Expanding Recognition at Verizon

Creating a culture of recognition is a challenging enough task with an organization of just 100 employees, but what about when you’ve got 50,000 employees to keep inspired? At telecom giant Verizon, this task falls primarily on the shoulders of two motivators-in-chief: Vicki Cahill, the director of incentives and recognitions programs for Verizon’s Domestic Telecom group, and Barbe Mariotti, the manager of Recognition and Incentives for Verizon Business.

Speaking recently with HR Management Magazine, Cahill and Mariotti describe Verizon’s new, broader approach to recognition, which they date to the company’s merger with MCI. The result of this merger was Verizon Business, consisting of 32,000 non-sales employees. Mariotti says the company hoped to expand on the existing recognition program for salespeople to include the team members now under the Verizon Business umbrella.

"For these employees you can’t say, ‘Well, you did X so you get Y’ like you can in the sales organization," Mariotti says, so in Verizon Business we needed to make this culture of recognition part of the management’s day-to-day duties. We use a point structure, and it’s online. We created it with flexibility in mind, because there are a number of organizations that need to use it, and be able to recognize their employees for the different milestones they hit throughout the year."

For a program of such magnitude, Cahill says trying to handle administration in-house would have been impossible. Instead, the tracking is done by Verizon and then every month, files are transferred to an outside agency that manipulates the data according to current rules structures. The agency also helps with communication, design, administering results, converting results into payouts, and making deposits into employees’ accounts.

"Due to the complexity of the rewards we want to offer our employees, you absolutely have to use a third party to do that in an efficient way," Mariotti says.

In Verizon’s case, complexity involves offering employees a great deal of flexibility in their reward choices. In addition to a catalog featuring more than 1,200 merchandise items, the company offers gift cards to 200 different retailers, as well as even more specialized options for international employees. But as Cahill points out, Verizon is willing to stretch beyond these boundaries for unique employee requests.

"We had an employee who had been saving his points from the sales group for several years, and eventually he saved enough to buy a pickup truck," Cahill says. "The third party went out, sourced his truck for him, and converted his points. We also have a site that’s a bit like eBay, where we have unusual items, like collector baseballs or tickets to sold-out concerts. Employees can bid their points for those items online."

Offering a wide array of award mediums is important, Cahill adds, because the company doesn’t want employees to ever feel like they’ve exhausted their prize options.

"We’ve got enough out there that they could sell forever and there would still be plenty of variety of gifts, travel, and merchandise they could select from," Cahill says.

And while the larger program may have originated as an extension of the company’s sales incentives offerings, Cahill notes that sales and non-sales employees require unique recognition strategies.

"One of the reasons we don’t do cash or gift cards on the sales side particularly is that you really want those tangible items; you want the employees to think and dream of earning something," Cahill says. "It can be a very powerful tool if its used effectively."

Similarly, Mariotti observes, travel incentives tend to work better for a sales audience because salespeople particularly benefit from the camaraderie that goes along with group travel, while the company can get motivational mileage, so to speak, out of winners who come back talking up their experiences in Hawaii or the Caribbean.

Beyond the specifics of the gifts or the details of individual programs, however, Mariotti says that a culture of recognition ties the reward to the company, so that recipients will always remember and think about the company they work for as they use or enjoy their reward.

"With recognition it’s always in the back of someone’s mind, ‘I’m going to do a good job because I want to be recognized for this,’ knowing that they might be recognized with an e-card or a thank-you or praise in front of their peers in key meetings all that builds on itself and managers are using that throughout the year," Mariotti says. "Rewards and incentives are really powerful tools that managers can use within their teams to keep everyone motivated."