by Traci Pesch

Recognize This! – Research shows our brains are built to perceive fairness as rewarding in itself.

Any parents out there? What’s the most common refrain you hear from your kids? In my house, it’s “That’s not fair!” It can apply to anything – who got the extra chicken finger, who got to pick the movie, who got the comfy chair for movie night, who had to go to bed earlier.

It turns out, my kids’ brains are hardwired for this kind of behavior. Actually, we all are.

Research reported in NBCNews.com showed:

“We have an inbuilt idea of fairness as well as a learned one. The researchers, led by Alexander Cappelen at the University of Bergen in Norway, had volunteers perform routine office work for various amounts of time. Then the subjects were put in an MRI machine and told their monetary reward would be split with another participant. This unequal split sometimes reflected the amount each had worked, and sometimes didn’t. When someone found they were receiving more money, the striatum lit up — but it lit up even more when they had worked longer than the other person. In other words, the brain perceived the fairness of the division at a very low level.”

Fairness matters. And that’s why we talk about the need in employee recognition programs to calibrate awards to the level of effort, contribution, and result, among other factors. Think about it. Let’s say you worked on a team project, but through some investigative work, you were solely responsible for the discovery of a system malfunction that could have saved the company millions over the next several months. The entire team is praised for the discovery and every team member is equally recognized with a reward that has an economic value of $100.

You and everyone else on the team know it was your discovery that made the difference. You, of course, feel slighted. But here’s the interesting finding – your fellow colleagues are also upset on your behalf. It’s not “fair” and everyone knows it.

Calibrated award levels let givers of recognition choose the appropriate award based on several factors (proactivity, scope, impact, ownership, and time investment) to ensure the recipient’s experience is memorable, enjoyable and – yes – fair.

How fair are your employee recognition and reward practices?