Recognize This! – Innovation is not just the big, market-transforming end result, but the little ideas along the way.

What’s the most powerful word in business today? Innovation.

Read any blog, any news source, any prospectus and you will quickly stumble over “innovation.” How the company pursues innovation, how innovative the products are, how “innovation” is a core value of the company. And this is all well and good – innovation truly is what propels industries and markets ever forward.

But the real question smart companies should be encouraging every employee, in every role, to ask is: “What can I do, in what I do every day, to be more innovative? How can I innovate our product, our service approach, to better serve our customers, change the market, or push the company forward?”

Unfortunately, too many people think innovation is too big for them or “not in my job description.” I believe that’s because we as leaders have failed to explain what real innovation actually looks like. David Steinberg, chief executive of XL Marketing, gives a much better definition of innovation in a recent New York Times ...

Recognize This! – Only the employee can define what is meaningful work to them. Leaders, however, are critical for helping them catch the vision.

Yesterday, I wrote about the importance of engaging in meaningful work for employees. But what, exactly, does “meaningful work” mean? As I was catching up on my (admittedly large) backlog of news and blogs in my reader, I found this nugget from the Switch & Shift blog (which is rapidly becoming one of my favorite daily reads):

“Managers cannot make work meaningful for employees. Managers, however, can shape the workplace environment to let meaningful work become possible for employees. With a context set to let meaning be experienced, employees can leverage the environment to derive meaning from their work.

“Meaningful work is vague. What exactly is it? Assuredly it begins quite selfishly. But this is out of necessity. For work to be meaningful, it is the employee who must label it so. This requires a belief that meaningful work is a desired outcome from managements’ actions. And employees believe managements’ intentions and see actions aimed to let meaning emerge.”

This ...

As you might know, Globoforce’s office is in the Boston area, specifically in Southborough, a western suburb one town north of Hopkinton, MA—where the Boston Marathon begins.

Last week was an emotional and transformative one. It affected everyone who was paying attention, to some degree or another. Whether you live locally or not. Our hearts have been frightened and broken, and we are all struck by the senselessness and utter waste in such destructive acts.

Here in Massachusetts, it was also one in which our identities have shifted momentarily. “One Boston.” “Boston Strong.” These have become the watchwords over the past week. In the greater Boston area, people who normally identify themselves by their towns or neighborhoods have suddenly redefined themselves as part of the greater identity that is “Bostonian”. And indeed, across the country, people who ascribe to other identities have aligned in solidarity with ours.

This is a common reaction of a group identity to outside pressure, stress or threat.

Humans are pack animals, fundamentally, so our natural instinct is to seek people who are similar to us—who share ...

Recognize This! – Give all employees the tools and systems needed to reinforce your desired culture every day for everyone.

Your company leadership makes a commitment to build a strong culture. They understand how powerful of a differentiator culture can be in the market. They know what kind of positive culture they want to instill and they take steps to make it happen. Yet over time, the culture changes into something else. What happened?

Over on the Fistful of Talent blog, Suzanne Ramsey tells a parable that ends this way:

“So, now we’re at the point in the story where the company is at a crossroads. To those who have been around a while, there is a feeling of the founding culture being unappreciated and not cared for by new employees coming in. To those newly joining, there is a feeling of having been slightly duped; that the descriptions of cool culture and being a different kind of firm, etc., shared during the recruiting process aren’t really true. Both groups are frustrated, and sad, and the early founders are befuddled. Their principles and priorities for the company, for differentiating itself through its awesome culture, have not changed. So ...

Recognize This! – Narrow research must not be used to define the power of truly strategic recognition solutions.

As long-time readers of this blog know, I like to stay on top of the latest research and news in the employee recognition, rewards, engagement and motivation industries (and there is quite a good bit of it). And I’m glad I do, because research like this out of Harvard Business School proves the point of a narrow focus being used to paint results much too broadly. The research working paper is titled “The Dirty Laundry of Employee Award Programs: Evidence from the Field.” Here’s the abstract:

“Many scholars and practitioners have recently argued that corporate awards are a ‘free’ way to motivate employees. We use field data from an attendance award program implemented at one of five industrial laundry plants to show that awards can carry significant spillover costs and may be less effective at motivating employees than the literature suggests. Our quasi-experimental setting shows that two types of unintended consequences limit gains from the reward program. First, employees strategically game the program, improving ...