Introduction
It
has come to the attention of the employees of this office that personnel
recognition have not been placed on high value in most government ministries
and other parastatals which has caused the level of creativity and project
management to have dropped in comparison to our performance in the past few
years. There
have been cases where employees perform very well in tasks given to them.
Examples of tasks;
- A project team able to deliver results with significant cost savings and greater than expected results.
- Staff volunteering to work over a weekend to handle an emergency situation (where this is outside the expectations of their position and they would not normally be entitled to overtime payments).
- Higher than anticipated achievement, for example the acceptance of a paper in a high ranking presentations.
- A spontaneous act of leadership that made a difference.
- Achieving outcomes under tight constraints and obstacles.
- Role-model an office value under difficult conditions.
Money,
praise, and public recognition can have a powerful impact on how well employees
perform. Employees seek rewards and recognition and distinction regardless of
their grade or status in the organization. They need to feel that the work they
are doing makes an important contribution to the mission of your
organization. The credibility of the
awards program and its effect on employee morale and productivity depend
largely on how the management uses it.
Therefore,
the government and/or the management is urged to institutionalize personnel recognition
program in a form of awards as a tool that will enhance the commitments of the
employees to excellence. The Program to institutionalize personnel recognition
for excellence by pride award into management policies integrates and
enhances the Personnel Management Assessment by supervisors. Personnel
assessment is a mechanism that empowers government agencies by developing their
human resource management competencies, systems, and practices toward employee
excellence.
The
supervisor, plays a vital role in the success of the Incentive Awards Program.
The
management must also assure that the level of performance which earned an award
has been significantly high, so co-workers recognize the justice in granting
the award. An award is not an entitlement. The decision to grant or not to
grant an award is a management prerogative.
How to institutionalize
this personnel recognition
In
reality, the institutionalization of personnel recognition is a process, in
which an organization continuously evolves until personnel recognition is
formally and philosophically integrated into its structure and functioning.
Let’s take a look at some key point;
Institutionalization Framework:
The
figure below presents a framework that identifies organization and intervention
characteristics and institutionalization processes affecting the degree to
which change programs are institutionalized. The model shows that two key
antecedents--organization and intervention characteristics--affect different
institutionalization processes operating in organizations. These processes, in
turn, affect various indicators of institutionalization. The model also shows
that organization characteristics can influence intervention characteristics.
For example, organizations having powerful unions may have trouble gaining
internal support for OD interventions.
Institutionalization
Processes:
1. Socialization. This concerns the transmission of information about
beliefs, preferences, norms, and values with respect to the institutionalization.
Because implementation of personnel recognition generally involves considerable
learning and experimentation, a continual process of socialization is necessary
to promote persistence of the reward program. Organization members must focus
attention on the evolving nature of the policy and its ongoing meaning. They
must communicate this information to other employees, especially new members.
Transmission of information about the personnel recognition policy helps bring
new members onboard and allows participants to reaffirm the beliefs, norms, and
values underlying the intervention. For example, employee involvement programs
often include initial transmission of information about the policy, as well as
retraining of existing participants and training of new members. Such processes
are intended to promote persistence of the reward program as both new behaviors
are learned and new members are introduced.
2. Commitment. This binds
people to behaviors associated with the reward. It includes initial commitment
to the program, as well as recommitment over time. Opportunities for commitment
should allow people to select the necessary behaviors freely, explicitly, and
publicly. These conditions favor high commitment and can promote stability of
the new behaviors. Commitment should derive from several organizational levels,
including the employees directly involved and the middle and upper managers who
can support or thwart the institutionalization of personnel recognition policy.
In many early employee involvement programs, for example, attention was
directed at gaining workers' commitment to such programs. Unfortunately, middle
managers were often ignored and considerable management resistance to the
interventions resulted.
3. Reward allocation. This
involves linking rewards to the new behaviors required by the personnel reward
policy. Organizational rewards can enhance the persistence of involvements in
at least two ways. First, a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic rewards can
reinforce new behaviors. Intrinsic rewards are internal and derive from the
opportunities for challenge, development, and accomplishment found in the work.
When personnel recognition provide these opportunities, motivation to perform
should persist. This behavior can be further reinforced by providing extrinsic
rewards, such as money, for increased contributions. Because the value of
extrinsic rewards tends to diminish over time, it may be necessary to revise
the reward system to maintain high levels of desired behaviors. Second, new
behaviors will persist to the extent that rewards are perceived as equitable by
employees. When new behaviors are fairly compensated, people are likely to
develop preferences for those behaviors. Over time, those preferences should
lead to normative and value consensus about the appropriateness of the personnel
recognition policy. For example, many employee involvement programs fail to
persist because employees feel that their increased contributions to
organizational improvements are unfairly rewarded. This is especially true for
interventions relying exclusively on intrinsic rewards. People argue that an
intervention that provides opportunities for intrinsic rewards also should
provide greater pay or extrinsic rewards for higher levels of contribution to
the organization.
