Excellent Employees / Staying

Recognition, and why most schemes fail

Formalising it usually devalues it.

Recognition programmes with nominations, categories and monthly awards reliably become either a rotation nobody takes seriously or a source of resentment about who was overlooked. The formality is what breaks them, because it converts a genuine expression into an administered process.

What people actually report valuing is specific, timely and from somebody whose judgement they respect. A manager who says precisely what somebody did well, close to when they did it, does something a certificate cannot. It is also free and requires the manager to have noticed, which is the part that is actually scarce.

Public recognition needs care because it is comparative. Praising one person in a group implicitly ranks everybody, and where the same people are recognised repeatedly the effect on everybody else is negative.

The most durable form is recognition that costs the organisation something visible: a better project, more autonomy, being asked for an opinion in a room where decisions are made. Those signal value in a way words do not.

It is worth adding that the manager who loses people is frequently under pressure themselves. Somebody with an unmanageable span of control, no time and no support will manage badly regardless of aptitude, and treating the resulting turnover purely as an individual failing addresses a symptom of a structural decision about spans and layers.