3 Common Mistakes in HRMS Employee Recognition Management

At its core, employee recognition is a good thing, with most companies having positive intentions to boost individual morale and team atmosphere in a working environment. When employee recognition is executed poorly or incorrectly it can be worse than doing nothing, as your company or HR department may end up with a tarnished reputation. How can you avoid such errors? Read on and ensure that you’re not falling into any of these common mistakes in HRMS employee recognition management.

1) Misuse or incomplete use of HRMS data

I can’t count the number of times that I’ve see data get lost in translation. An employee’s anniversary is Oct 1 (1/10/2001) in European data format but is extracted as January 10th by a report writer in the US who misreads the data format. Or how do you treat employees who transitioned over as contract to permanent? There can be many nuances or variations from ‘standard’ employee career paths, so it helps if you’ve tested out all possible data scenarios, in particular if you’re going to publish and promote job anniversaries via your HRMS portal.

2) Mismatch of performance rating and compensation increase

While those of us in HR understand the struggles of financially rewarding an employee who is above their compa-ratio, if you provide a high employee review rating and then no compensation increase, the end result is an employee who is jaded on the recognition front. In such situations, there needs to be HR involvement to explain the situation and provide career next steps to garner an increase, or other HR incentives such as a one-time bonus to diffuse the situation. Companies that depend only on system data without thinking through all scenarios that need to be flagged up are making a big mistake in employee recognition and treatment.

3) Failing to put recognition data in front of managers

A key factor in employee recognition and engagement is a manager’s recognition of employee efforts or work anniversaries. Many managers are not aware of such details, but will certainly promote and celebrate them if presented with the opportunity. If you’re depending on HR to run manual reports and to send emails, you’re missing the boat here. Put the data into your manager self-service HRMS dashboard to ensure that it’s always there, on-time. Even better, enable the data up the manager chain via dashboards to give higher level directors and others the chance to congratulate indirect employees on key milestones.