The People Management – December 2024
Role of HR in building a “Culture of Recognition” & Rethinking Education for Future…
Reward and recognition in the workplace is fundamental to creating a thriving and dynamic workplace culture. With employee satisfaction, engagement, retention and productivity top of mind for HR pros worldwide, fostering a strong culture where appreciation is shown in a meaningful way should be top of the agenda.
The strategic implementation of reward and recognition initiatives helps cultivate employee motivation and loyalty and they play a pivotal role in shaping the overall employee experience.
Imagine working in a place where every effort you make, every extra mile you go and every success you achieve is overlooked. If these daily efforts go unnoticed, you’ll start to feel pretty demotivated quickly, right?
Now switch to a workplace where those efforts are not just noticed but genuinely appreciated…. That’s the essence of an employee rewards and recognition programme.
These initiatives focus senior management, team leaders and colleagues on the act of recognising great work – no matter how small – every, single, day.
This builds an environment where employees feel valued and acknowledged for their dedication and efforts towards the company. And when employees are confident that their hard work will be recognised, they are more likely to take initiative and go above and beyond in their roles.
But you don’t build a “Culture of Recognition” in a day. Instead, it’s a process you work on and develop over time to acknowledge the value of your employees and what they contribute to your bottom line. Creating a Recognition Program is a start—so if you don’t have one, that’s a good first step!—but great companies go further, constantly reevaluating the ways they reward employees and considering the role recognition plays in their company culture.
As companies grow, this becomes even more of a challenge, and leaders must rethink the way they add value to the employee recognition experience.
Our world today is facing an increasing number of “wicked” problems– rising inequality, violent extremism, global warming and others to name a few. The challenge we have before us is that trying to solve our problems with the mindset that created the problems will just not work. We need innovative and out of the box thinking– and this can only come from our education systems. However, here is where we have a problem. The education systems we have now have not changed much over the past 300 years. In order to change and foster more peaceful and sustainable societies, there is definitely a strong need to re-think the future of education and re-think learning.
The education system we have now was developed to meet the requirements of the industrial revolution. In other words, we’ve developed an assembly style of producing educated individuals capable of producing efficiently for the economy. The question we have to ask ourselves is if this system can provide the mindsets we need for building peaceful and sustainable societies across the world. I venture to say no.
In fact, what we have right now is orthogonal to the outcomes we want – we live in a predatory system that focuses on pitting individuals against each other in the name of competition and rewards only success in areas that make financial gains, not social or ecological. The weakest are left to perish and it is the survival of the fittest. We need to reinvent our education such that the well-being of the individual and the collective is the primary goal.
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Stay Safe, Healthy & Ahead of the game – Happy Reading & Learning in 2025!
Aparna Sharm