Is a pat on the back too much to ask?

Companies believe they’re doing a terrific job of motivating employees, but American workers don’t see it that way. After weathering the recession and being asked to do more with less, they’d like some kudos for their efforts.                                                             

“We found that employees with one foot out the door clearly feel recognition in their company is not frequent enough or fair enough,” Globoforce, a company that designs corporate rewards programs, said in its twice-yearly Mood Tracker survey last fall. About half of the employees who were looking for a new job said it was because they weren’t getting those “attaboys” for jobs well done.

When the economy was at its trough, employees didn’t mind giving up perks and working harder, because at least they still had jobs. But now things have changed: Corporations earned a record-high $1.75 trillion in the third quarter of 2012, and compensation for top executives has climbed even as wages for rank-and-file have stagnated.

A survey last fall of medium-sized and large companies conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management and Globoforce, found that although about three-quarters of respondents had programs in place to recognize employee achievements, this number slipped from the previous year.

That’s still a healthy majority, but there’s evidence that the decrease might be a longer-term trend dating back to the start of the recession. Surveys conducted every three years by the group WorldatWork found that recognition peaked in 2005 and 2008, when 89 percent of responding companies had recognition programs. In the group’s 2011 survey, that number slipped to 86 percent, and the amount they spent on these programs also dropped.

“There is an impact when things are taken away, particularly in this day and age when there are minimal increases in salary,” said Rodger Stotz, chief research officer with the Incentive Research Foundation. “The recognition becomes more valuable because it shows the organization values and appreciates the employee, and it has an emotional impact.”

Efforts to recognize good work and boost morale don’t have to be expensive, recognition experts say.

“My experience has been these programs don’t cost a lot of money, but there’s a lot of bang for the buck,” said Bruce Elliott, manager of compensation and benefits at the Society for Human Resource Management.

“It creates a culture of positivity,” Charlie Ungashick, CMO at Globoforce, said.

The problem is that the financial benefits of more motivated workers aren’t always evident. Much of the research conducted to assess results is attitudinal rather than quantitative, and the losses the come from dropping recognition efforts are similarly hard to quantify, said Frank Mulhern, associate dean of integrated marketing communications program at Medill School of Journalism Media and Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University. “It’s hard for a CFO to see that.”

A little more than three-fifths of respondents in the SHRM survey said their company rewarded employees based on performance, but the people doing that hard work don’t see it that way. Just 37 percent of respondents in Globoforce’s Mood Tracker survey said people in their company were fairly rewarded according to their job performance.

More than half of workers say being “valued and rewarded” is what’s most important in choosing where to work, employee recognition program company Achievers found in a survey conducted last year, but a November Gallup poll found that slightly less than half of American workers are satisfied with the amount of recognition they get for the work they do.

Ungashick said companies were experimenting with new ways to give workers that pat on the back, like peer-to-peer recognition. And a growing number of managers are embracing benefits like flex time and working from home. But these “perks” are a double-edged sword: A Bureau of Labor Statistics study found that up to two-thirds of the time employees spend telecommuting is actually on top of the regular 40 hours they put in every week.

Industries with labor shortages see the most feel-good investment. Elliott says Silicon Valley, where big tech firms fight for top talent in programming and engineering, is a hotbed of incentives and little extras. After becoming CEO at Yahoo last July, Marissa Mayer implemented free lunch and gave employees iPods. (She also demanded that employees work from the office.)

But this sort of lavish perk isn’t the norm in most workplaces. “This emphasis on engagement, much of that is being pioneered in the high tech industries where there’s such a high value placed on human capital,” Mulhern said.

It’s another story at the lower end of the labor-market spectrum, where many of the jobs lost in the recession have been recovered, he said. “It’s more like the cost benefit isn’t necessarily there... for employees where there’s a high turnover and they’re easily replaceable.”

Many employers end up scratching their heads when women who are seemingly on the fast track to the corner office end up leaving their companies.

Google managers decided to use their expertise deciphering data to figure out why it was happening within their ranks.

A story in the New York Times titled “In Google’s Inner Circle, A Falling Number of Women” discusses how the search engine giant used its own internal data to figure out why some women leave the firm.  One of the best nuggets was buried in the next-to-last paragraph of the story.

