Recognition practices which works
By: Łukasz Swolkień
Tags: Motivation, Recognition, Programming, Metrics, Leadership

Recognition practices which works

How to make the work done by the engineers visible so that they can continuously fill motivated and engaged in team work Łukasz Swolkień Sep 3, 2020·4 min read

Recognition for accomplishment is one of the motivator factors which drives our engagement. It is also the first factor with the lowest score calculated by employee engagement software in my organization after we formed new teams and get up to speed with engineering work. We were done with setting the most important SDLC processes and started delivering new products. The overall engagement score was 8.3 (59 employee net promoted score), but recognition was just 7.9. The comments gave us information about what people think and hints on what we can improve.

Comment 1

“You can do things just right and on time, or you can create a problem first and then fix it. I prefer to create high-quality solutions right away, but it seems I don’t have visibility as good as a person who does ‘rescue mission’, which is often fixing his own mistake.”

I need to admit that the above comment sounds very familiar to me. I have a similar experience from the time I was an engineer working on a very complex and time-constraint project, and my piece of work just did a job. Still, the entire project got delayed due to many issues in a different component of the system. When we finally delivered this project to the customer, people got recognized on the well-done job, but … the manager forgot about me. I do not remember what work I did (it was over ten years ago), but I do remember how I felt then.

The lack of problems with the implementation should not mean that someone’s well-done job is not noticed and appreciated!

Comment 2

“It doesn’t happen very often. I don’t know if I didn’t do the job well enough, or if my work wasn’t noticed.”

Yes, it is a challenge for every leader who has many people reporting to him. It is simply impossible to be aware of everyone’s contribution to a large-scale organization. It is also sometimes hard for the line managers to give specific enough feedback to every person. Fortunately, people are working in persistent product-oriented teams, follow scrum ceremonies which help with communication and cooperation, follow good engineering practices including code reviews, knowledge sharing sessions, design discussions, often doing research or troubleshooting together. Why not invite everyone to nominate people for recognition? Line manager appreciation in public sounds good, but praise from the peers in front of colleagues and line manager even better!

There are many software tools, but we found out that the simples solution works best. We are actively asking by sending survey form after each sprint to collect votes and comments from everyone in the team and see who wins in the following categories:

Hero of the sprint (someone who has a substantial impact on achieving scrum sprint goal) Cross-squad hero of the sprint (to recognise the largest external contribution to the work done in the sprint). Then, together with all team leaders (line managers), we choose one Hero of the Heroes every month (2 sprints), and we recognize people in the email and during the monthly Town Hall. We also have “Wall of Fame” on the Confluence page. Execution champion team. We also have a metric based category of the best team in planning and execution in each sprint. The winner is selected purely based on the % of sprint progress counted by the number of stories with Done status vs. total planned for the sprint. It is a one-page report generated automatically for all eight teams. I wrote another article about automated Engineering Metrics here. Soon, we plan to introduce the Hero of the product owners since there might be a case that someone is doing essential work for our customers, however, there is nothing fancy in terms of technology, algorithms in his/her tasks, or challenging in terms of cooperation, but have substantial value for the business.

Conclusions

There are a lot of tools out there that can help you get appreciation comments from people for other people, but a simple online form works fine enough. The most important thing is to ask people for feedback after each sprint actively. There is also an element of competition on this occasion, as the team only can choose one champion per category. For this reason, people should talk before voting to decide who to select in each round. This recognition process not only helps to engage and motivate people but also supports team building and the employee appraisal process. The recognition votes and comments of colleagues have a significant impact on the visibility of the work performed by individual engineers and, thus, on the annual evaluation of employees.

After 6 sprints and another employee engagement survey, the Recognition score increased from 7.9 to 8.2