern University, who initially introduced the concept of Enrichment Leadership.
Businesses have long understood that building relationships with consumers is critical to success. But what’s less widely recognized is the importance of ALL the relationships which occur across the entire spectrum of constituents; employees, suppliers, distributors, shareholders and more. And with research from the FORUM for People Performance at Northwestern University demonstrating that profitability increases as multiple relationships strengthen, then the question becomes…. How do leaders encourage connections across the enterprise? Michelle will share the answers to this question that each of these companies discovered to help propel them forward – even in a soft economy.
In this session you will:
 Explore the new concepts of employee enrichment and human value connections, and the power they have to grow an organization’s bottom line
 Identify practical strategies that encourage productivity, employee satisfaction and engagement
 Expand your own understanding of the topic and discover new ideas to apply in your unique workplace

Do you say thank you effectively? Do you take the time to recognize employee efforts? Do you give recognition as often as you should? If not, what’s holding you back? Budget? Time? Don't think it really makes a difference? Numerous studies indicate that over time employee engagement levels decline and mostly due to lack of support, disrespect, zero encouragement, acknowledgement, praise or reward.

Gallup estimates that disengaged employees cost the US economy about $300 billion a year and that 17 percent or more of employees are “actively” disengaged. Each of these employees cost about $13,000 a year in lost productivity.

If you could implement simple, cost effective techniques that help maintain or increase engagement levels ~ why wouldn't you? In
this session, you will learn a variety of effective recognition techniques that you can put to use immediately to get your MOJO back in your company.

With unemployment stubbornly stuck at high levels, do employee recognition programs still matter? With the pressure to “do more with less” still influencing corporative thinking, do investments designed to strengthen employee allegiance make sense in an economy that has an abundance of potential replacements looking for work?
And then there is the other side of recognition’s promised return—increased productivity. Engaged employees—those that are emotionally and intellectually committed to what they do, and who they do it for—are proven to be more productive than those that are not. But employee productivity during the recession has not wavered. In fact, the aggregate output per employee has increased.
In light of this, how do you formulate a compelling and relevant argument for recognition programs that promise better retention levels and increased productivity? How do you make the case to budget-conscious executives that recognition interventions are still essential when employees seemingly have nowhere else to go? How do you offer up the notion of increased productivity when the organization is already functioning at levels that rival pre-recession figures?
This webinar offers a look back at some of the corporate decisions that now define a worker’s new normal and outlines why current rates of employee retention and productivity are not sustainable.
It also offers up 5 ideas on how companies can use their recognition investment in a more appropriate/strategic fashion for current times—increasing the impact for workers as well as budget-mindful executives.

Attendees will learn why…
1.       Corporate cultures have become more competitive (vs. cooperative) and how a recalibrated recognition strategy can help you change that.
2.       Individual innovation is an untapped asset in a talent-driven economy and how recognition can help you commercialize those “personal patents” that could otherwise go unnoticed.
3.       Why a local manger’s role is so critical and what’s holding him/her back from getting involved.
4.       Why you can’t afford to ignore the unique motivational needs of virtual workers.
5.       Why the HR suite needs to start thinking more like their marketing colleagues if it wants to truly optimize the impact of recognition.

To fully engage employees in your business and provide them with an understanding of the importance of their work to the business, your organization needs a well-defined and believable vision, set of values and purpose. It is the clarity of business purpose along with a shared vision and values that allows employees to align their personal beliefs and talents with those of the company to support the company’s success.
When employees don’t understand the purpose of the organization or the role their job plays in achieving that purpose, employees don’t have a clear line of sight to where the organization is headed, how it is going to get there and how they can contribute to the business’ success. Worse, if employees perceive a disconnect between the company’s stated vision, values and purpose and how the company actually acts towards employees and customers then total disengagement takes over.

We’ll look at the importance of defining and living toward the company’s vision, values and purpose. Plus we’ll look at some examples of companies that engage their employees by providing clarity of purpose and align their employees’ talents in support of the company’s goals. We’ll take a look at their business success and what people have to say about the company. Through a thoughtful review, we’ll reveal the methods these companies have used to unite their employees around the companies stated mission and shared vision for the company’s success. When companies align their resources with the organization’s purpose they create true brand advocates and company ambassadors.

Is your recognition program having its maximum impact?
How well do you know your employees?

Join Greg Butterfield, Terryberry’s Senior Partner and Recognition University Coach to learn the best practices for giving impactful recognition. Discover how the A.C.T. Now program can help your organization coach your managers to become more effective at giving recognition that connects with your employees on a personal level. Developed from a Terryberry case study with a healthcare provider, the A.C.T. Now Recognition presentation serves as a step-by-step recognition training outline for your management team. The A.C.T acronym stands for Appropriate, Connected, and Targeted; while the Now underscores the value and benefit of immediate gratification. In this interactive session, we’ll dig deep into each of the action steps and will discuss how to increase employee engagement and retention of Gen Y employees. There will be opportunities for you to get involved and be recognized with prizes along the way!

How well do you know your employees? This personal knowledge makes you a more effective leader and contributor. It is this understanding and knowledge of your people that makes it possible for managers to approach each person in the most appropriate way. Is your recognition program aligned with your corporate objectives? Understanding and connecting to the mission, vision, and values of your organization is a critical step in the recognition process. Communicating expectations and then recognizing those who personify the attitudes, behaviors, and contributions you value most is the best way to underscore your targeted actions and traits. When giving recognition, time is of the essence! When you see one of your people was caught in the act of doing it right, the time to A.C.T. is NOW!

This webcast provides tips for practical application and serves as a road map to guide your recognition and training efforts for years to come.