Employee recognition programs/ideas

colemic

background - we are a 5B+ bank, about 25 in infrastructure support. We are a technology company owned by the bank, they are our only customer, we are technically bank employees. (it's complicated.)

Bank employees, and other support employees (in centralized services such as fraud detection, etc.) have a mechanism 'Fraud Busters' to recognize internally when money is saved - for example, when someone stops a fraudulent check, for example, and they can quantify how much was saved. I think it's great that this is available to them, and I want to extend it to our infrastructure staff, but I don't know how to, since we don't deal directly with dollars, and can't easily quantify the value saved.



We are looking for ideas to formalize recognition for technical staff... as an example, we enabled radius for Ironport (so we don't have to use a local acct) and a day later, discovered that it was configured incorrectly, and defaulted to all users having admin access on the box. In a business (not security-focused) environment, how do you recognize to the entire bank the individual that detected this, without 1)freaking out senior leadership, and especially 2)making it seem like we can't get it right the first time? We are working hard to build our internal 'brand' and we don't want to diminish that, but we want to find a way to reward our staff, similar to the way other areas of the bank are. (hope that makes sense!)

How are your teams' efforts and excellence acknowledged?

Mike C

cyberguypr

There was a discussion on the SANS Advisory Board a few months ago about this. People started talking about gift cards and other type of cash equivalent awards but the tax implications quickly popped up. People were 50/50 on the whole cash/gift card thing vs. other methods.

Some of the things people said they were doing:
- Small reward pulled form petty cash
- Gift cards
- Some sort of catalog with shirts, mugs, and other goodies and employee picks something
- Company wide recognition - making the person a "hero"
- Team lunches
- Departamental parties/outings

My current company gives out gift cards. Previous one gave NHL/NBA tickets.

NightShade03

This is based on a program that I built for engineers/architects within a company I worked for. Gamify the process...

There is a web dashboard (doesn't have to be pretty) that holds the score of each member of the staff and IT mgmt. Each "task" should get a certain amount of points. For example:

Someone gets a certification (5 points)
Someone builds documentation for a system or process (3 points)
Someone holds a training session (3 points)
Someone covers for a friend while they are on PTO (1 point)

You get the idea. Each task should also be documented somewhere for all of the staff to see. Whenever a task is completed, that employee can select the task from a dropdown (optionally upload anything created like a policy document) and a notification is sent to their mgr for review. If the task is done to satisfaction of the mgr, the mgr approves the task, points are added to the dashboard, and the dashboard re-evaluates each persons rank.

The point of the system is friendly competition among the staff while keeping productivity high Each QTR or annually you review the dashboard and the top people get prizes, extra PTO, a bonus, etc. and then everyone's score is reset to zero. While I wrote the portal, webpages, functions...it wouldn't be that hard to do something yourself or hire a freelancer for something quick and dirty.

Results from this program were great and you also can pin point which employees aren't even trying too. Maybe help them along

ccnxjr

Just my opinion, but I think you definitely want some input from the Engineers (the people being recognized) .

Also, depending on the personality types, they may not want "public" recognition,
but a hand written note and maybe a private lunch with the CEO/Company leadership would certainly go much further.
Or possibly having a supervisor/direct manager, pick up that employee's dirty chore for a month.
Not an "easy" dirty chore, but one you know they secretly loath, but grinds through anyway .
(By actually walking a mile in their shoes, you take the BS out of "I know how much effort you put into activityX!")

Maybe granting them "free" time off for an event or convention you know they'd enjoy (ComicCon?)
Or just leave it open as a "favor" , (within reason) .

This approach is a little bit more challenging as it involves having to get to know the individual employees, and requires some real work on the manager's part and getting to know the personalities, instead of just setting up templated reward system.

The upside is that the "reward" is actually meaningful to the persons being rewarded, instead of a dog and pony show.

colemic

Thanks guys... all good ideas, will help us to approach this a little differently.

jibbajabba

Nice to see companies care about recognition .. Sometimes appreciation is the lack of complaints ..

colemic

Our company does a great job of recognizing bank employees, but we just don't have a way for technical/support/non-customer or money-handling staff to be a part of that. we do have *some* tie ins to the existing programs, (technically they are all available, and some are just not relevant; if you aren't stopping someone from cashing a bad cashier's check or something, it's hard to get them recognition they deserve.

aftereffector

Just don't do this!

Dilbert comic strip for 05/19/2013 from the official Dilbert comic strips archive.

chmod

We implemented an internal dollar system, companynamedollar lets say hpdollars or delldollars or huaweidollars but with my current employer name.

Basically we have certain prizes(we pay many things with CC so we get a lot of free stuff from the bank point system that we like to give to employees) plus other things like one day off or paid vacations to a beach hotel among other things.

We try to keep everybody motivated so we try to give companydollars even for basic things like been on time every single day of the month, a full semester and the entire year.

2 times a years people can "cash out" to get something like an LCD screen, a computer monitor, days off, a ps4, an all inclusive weekend in a hotel, also we have small prizes like free car wash service on company parking lot, amazon gift cards, free dinner in certain places etc etc.