Recognize This! – Lack of complete and total understanding of your recognition & reward activities globally opens your organization to financial risk.

Thought it’s a bit like choosing which of your children is your favorite, one of the most important services my Insight consulting team offers is our recognition program audit. Just hearing the word “audit” makes people think of long, boring hours spent digging through papers and files. So why would I pick this as a critical service?

Simple – if you don’t know what is going on in your organization in terms of recognition and reward, you open your organization to great risk.

Case in point, news out of the U.S. about recent misuse of employee rewards at the General Services Administration (GSA). I’m not referring to the extravagant Las Vegas trips most reported in the news. I’m talking about this story out of the Federal Times, which reported in part:

Quotation

“The General Services Administration is suspending a controversial employee awards program amid revelations that thousands of dollars worth of merchandise is missing or was mismanaged. Under GSA’s “Hats Off Program,” employees receive award points and can redeem them for prizes such as iPods, digital cameras and gift cards, according to an inspector general’s report.

“But it turns out that those responsible for administering the program received the most awards, the IG report found. Also, GSA has had problems keeping track of the merchandise: 115 iPods valued at $20,000 could not be accounted for, while another 40 iPods were stolen from the Philip Burton Federal Building in San Francisco, according to the report.”

Lack of governance and program oversight can be just as detrimental in the private sector. One client of ours related a story in which well meaning managers, dissatisfied with a prior employee rewards program, would buy an iPod or similar and give to a deserving employee. The manager would then expense the iPod. That means the iPod was not properly accounted for or taxed in the company system, opening the organization to risk.

That is but one small example of the misuse of funds and possible risk possible when an organization does not have a detailed and complete understanding of all employee recognition and reward activity. Compound that by organization locations globally and the myriad tax laws and you can easily see how an audit becomes a valuable service.

Once you understand the gaps and the risk, understanding the value of a single, global, highly governable strategic recognition program becomes easy – especially one that can provide detailed reports in real time.

Are you confident all employee recognition and reward activities in all of your locations are fully and appropriately accounted for?