Tips to try and traps to avoid in team recognition (Web Sight)

Recognition association • Return on team investments • Team recognition in IT • History of teams

Employee recognition programs typically focus on individual performance — rewarding an employee who surpasses expectations. The workplace is evolving, however, in such a way that this individual employee is often a part of a team, or even several teams. The question then becomes, how do you reward employees in a team-based setting? These sites provide tools and information to help.

Recognition association
www.recognition.org

The U.S.-based National Association for Employee Recognition offers lots of great resources on the broad topic of recognition. Tips, tools, upcoming events, conference recaps, articles, frequently asked questions and directories can all be accessed from the menu bar on the left. There is also a members’ section that provides more in-depth information, research and discussion for those interested in joining the association.

Return on team investments
www.workteams.unt.edu

The Center for Collaborative Organization, formerly the Center for the Study of Work Teams, is based at the University of North Texas. Although the research is U.S.-based, the main principles can be applied to Canadian work teams. The Web site offers literature and research in the areas of team leadership, employee involvement, return-on-investment, compensation practices, organization transformation, support system alignment and readiness assessment. All in all, a good resource site with a specific focus on teams.

Team recognition in IT
www.cio.com/archive/031597/team.html

This article, from CIO magazine, takes a look at fostering and rewarding information systems teams. Citing specific corporate examples from Saturn, FedEx, AT&T Universal Card Services, Bell Atlantic and GE Appliances, the author looks at different types of team reward strategies and discusses what is reasonable when it comes to monetary bonuses. The author discusses some of the problems around pay for performance and goes on to discuss team reviews. Well worth checking out.

History of teams
www.sciforma.com/resources/white_papers/Psychological_Contract_P3.htm

This white paper from Sciforma Corporation examines team recognition by looking at the structure of teams. In the early days, entire teams reported to the same supervisor and were dedicated to a single project. Today, individuals may be working on many different projects and reporting to different supervisors for each project. The paper spells out traps to avoid when looking at implementing a new team rewards strategy. The author points out that “studies of human behaviour have shown that people do not want to give up anything that they have gained as far as compensation and recognition are concerned.” So when introducing a shared rewards strategy, employers must take care not to remove existing practices, but to add to them. The author also gives a number of valuable suggestions aimed at HR specialists for creating effective shared rewards.

Shannon Simson is Canadian HR Reporter’s resource editor. Her Web Sight column appears regularly in the CloseUp section. To share an interesting HR Web site, contact [email protected].

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