High-tech firm’s recognition programs are part of a total rewards strategy that includes intangibles such as corporate culture
Primarily programmers and mathematicians, employees at high-tech company Certicom don’t make for an especially social or outgoing bunch. They tend to stay at their computers, working through the night if they have to meet a deadline. When it comes to building a recognition program, incentives like “days off” don’t work because employees tend not to take all of their vacation days anyway.
Recognition is part of a total rewards strategy at the Mississauga, Ont.-based company. Recognition programs support, and are supported by, team-building activities, communications programs and a corporate culture that supports and recognizes the firm’s 107 staff.
It makes for a positive working environment in which, as employee Josie Poole said, the company feels “like a family.” That sentiment is the Holy Grail for HR managers, especially today when employee loyalty is so hard to come by.
“Management recognizes and respects the individual people,” said Poole, a project co-ordinator.
So how do you create a “family” atmosphere when so many of the family members are locked in their bedrooms and won’t come out?
HR director Pat Griffin took a multi-faceted approach to employee recognition, inundating employees with so many programs they couldn’t help but become interested. More importantly, she listened to her staff members. And she tweaked the programs according to what she learned.
For instance, she introduced the annual Certicom Academy Awards, for which employees are nominated by their peers for having significantly improved products or processes “by means of creating, managing or assisting others.” However, she found that people were nominating mostly within their own departments. She saw that there wasn’t enough cross-pollination between departments. “Small companies can be silos as well,” said Griffin.
So she put programs in place to encourage departments to get to know each other better.
She added a new stipulation to the awards program: now each employee gets up to three votes, one for someone within the same department, and two for people in other departments.
“It’s quite interesting to see who nominated who,” said Griffin. “You can spot, from an HR perspective, where there are issues in a company.”
And when the person goes onstage to accept the award, the CEO says a few words about the employee. Imagine people’s surprise when the CEO mentioned that, by the way, Brian had run in the Olympics. “Nobody knew that within the company — we announced it,” she said. That’s guaranteed water-cooler talk the next day, the kind of healthy gossip that helps make people feel like their colleagues are family members.
It’s recognition at the simplest level — recognizing that each staff member is an individual, with individual strengths, weaknesses, goals and needs, said Griffin. Certicom’s ability to understand that basic recognition principle is perhaps why employees feel they work in a family atmosphere, she said.
Certicom is a successful company today, having recently closed an important deal with the U.S. National Security Agency to license 26 patents for encryption technology. But during its troubled days in the late ’90s, Certicom had to go on life support, slashing spending and laying off hundreds of employees.
A long-standing award program recognizing employees’ innovations that lead to patents, played a big part in Certicom’s “revitalization,” said CEO Ian McKinnon. “The key to our growth ended up being the crown jewels of the company, the patents.” The company’s patent recognition award gives up to $3,700 to people who come up with ideas on which the company ultimately files a patent.
McKinnon said communication was another key factor in the company’s turnaround. “Particularly in the dark days, we tried to make sure we were over-communicating, if anything. The good, the bad and the ugly, we communicated it all.”
That strategy continues, as the company has quarterly “all-hands” meetings, and “functional reports” in between, at which business results are given and employees are verbally recognized in front of their peers for outstanding effort.
“Employee recognition is a series of programs,” emphasized McKinnon.
The company also has spot awards — a pool of gift certificates, dinners out, theatre tickets and cash that people can dip into to reward a staff member who has helped them in a significant way. The spot awards can also be given to teams, such as the time when 30 employees in a department worked beyond the call of duty to meet the deadlines of a huge contract. Members of the department each received a $100 gift certificate, and the vice-president invited all of Certicom to attend a luncheon. In that way, the award was shared with the whole company.
Employee recognition to build morale is one thing. But the biggest bang for the buck happens when the recognition is motivating in terms of productivity. That’s why McKinnon changed the firm’s bonus program.
“Employees in the past would receive a cash bonus but they didn’t have goals and didn’t know why they were receiving it,” he said. Now employees have individual goals and corporate goals. “Culturally, that was quite a shift.”
Employees like Josie Poole know exactly what they have to do to earn that annual bonus money. “My part of the bonus will be to help get (an IT tracking system) implemented… learn everything about it and then teach others to use it,” she said without hesitation. “Last year my boss gave me my goals and what I had to do and said, ‘This is for 12 months, not one month,’ because he knows I’ll just jump all over it.”
