Recognize This! — Bottom-up recognition and feedback leads to far more data points for more accurate decision making.

Many long-term readers of my blog know I started out blogging on the GloboBlog, the blog for my company, Globoforce. About a year ago, I switched over to blogging here on Recognize This!, expanding the focus of my blog to how strategic recognition impacts the entire talent management spectrum from recruiting through succession planning and even exiting.

The GloboBlog continued on (and I encourage Recognize This! readers to subscribe there as well) with posts from Globoforce executives and directors. The GloboBlog also focuses on the broader impact of employee recognition, especially in the areas of performance management, retention and employee engagement.

Most recently, Grant Beckett, Globoforce’s vice president of product, highlighted very interesting research from Jim Holincheck of Gartner, noting:

“Jim Holincheck from Gartner released a report last week that perfectly expounded what recognition can do for employee performance management and talent management. In his 2012 Strategic Road Map for Employee Performance Management (membership required), Jim says that ‘leading organizations will start to move toward more bottom-up feedback, recognition and rewards.’  Managers can see the level of frequency of recognition and performance feedback for individual employees.  The result of this, as Jim says is, ‘senior executives can use this data to see if manager performance decisions align with what coworkers indicate through their actions.’  In addition, recognition can be used ‘to identify high-potential, high-performance individuals.’”

I was particularly interested in how Jim suggested the “bottom-up feedback, recognition and rewards” would impact compensation and rewards budgets (from the same research):

“This will likely manifest itself in the shifting of budgets from traditional, top-down-determined, annual merit increases and incentive compensation to bottom-up, event-specific and more frequent rewards.”

That shift to a bottom-up approach is critical to achieving the increased levels of feedback and recognition from all sources. Additional feedback and recognition equals more data points. The more data points gathered, the more informed decision-making can be.

Be sure to check out the rest of Grant’s post on the importance of the wisdom of crowds as well as the full Gartner report.