Values-based recognition

Two problems, one mechanism

Company values have a well-known problem: they are abstract. Integrity, Passion, Excellence. Nobody can act on them directly, and nobody can tell whether a colleague has demonstrated one.

Recognition has a well-known problem too: it is vague. “Great work” and “thanks for the help” are the median messages in any program left to itself.

Values-based recognition points the two problems at each other. If every recognition has to name a value, the giver has to say what the behaviour was an example of, which forces the message to describe a behaviour. And if every value accumulates a stream of recognitions, the value acquires a set of real examples, which is the only way an abstract noun ever becomes something people can act on. The company values pages on this site are built on that idea: each value described as behaviours somebody could observe, with the messages that would recognise them.

What it looks like done well

“Ownership: Marta chased the billing bug into finance’s system after it stopped being her problem.” The value is named, and the rest of the sentence shows what the value meant on that day. Somebody reading it who had never heard the word ownership used at this company now has a working definition.

Done well, the practice also produces a kind of data that nothing else does. A monthly count of recognitions by value and by team shows which values are alive where. A sales team that has never once been recognised for candour is telling you something, and so is a company where 80% of recognitions go to a single value.

Where it fails

When the values cannot be recognised against. Values written as aspirations (Excellence, Passion) have no observable form, and recognition tagged to them adds nothing. The data shows this quickly: one value gets everything, because it is the one people can picture.

When the tag becomes a checkbox. A dropdown that has to be filled in before the message can be sent will be filled in with whatever is at the top. The tag should shape the message; if it is an afterthought, it is admin.

When the values change. A company that rewrites its values every two years resets the examples each time, and staff learn not to bother learning them.

Alongside bias and culture

Anchoring recognition to behaviours is one of the few practical defences against recognition bias, because a message that has to describe an act is harder to give on general impression. And a body of values-based recognition is what a culture of recognition looks like when written down: a record, in colleagues’ own words, of what the company’s principles meant in practice, week by week.