Customer Reviews

Workplace Recognition

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As a fellow recognition professional, I know how difficult and rewarding the role is and I am grateful to Ms. Glasscock and Ms. Gram for gathering the data, outlining the process steps and creating an elegant and strategic blueprint for effective recognition, no matter what the work environment.

Organized into sections that deal with Meaning, Myths, Methods and Magic, Workplace Recognition clearly and concisely establishes the business case for recognition and cites statistical data and respected management experts as additional support for the book's premise.

Good and bad scenarios bring the messages right into the workplace we are all familiar with and help us understand the consequences of our actions and behaviors.

I wish I had this book as a resource during my tenure as manager of Cast Recognition at the Walt Disney World® Resort. Our team and over a thousand Cast Members worked many months to create the first global recognition process for over 35,000+ Cast Members. I believe that this book could have saved the organization many hours of research, benchmarking and just plain trial and error.

The book is well researched and analytical in its approach yet it speaks to the intrinsic needs we all have as co-workers, bosses and team members. It explains the how and the why of practicing positive reinforcement in straightforward, jargon-free language.

I recommend it to anyone who is interested in creating a more positive, productive workplace.

The authors claim to know and understand behavior science and how it applies to the workplace, however, they refer to increasing the workload (pg. 69) as negative reinforcement which goes to show they are ignorant of what negative reinforcement means. According to the science of behavior and the author's definition of negative reinforcement on page 72 negative reinforcement is any stimulus when removed, INCREASES the probability of behavior. Increasing a workload would be adding something that makes a behavior less probable to occur and would be correctly called positive punishment. A reinforcer by definition makes a behavior more likely to occur. The authors continue to misuse negative reinforcement on page 73 when they give negative feedback from your boss as an example of negative reinforcement. The bosses negative feedback is an example of positive punishment because a stimulus was added (negative feedback)and no stimulus was removed. The authors do have some good recognition ideas based in behavior science just be careful of how they misuse and confuse their terms. Aubrey Daniels books are on employee recognition and motivation are so much better that this book because Daniels is accurate in his definitions,usage, and understanding of behaviorism terms.