Recognition Practices Assessment
Do You Know What Your Employees Really Want?
FIND OUT!
Click here to view the Recognition Practices Inventory for Employees
Click here to view the Recognition Practices Inventory for Managers
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 rely on incentives not realizing that the incentive industry has not picked up on what's really important to employees today and is more focused on continuing to move and customize merchandise, awards and plaques than on motivating employees or improving performance. 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! Nelson Motivation has a tool that does exactly this.
What is The Organizational Assessment?
Based on his doctoral work on the use of employee recognition, Nelson has developed the Organizational Recognition Practices Assessment which pinpoints the types of recognition that YOUR employees want. It is broken into two sections, each which compliment the other. The Recognition Practices Inventory (RPI) asks employees to prioritize 50 specific recognition items by Importance to them and Frequency that they currently receive those items. 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. The five Importance rankings are: Extremely Important, Very Important, Somewhat Important, Not Very Important, or Unimportant. And, the five Frequency rankings are: Almost Never, Seldom, Occasionally, Frequently, or Almost Always.
How Was The Recognition Practices Inventory 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 significantly, 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 Recognition Practices Inventory 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.
Your Results – The Heart of the Organizational Assessment
Once all assessments are in, Dr. Nelson himself will compile a report based on your organization’s results. In addition to listing your organization’s raw scores he will do a detailed analysis on the difference between your managers’ and employees’ scores. He will then interpret all scores and do a lengthy commentary on the opportunities that your organization should focus on.
Sample Question:
RPIM (Managers): I ask my employees for their opinion or ideas.
RPI (Employees): My manager asks me for my opinion or ideas.
NOW Online!
Taking the Organizational Recognition Practices Assessment is 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.
Click here to view the Recognition Practices Inventory for Employees
Click here to view the Recognition Practices Inventory for Managers
For more information on this assessment please contact Nick Swisher at 800-575-5521 or 858-353-5642. You may also email him at nick@nelson-motivation.com. |
