Managers seem to love the concept of Employee of the Month/Quarter/Year. On paper, it sounds good because it recognises the efforts of an employee, but I often find that managers don’t really understand the effort that goes into something, and they also don’t have knowledge about the entire development process.
So what will happen – is that there will be a shortlist of nominations, then managers will get together and debate on who should win. Some of the nominations will have been highlighted by any staff members, but some will be the manager’s own opinion. Regardless, the emphasis is really delivered by the manager who is representing the nomination. So a more persuasive manager will hype up their candidate more than someone with less persuasive skills.
As an aside: as a non-manager, I can only judge by their description of why they gave the award, and I might have my own view on who deserved it based on my limited knowledge of the projects that I have heard about. So their judgement may be misguided, but so is mine because I also don’t have full knowledge across the department.
Another thing to bear in mind is that managers can be biassed towards the financial gains of the project. Team members don’t decide what projects they work on, so as long as they don’t completely mess up the project, sometimes it seems pre-determined who wins.
I remember talking to a colleague whose team had won the “Team of the Quarter” award. He said it was an absolute joke because the project had overrun by 3 months or so due to mistakes within the team. He said there were all kinds of arguments and team morale was low. They knew they had cost the company money, but the late fines were insignificant compared to the money they gained when the project was delivered. Then, because it was worth loads of money, the managers gave them the award and cited “tough challenges” that were overcome.
Recent Awards
Strangely, in our last awards ceremony, an award was given to a team whose analysis and discussions led to the cancellation of one of the highest-value projects we had gone for in recent years. The CEOs seemed to make a big joke out of it, but were probably crying on the inside as we had not only paid 20+ people a year or so salary, but lost out on potentially millions of revenue.
There were also some great examples of somewhat-predetermined winners. The team leading the “Employer Of Choice” scheme won an award based on “improving work conditions“. Who else was gonna win that? The team was literally formed with that objective. Should you get it for merely delivering it, or should it only be given if you exceed it?
There was a recent problem where some users were experiencing a 20 second wait time to load up a customer’s record. A developer was assigned to the bug and put out a fix. He won a “customer satisfaction” award. Whichever developer was assigned to that was gonna win – it wasn’t anything to do with his contribution at all. The thing is, if you look at his change, and look at the code review, it was a bigger team effort:
- 2 expert developers had left all kinds of comments on his review and made him come up with an alternate fix. So the solution he came up with by himself wasn’t adequate.
- One of the comments stated how his fix simply moved the problem from “first load of a customer record” to “when the user logs in”. This was stupid for 2 reasons. That very same developer had fixed a problem with excessive login times 2 months prior so he should know it wasn’t a good idea to extend the log-in time. Secondly, some users like System Admins may never look at customer records, so extending their login time in order to save time when loading records is terrible.
- Then the developer had also stated that part of the actual fix was created by a senior developer.
So really, barely any of the solution was actually produced by the developer that won the award. It was a team effort and they didn’t get recognised.
What annoys me, is it was for the “Year” period, but some nominees had already won when they did “Employee of the Quarter”, so they ended up winning twice. I suppose it is stupid if you don’t win the Quarter award but then win for the Year, but maybe they could have come up with different categories, so you can’t win both.
In recent times, we have been producing some video interviews with the winners along with the people that nominated them for the award. The video is full of soundbites and emotional music. It’s so unbelievably pretentious. One video was hyping up a newly-hired manager’s Employee of the Quarter award:
“That’s what I have brought to the business. Don’t make a decision unless you understand all aspects of it.”
Winning manager
Kinda sounds like he is having a dig at the current managers and their rash decisions!
“interpersonal connectedness. He is driving that agenda which is great”
The nominator
“I’ve got a long way to go but yeah, I’ll get there, and I’ll bring the business with me”
Winning manager
My Win?
Several years ago when I was a Tester, there was one particular awards ceremony that I’ll never forget. When the awards were read out, the managers created tension by reading out what the winner did before announcing the person’s name. So they were like “this person worked on Project X, and this person took on challenge Y, showed positive attitude” etc. I couldn’t believe it because it described my work in my team! I was overjoyed how my team had recognised my work over the months and had put me forward. In that team, I had successfully delivered the previous project when I was the only Tester and we had no assigned Team Lead. Then I had moved onto a new project with the same team, plus one new problematic team member. I felt like I deserved something to make up for the fact we had a really problematic team member who caused me a lot of stress. Then when they finally read out the name – they gave it to the problematic team member! I nearly swore and stormed out of the room.
Virtual Praise Cards
We did come up with some virtual praise cards that you can send to your colleagues. There’s certain people that frequently give them out, so it leads to the same names that gain them. Often you see them just handed out for doing basic things. Like I was saying before; you are just literally doing your job and you get praise. There was one that I was joking about with my colleagues because it just seemed like – either the employee was trying to get in his manager’s good books, or was just having a laugh with the system.
“Thanks for sharing the updates time and again. Literally under good leadership.” – Praise card for a manager
I also got quite a few of these cards during the first year of them being implemented, but then it seemed like a fad and I have rarely received them since.
LinkedIn Learning
I was recently watching a course on LinkedIn Learning about “Recognizing and rewarding great performance”. There were some good lessons in there:
- Employees will respond more to non-money recognition once they are already paid fairly
- Monetary reward should be proportional to the work value. If they save the company £10000, don’t reward them a measly £20.
- High performers are best rewarded with growth opportunities
- Peer to peer recognition is powerful
- Be careful with incentives that creates more losers than winners. – might not help people you are competing against
- Be mindful that incentives can be manipulated
- Flexibility is a reward every employee can appreciate. Extra day off.
Stranger Coding Tings 