4. Diffusion. This refers to
the process of transferring personnel recognition policy from one system to
another. Diffusion facilitates institutionalization by providing a wider
organizational base to support the new behaviors. Many interventions fail to
persist because they run counter to the values and norms of the larger
organization. Rather than support the personnel recognition (award) policy, the
larger organization rejects the changes and often puts pressure on the change
target to revert to old behaviors. Diffusion of the personnel recognition
policy to other organizational units reduces this counter implementation force.
It tends to lock in behaviors by providing normative consensus from other parts
of the organization. Moreover, the act of transmitting institutionalized
behaviors to other systems reinforces commitment to the changes.
5. Sensing and calibration.
This involves detecting deviations from desired personnel recognition behaviors
and taking corrective action, institutionalized behaviors invariably encounter
destabilizing forces, such as changes in the environment, new technologies, and
pressures from other departments to nullify changes. These factors cause some
variation in performances preferences norms, and values. To detect this
variation and take corrective actions, organizations must have some sensing
mechanism. Sensing mechanisms, such as implementation feedback, provide
information about the occurrence of deviations. This knowledge can then
initiate corrective actions to ensure that behaviors are more in line with the policy.
For example, if a high level of job discretion associated with a job enrichment
involvement does not persist, information about this
problem might initiate' corrective actions, such as renewed attempts to
socialize people or to gain commitment to the personnel recognition program.
Institutionalizing Organization Development
Once it is determined that personnel
recognition has been implemented and is effective, attention should be directed
at institutionalizing the changes--making them a permanent part of the
organization's normal functioning. Normally, change occur in three stages:
unfreezing, moving, and refreezing. Institutionalizing a policy concerns
refreezing. It involves the long-term persistence of organizational changes: to
the extent that changes persist, they can be said to be institutionalized. Such
changes are not dependent on any one person but exist as a part of the culture
of an organization. This means that numerous others share norms about the
appropriateness of the personnel recognition.
Conclusion
Experiences
have shown that personnel recognition can have a lasting positive impact on the
culture of an organization, in the engagement of staff and users, and, most
importantly, on the quality of services provided. The growing emphasis on
educational sector reform throughout the world provides `fertile soil' for the
concept of institutionalizing personnel recognition. However, personnel
recognition will need to become part of the government and/or management
agenda, and not proposed in isolation, if civil service systems are to progress
beyond the awareness and experiential phases. As the framework illustrates, the
institutionalization of personnel recognition is a continual process with
multiple elements that require sustained commitment from leadership. Hence, one
of the challenges we face is convincing civil service decision makers to
implement, support, and promote a culture of quality. To this end, the use of
quality indicators and self-monitoring systems to readily capture clear,
quantitative results of civil service improvements are critical. Another
challenge to institutionalizing personnel recognition is staff attrition and
relocation to other parts of Nigeria, especially in Abakaliki. For this reason,
diverse capacity-building strategies should be implemented, including
on-the-job learning (through self-learning, peer mentoring, and job aids) and
pre-service education. In addition, sufficient resources must be allocated to
assure that a critical mass of personnel recognition experts are developed who
can train, coach, and mentor others, as well as keep up-to date in the field of
personnel recognition. Resources (human and financial) must also be devoted to
implement personnel recognition activities. The personnel recognition Project's
experience using the model portion of the Institutionalization Framework in
Latin America and Africa indicates that it can be a useful tool to assist an
organization or Ministry to plan and focus its efforts and resources to
strengthen and sustain personnel recognition. Responding to requests from
country programs and Ministries, we hope that the government and/or management
will develop and evaluate a self-assessment and monitoring instrument, based on
the framework, which will help an organization to analyze its personnel
recognition institutionalization progress more systematically over time.
It
has been recommended that when these measures are implemented, performance will
increase by 30%, this of course will have a knock-on effect our urge and lead
to greater future performance, productivity and execution of tasks ahead.
Therefore,
I implore that a meeting be held by the executives where they will discuss how
to institutionalize and implement this personnel recognition (through award)
into the policies of the management as it will set a new target within the
whole office. This is to ensure that the entire employees get back on track and
stick to timescales and deadlines in their assignments.
Thank
you for your co-operation and commitment to the join hands to institutionalize
personnel recognition in this office.