Some years ago, I was working for the marketing department of a large UK company who had just acquired another company.

The plan was to amalgamate the two marketing departments and we wanted to create and communicate a core set of values that would help integrate the new people and ensure we were all clear about what the department’s objectives were.

We decided to implement a reward scheme for people who were ‘living’ the new values and discussions began about the best way to run the scheme.

Very early in the discussions we decided that we wanted this to be a peer to peer scheme but wanted to present it in a new and exciting way. Most people had been used to the usual ‘nominate a colleague’ scheme where the management had the final say on who got awards but we wanted ours to be different to engage the new larger team.

Our solution was simple.

We gave everybody in the department a cheque book with four £10 reward cheques. Staff were instructed that they could give these cheques to anyone in the department who they believed had ‘lived the values’. We asked the staff to tell us how they had given the cheques to and why but the deal was we would never say no.

When we suggested this scheme, certain people in the business (the finance department was one of them!) were convinced that all that would happen would be a mass exchange of cheques on day one.

As it turned out, the scheme was one of the most successful I had seen. Staff really valued being trusted to issue awards and demanded a far higher level of performance from their colleagues to receive an award than management would have. The bottom line was, your colleagues know what good is because they do the same job as you and know what’s hard and what’s easy.

The other side of that was that people receiving awards from their colleagues really valued them because they knew how highly everyone valued them.

It also engaged everybody in understanding the values….people were keen to make awards but needed to know the values to be able to do that.

So the lesson we learned……..management aren’t the only ones who know what good looks like. Give the power to the people!

Image: woodleywonderworks