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The other day I got an award from my employer.  It was given to me "for exemplary perfomrance in Achievement Through Teamwork". This is the first such award I have gotten in over 13 years of working under basically the same management. I am somewhat surprised that I got the award since I didn't do anything that much beyond what I have been doing since I started working.

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So the whole award thing got me thinking about how to recognize employees. I have this pipe dream of one day leaving the corporate world and becoming an independent consultant and eventually building up a company that would employ no more than 20 highly focused and extremely talented individuals. I say pipe dream because I am addicted to a steady paycheck but that doesn't stop me from thinking about how to recognize people.

I have seen many different ways of showing your appreciation for people who have done a good job. The most obvious is the "employee of the week/month/year" type award. I have long been opposed to those because there are usually way more deserving people than time periods to recognize them. If you make the period too short, the award seems trivial i.e. Today's employee of the day is Bob because he made it to work 2.8 seconds before anyone else. If the time period is too long you end up with something like: I know all 10 of you worked yourself to death to complete the project but only one of you can be employee of the decade so Susan will get the reserved parking spot and exlusive use of the company car until 2016. Keep up the good work and maybe your turn will come around.

I have also seen monetary rewards. These seem to be recieved the best when presented correctly. Most of the time I have been given a gift certificate to a local resturant so I could take my wife out. The certificate rarely covered the meal but it let us go someplace nice for very little money. I did get one one time where my manager said something like "I know you have worked 100 hours of overtime in the last 2 weeks. Here is a $25 gift certificate. I hope this makes up for it." I was obviously less than pleased about the implication that my personal time was worth so little to the company especially considering the fact that they billed the client for all of my overtime hours. So maybe money is not the best idea.

For some people extra perks are a good motivator. I would love to see a program at Keane or any company that I worked for where you were rewarded with training or going to a conference. Maybe I am just too much of a geek but I love learning new things and the best thing is that I can use the knowledge I get at a conference to further my career. The only problem I have come up with when thinking about rewards like that is how to quantify what kind of contribution would qualify for a large conference like TechEd or PDC. Oh well, I guess I have a lot of time to think about it before I make the plunge into the world of running my own business.