SAVE | EMAIL | PRINT | MOST POPULAR |  RSS | | REPRINT
|
Avnet: Building Ground-up Support for Recognition
August 07, 2008
By Leo Jakobson
Avnet is different from Amgen in a number of ways. A distributor of electronic components, computer products and software, as well as technology products and services for more than 300 leading manufacturers, Avnet does not invent or manufacture products, although it does put some products together for clients. But it is largely a middleman, a supply-chain specialist. Headquartered in Phoenix, the $15.7 billion firm has more than 300 offices in 70 countries around the globe. Compared to Amgen, Avnet is rolling out its global recognition program using a slower, more step-by-step approach.
At the beginning of the year, says Church, Avnet's chief HR development officer, the company had just expanded its North American program beyond length-of-service and birthday awards to include a Web-based, peer-to-peer recognition program that lets employees send "thank you" messages to other employees. And it was preparing to roll those programs out globally. The next step is to allow managers to give out gift cards in nominal amounts—probably up to $100, he says. "We're going to run that for a while and see how it goes," Church says, adding, "I already know what's going to happen: Our managers are going to say, 'This is awesome, what else can we do with this?'"
Culturally, that's how Avnet works, Church says. "We start with something that we believe will work everywhere, we let people use it and see the value of it." Then the company will expand the program, building out more features as demand arises, rather than launching the program in one fell swoop, as Amgen did. That said, once the concept is accepted within the company, Avnet tends to add features quickly.
Another "one of the areas where we differ a little bit is we don't really look at this whole topic as trying to create a recognition culture," says Church. "Avnet already has a culture, and it's a performance- and values-based culture. We view recognition as extremely important, but we view it in the context of driving performance management and driving engagement," he adds. "That's what we're really trying to accomplish."
In fact, this is something Avnet has been working on for as much as five years, Church says. "We're pretty far down the road: We've trained all of our managers, they understand why it's important, they know what the drivers of engagement are. We also have done a lot of work to understand that [those drivers] are different by region. There are some that are common, but some of the things that drive engagement in Europe and Asia are different than they are in North America."
Church admits that Avnet's recognition programs have not, until now, been global. "There was no consistency and no uniformity," he says. He found "some managers are very good at it and do it in the regular course of their work, and some managers don't do it at all. Some managers do it by sending flowers to the employee's home or telling them they can take their wife out to dinner, some do it by recognizing people at a staff meeting, some do it by walking around and shaking people's hands, looking them in the eyes and saying 'thank you,' and some managers do it by giving away gift cards."
The problem, Church adds, is that Avnet does not "know to what extent this is taking place. It's all sort of ad hoc, and because of that, we don't know how much we're doing and we can't measure it, we don't know how much money we're spending on recognition." Most importantly, he adds, the company couldn't measure return-on-investment.
As for that, Avnet uses Watson Wyatt to run its employee engagement surveys and another company to compile global customer satisfaction data. "We want to look at the relationship between engaged employees and loyal customers," Church says. In a service business, the model is that "engaged employees get you loyal customers, and we want to test that out, as well as drive behavior."
Send comments to ljakobson@incentivemag.com
|
SAVE | EMAIL | PRINT | MOST POPULAR | RSS |
|
|
| Back to Incentive Index |
|
|