Joyce Grant is a Toronto-based freelance writer.
Recognition is part of a total rewards strategy at the Mississauga, Ont.-based company. Recognition programs support, and are supported by, team-building activities, communications programs and a corporate culture that supports and recognizes the firm’s 107 staff.
It makes for a positive working environment in which, as employee Josie Poole said, the company feels “like a family.” That sentiment is the Holy Grail for HR managers, especially today when employee loyalty is so hard to come by.
“Management recognizes and respects the individual people,” said Poole, a project co-ordinator.
So how do you create a “family” atmosphere when so many of the family members are locked in their bedrooms and won’t come out?
HR director Pat Griffin took a multi-faceted approach to employee recognition, inundating employees with so many programs they couldn’t help but become interested. More importantly, she listened to her staff members. And she tweaked the programs according to what she learned.
For instance, she introduced the annual Certicom Academy Awards, for which employees are nominated by their peers for having significantly improved products or processes “by means of creating, managing or assisting others.” However, she found that people were nominating mostly within their own departments. She saw that there wasn’t enough cross-pollination between departments. “Small companies can be silos as well,” said Griffin.
So she put programs in place to encourage departments to get to know each other better.
She added a new stipulation to the awards program: now each employee gets up to three votes, one for someone within the same department, and two for people in other departments.
“It’s quite interesting to see who nominated who,” said Griffin. “You can spot, from an HR perspective, where there are issues in a company.”
And when the person goes onstage to accept the award, the CEO says a few words about the employee. Imagine people’s surprise when the CEO mentioned that, by the way, Brian had run in the Olympics. “Nobody knew that within the company — we announced it,” she said. That’s guaranteed water-cooler talk the next day, the kind of healthy gossip that helps make people feel like their colleagues are family members.
It’s recognition at the simplest level — recognizing that each staff member is an individual, with individual strengths, weaknesses, goals and needs, said Griffin. Certicom’s ability to understand that basic recognition principle is perhaps why employees feel they work in a family atmosphere, she said.
Certicom is a successful company today, having recently closed an important deal with the U.S. National Security Agency to license 26 patents for encryption technology. But during its troubled days in the late ’90s, Certicom had to go on life support, slashing spending and laying off hundreds of employees.
A long-standing award program recognizing employees’ innovations that lead to patents, played a big part in Certicom’s “revitalization,” said CEO Ian McKinnon. “The key to our growth ended up being the crown jewels of the company, the patents.” The company’s patent recognition award gives up to $3,700 to people who come up with ideas on which the company ultimately files a patent.
McKinnon said communication was another key factor in the company’s turnaround. “Particularly in the dark days, we tried to make sure we were over-communicating, if anything. The good, the bad and the ugly, we communicated it all.”
That strategy continues, as the company has quarterly “all-hands” meetings, and “functional reports” in between, at which business results are given and employees are verbally recognized in front of their peers for outstanding effort.
“Employee recognition is a series of programs,” emphasized McKinnon.
The company also has spot awards — a pool of gift certificates, dinners out, theatre tickets and cash that people can dip into to reward a staff member who has helped them in a significant way. The spot awards can also be given to teams, such as the time when 30 employees in a department worked beyond the call of duty to meet the deadlines of a huge contract. Members of the department each received a $100 gift certificate, and the vice-president invited all of Certicom to attend a luncheon. In that way, the award was shared with the whole company.
Employee recognition to build morale is one thing. But the biggest bang for the buck happens when the recognition is motivating in terms of productivity. That’s why McKinnon changed the firm’s bonus program.
“Employees in the past would receive a cash bonus but they didn’t have goals and didn’t know why they were receiving it,” he said. Now employees have individual goals and corporate goals. “Culturally, that was quite a shift.”
Employees like Josie Poole know exactly what they have to do to earn that annual bonus money. “My part of the bonus will be to help get (an IT tracking system) implemented… learn everything about it and then teach others to use it,” she said without hesitation. “Last year my boss gave me my goals and what I had to do and said, ‘This is for 12 months, not one month,’ because he knows I’ll just jump all over it.”
Joyce Grant is a Toronto-based freelance writer.
