Dr. Bob Nelson's Assessments

Do You Know What Your Employees Really Want?

Do You Know Why Your Managers Use & Don't Use Recognition?

FIND OUT!

Assessment 1: The Recognition Practices Inventory (RPI)

Recognition is Fuzzy

Recognition is a fuzzy notion. We know that employees want it but we’re not sure exactly what they want. When implementing recognition programs companies too often look backward to "what we've done," and make their evaluations of programs historical rather than current. They don’t take the time and make the effort to determine existing employee preferences. Others implement recognition programs based upon the “good ideas” of management. Often these programs come from the belief that: “if we would like this then surely our employees will.”

Stop the Guesswork—Quantify!

It’s time that you take the guesswork out of your organization’s recognition program and find out the types of recognition your employees really want, and why your managers use and do not use recognition! Nelson Motivation has a tool that does exactly this.

How The Recognition Practices Inventory (RPI) Works

The Recognition Practices Inventory (RPI) is is a tool for your organization to better understand what forms of recognition your employees want and are receiving and what forms of recognition your managers believe are important to your employees and that they are providing. To measure this The Recognition Practices Inventory (RPI) is divided into two parts, each which compliments the other: The Recognition Practices Inventory for Employees (RPIE) asks employees to prioritize 50 specific recognition items by Importance to them and Frequency that they currently receive those items from their immediate manager (click here to view the RPIE's questions). The Recognition Practices Inventory for Managers (RPIM) asks managers to rank the same 50 recognition items in terms of what they believe is important to their employees and the frequency they think they currently use the recognition items listed (click here to view the RPIM's questions).

Your Results – The Heart of the Assessment

Together, the results from The Recognition Practices Inventory for Employees (RPIE) and The Recognition Practices Inventory for Managers (RPIM) are compiled into a 15-to-18 page report that informs you of what kinds of recognition your employees want and do not want, how often they are receiving it, and those factors that both inhibit as well as promote the use of recognition amongst your managers. The Importance gaps between the employees' scores and the managers' scores will show you how "in tune" your managers are to the recognition needs of your employees. And the Frequency gaps will show you how often your managers think they are providing recognition but in the eyes of their employees are either not providing enough, or are providing too much of the wrong types of recognition.

There are two reports that are included with the RPI:

Report 1: The Organizational Report. This report contains the averages from all your employees and all your managers. With this report your organization will be able to precisely target those areas of recognition lacking in your organization as well as give you the ability to precisely target, and then work to correct, those variables preventing your managers from providing recognition. Click here to view a sample organizational report.

Report 2: The Individual Manager Report. Every manager in your organization who takes the RPIM will be given an inidivual report that compares their scores against those of their direct employees. With this each manager will know precisely what recognition dimensions his or her employees are wanting and if those same employees believe they are receiving enough of those recognition dimensions. Thus, whereas the organizational report will contain the averages of all employees and managers in your organization, the individual report will contain only those averages of each manager's direct employees (which is, in some cases, as few as only 3 employees). This provides each manager with highly specific information and goals. Click here to view a sample individual report. The individual report is included with each RPI because Dr. Nelson recognizes that most organizations have a diversified workforce. What one department's employees want is not necessarily the same as the next department's employees. The individual manager report is designed to make these distinctions.

How Was The Recognition Practices Inventory (RPI) Assessment Developed?

Bob Nelson, while a doctoral student at the Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management at Claremont University, sought to honestly answer the question, “What is it that employees most want when they do a good job?” In effort to answer this question as objectively as possible, Nelson conducted extensive research over a three-year period within some 34 national companies and without funding from any source.  Nelson’s methods were systematically examined, modified and challenged along the way by his doctoral committee at The Drucker Center, which included experts in statistical methods, organizational behavior and psychology.

Nelson originally used 25 behavioral items in his doctoral research to determine what employees most wanted and what they were currently getting from their managers.  Those items came from over 50 hours interviews with a variety of employees and managers from a cross-platform of industries as well as from interactions with 1000s of seminar participants in several hundred public programs Nelson conducted around the country over several years. 

After finishing his Ph.D., Nelson sought to further develop his employee measurement tool. Again relying almost entirely on the views of actual employees, Nelson expanded the selection from 25 items to over 50. He did this by factoring the items into related groupings by sorting them into relevant "clusters" and dropping any items that were insignificant. This process took multiple rounds with varied groups of employees, with each iteration making the factors more relevant and "robust" to capture what employees seemed to indicate they most valued.  In comparing individual responses to the normative database of past respondents, care was taken to build a scoring mechanism that made use of more exacting stanine statistical representation as opposed to the more general use of standard deviations in comparing scores.

Very Different From Survey Research

Unlike most assessments, this systematic ebb and flow in refining variables, adding and subtracting items over multiple applications is what has made Nelson’s assessment not only powerful, but solid, deep-reaching research. As a result, Dr. Nelson’s assessments are very different from the passing one-time phone surveys of 1000 people that are often portrayed in news magazines or conducted by human resources associations and many consulting and incentive firms for that matter. Collections of related variables (called factors) are much more credible than individual variables (i.e. "meaning" is best explained through relations between quantities or qualities. As a result, true research involves finding relations between variables and underlying trends in the data). The strength of Nelson’s variables were significant, with correlations of 80% or higher within each factor.

Ongoing Research

Although every subsequent use of Nelson’s assessment since its completion has helped to revalidate the relevance and accuracy of the factors items, one of the greatest strengths of The Recognition Practices Inventory (RPI) is that it is dynamic. Recognizing that what employees want changes over time, each year Nelson scans and further refines the variables of the assessment by capturing new elements to include and then reprioritizing the overall norms if ongoing use of the assessment dictates it.

NOW Online!

Taking Dr. Nelson's assessments are easy. All assessment takers will receive an invitation email that will give them a link to their assessment as well as their login information for the assessment login screen. Once they have completed the assessment their results will be stored in an online database.

Pricing:

$10 per manager (employees are not charged). Price includes one organizational report and one report for each manager. Click here to order.

For more information on this assessment or to sign-up please contact Nick Swisher at 800-575-5521 or 208-881-7803. You may also email him at nicks@nelson-motivation.com.

Assessment 2: The Organizational Recognition Assessment for Managers (ORAM)

What is The Organizational Recognition Assessment for Managers (ORAM)?

Also based on his doctoral work on the use of employee recognition, Dr. Bob Nelson developed the Organizational Recognition Assessment for Managers (ORAM) as a tool for organizations to determine WHY their managers use or do not use recognition when managing their employees. It provides a useful foundation for examining the beliefs, experiences, and conditions that encourage or inhibit the use of recognition in an organization that can then be reaffirmed, modified, or changed as needed to build a more positive and productive work environment. Based upon managers' anonymous answers, this assessment will tell you whether your managers believe recognition is important for them to be practicing, whether they believe your organization provides enough support for proper recognition, whether they believe recognition affects job performance, as well as a host of other factors. All questions fall into six dimensions: Recognition's Impact on Performance, Beliefs about Recognition, Ability to Do Recognition, Passion for Recognition, Organizational Support for Recognition, and Organizational Context for Recognition (click here to view the ORAM's questions).

Click here to view a sample ORAM report.

Pricing:

$10 per manager. Price includes one organizational report and one report for each manager. Click here to order.

For more information on this assessment or to sign-up please contact Nick Swisher at 800-575-5521 or 858-353-5642. You may also email him at nicks@nelson-motivation.com.