Once you’ve aligned your strategic recognition program to reflect your changed company objectives to help communicate new strategies, approaches or even organizational structure, how do you know your efforts are succeeding?

Disturbing results from a survey of senior managers at more than 500 blue-chip organizations in the US, UK and Ireland found:

Quotation

“More than half the respondents said their organisations are structured in a way that prevents data and analytical talent from generating enterprise-wide insight.

“For instance, almost half of the respondents (45%) said data are housed in isolated parts of their organisation, and more than half the respondents (52%) said that analytical talent is housed separately from the relevant data at their organisation. In addition 13% of employers in the UK and Ireland said that their organisations do not have any professionals dedicated to analytics.

“Overall, four out of 10 respondents said their current technological resources and systems greatly hinder the effective use of enterprise-wide analytics in their organisations. And 51% said they have more opportunities to use analytics to improve the business than they have analytical resources to exploit them.”

There are three distinct problems highlighted here:
1) Information isolated in often inaccessible silos with poor tech resources
2) Data separated from the people that know how to analyze it
3) No people tasked with understanding what the data is telling them

We find this to be true with many companies we work with to develop truly strategic employee recognition programs. Often, large global organizations are operating many different recognition initiatives within silos of business unit, division or geographic area. Managers, trying to do the right thing, will reward deserving employees out of their own pocket, and then file for reimbursement of that expense on their expense forms. Years of service or long service programs are completely disassociated from behavior-based recognition efforts, which are also unrelated to ongoing results oriented incentives schemes.

The cost of running such disassociated programs is exponentially higher than necessary and the risk of hidden, untracked, unreported and untaxed recognition efforts is high. Simply by consolidating all of these disparate efforts into a single, strategic program can save 50% of costs. Consolidation also enables single-site reporting for true analytical insight into spend, usage, and other patterns that, once understood, can help management change the company culture itself.

Too often, companies will choose to leave disparate programs in place because “units prefer to do what they want to do for recognition.” That is no good reason to throw money away and put your company at risk.