Long-Distance Recognition - motivating and praising employees at a distance

Workforce, August, 2000 by Bob Nelson

Now that the world of work is branching away from a central location, how do you praise workers when they're miles and miles away?

KARLA HERZOG HAD A PROBLEM. As THE PRESIdent of Total Personnel Service in San Diego, she knew it was important to stay in touch with the employees she hired and placed with clients, but since she hardly ever saw them once they were hired, the task was daunting. How could she connect with employees who were always with clients at locations other than her own? How could she make them feel special when she never saw them and knew nothing of their needs, frustrations, and successes in their jobs?

With the changing nature of work today, more managers are in Herzog's spot. They have to adapt to new circumstances for recognizing employee performance. Increasingly, empowered employees are working more independently in their jobs with the authority and autonomy to act in the best interests of the company. Many organizations are also moving to decentralized operations, so an employee's manager may physically be located at a different facility or even a different state. And global companies increasingly expect executives to oversee staff in remote, and often overseas, locations.

The workplace itself is being redefined to include such arrangements as telecommuting, flexible working hours, and job sharing. "Futurework: Trends and Challenges for Work in the 21st Century," a report by the Department of Labor, found that roughly one in 10 workers fits into an alternative work arrangement, with nearly 80 percent of employers offering some form of non-traditional staffing arrangements. And some 47 percent of employees today now do some amount of telecommuting.

So how can managers best recognize performance when employees may not even have physical contact with their managers for weeks or months at a time? In a virtual environment, recognition needs to be more of a conscious and planned act because there are not as many spontaneous opportunities to acknowledge an employee's hard work and accomplishments. Making sure a virtual employee stays motivated, happy, and productive is the key to ensuring the success of a virtual workplace.

Herzog understood that, and found new ways to manage, communicate with, and recognize her employees. That means delivering recognition awards to the employees at the client site, or sending them to the client to present to her employees. She uses every type of communication with her employees as an opportunity to recognize and better communicate. Herzog has the payroll department include fax-back forms with all employee paychecks to see how things were going, and asks her employees to tell her of any questions or concerns. She then takes those issues seriously--and gets back to the employees quickly to resolve them.

Make time for people

There's no substitute for face time when it comes to building trusting relationships. At The Ken Blanchard Companies in Escondido, Calif, the company expects all managers to hold one-on-one meetings with each direct report at least once every two weeks for at least 20 minutes. Sometimes, those meetings are on the phone, but the employee always sets the agenda If your employees are in the office less, coordinate your schedules so that you are at work when your employees are there. This could be a set time each week or during "core hours" when everyone is present (if your company operates that way). Talk about real issues of importance to employees, the work, or the company in general.

Keeping the sense of teamwork

One of the cornerstones of the virtual office is making sure that virtual employees feel they are an important part of the team. Employees are motivated by managers who take the time to get to know them. A recent survey of 500 professional employees by MasteryWorks in Annandale, Virginia, found that the primary factor affecting a respondent's decision to leave an organization was whether or not the manager developed a trusting relationship with them. Says Caela Farren, CEO of MasteryWorks, "Managers who get to know their people, respect and trust the competency of their employees, and listen continually for how employees are doing relative to their aspirations, quality of work life, and sense of career advancement, will have a far greater chance of developing and retaining their employees."

Working as virtual team may mean that employees are working on the same project, but limited face-to-face contact can make virtual employees feel isolated from other team members and they may be unable to see how their efforts contribute to the end results.

Managers must take a proactive role in fostering a sense of teamwork by involving virtual workers in all team meetings through any available means--telephone conferencing, e-mail, chat rooms, etc. Be sure to include some form of recognition in all team meetings. Verbal ways to recognize employees from a distance include:

* Acknowledging a good comment.

* Recognizing small accomplishments that contribute to the end result.