“Another time Google was losing women was after they had babies. The attrition rate for postpartum women was twice that for other employees. In response, Google lengthened maternity leave to five months from three and changed it from partial pay to full pay. Attrition decreased by 50 percent.”

Bingo!

That piece of data — albeit from a limited sample of corporate America — points to a simple idea: If women can get some extra paid time to get their bodies and minds back on track after the baby comes they may be able to figure out how to make work-life balance a reality when they return.

Unfortunately, research from the Families and Work Institute shows employers are cutting back on providing full pay during such leave.

Although employers have grown more likely to offer some form of paid maternity leave, they are becoming less likely to provide time off with full pay.

About 58 percent of employers provide some form of pay for maternity leave based on the latest survey, up from 46 percent in 2005. But only 5 percent of all employers offer full pay for new mothers, down from an estimated 6 percent in 2005.

Clearly Google is bucking the trend on this one in the United States although they are still not up to the standard set by Sweden, which offers workers more than a year of paid maternity leave.

The jury is out on whether such a generous amount of time off will help women crash through the glass ceiling. But you have to give Google kudos for realizing it has a problem keeping talented women on board, especially given the recent departure of a pregnant executive at the firm, Marissa Mayer, to run Yahoo.

Not that having maternity leave would have helped Google keep Mayer. She sparked a national debate last month when she said she planned to work through her leave after she gives birth.

Eve Tahmincioglu is a career blogger and director of communications for workplace think tank Families and Work Institute. 

Companies that provide employees with generous benefits, including contributing more to retirement funds and absorbing health insurance hikes, are often financially healthier because of it.

A study released Wednesday found employers that offered substantial programs focused on the long-term financial health of their workers saw a host of business dividends as a result, everything from lower turnover to better customer service.

Harvard Business Review Analytic Services surveyed 58 of the 100 companies named to “The Principal 10 Best” list over the past decade and also conducted interviews with executives from 20 employers included on the list. Three quarters of those polled reported that benefits contributed to employee retention and 72 percent said they impacted employee loyalty.

The survey was commissioned by the Principal Financial Group, although companies studied did not necessarily use Principal services.

Despite the tough economy in recent years, firms in the study said they had maintained or increased their benefits packages, including raising retirement contributions in some cases. While some did have their employees pay more for health insurance benefits, the majority ate the increased costs.

Virtually all the firms agreed that they have a "strong sense of responsibility when it comes to providing benefits that protect the financial well-being" of employees and their families. When asked to identify the most significant thing they are doing to impact employees’ financial security, nine out of 10 respondents mentioned retirement programs and cited generous employer contributions.

The majority of companies surveyed also provided one-on-one financial help for employees for retirement planning and have added wellness programs.

As a result of the generous benefits, the employers surveyed said they saw a host of benefits, including:

• Enhanced recruitment
• Committed, engaged employees
• Excellent retention
• Deep organizational expertise
• Safe workplace practices
• Strong customer relationships

The question of whether these employers are more likely to have lucrative benefits because they’re successful, or they’re successful because they provide such perks, wasn’t answered by the study, said Luke Vandermillen, senior vice president of retirement & investor services with the Principal Financial Group. However, he said there is “a paternalistic feeling that cuts across these companies.”

The Harvard study shows great benefits are "not only good for employees, but good for those companies that provide well-rounded broad and deep benefit programs," he said.

The percentage of working-age people who get their health insurance through their employer has fallen sharply in recent years, according to a new report, and the drop cannot just be blamed on people losing their jobs.

A report released this week by the by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that 60.1 percent of working-age adults had employer-sponsored insurance in 2009, down 8.8 percentage points from 1999.

In addition, 55.8 percent of children were on an employer-sponsored plan in 2009, a 9.3 percentage point drop from a decade earlier.

The report said job losses were an important factor in people losing their employer health coverage, but they were not the primary reason.

Over the course of the decade, the percentage of full-time workers with employer health benefits fell by 3.8 percentage ponts, to 77.2 percent. The number of people with part-time jobs who got health insurance from their employer saw an even steeper 9.2 percentage point drop, to 50.6 percent.

In general, about 50.7 million people, or 16.7 percent of the population, had no health insurance at all in 2009.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities focuses its research on programs that affect lower-income families. The health insurance report is based on U.S. Census data.

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