Metlife Rethinks Recognition
September 08, 2008
When it comes to recognition, MetLife Auto & Home puts its employees in charge
By Leo Jakobson
Like a small but rapidly growing number of companies today, MetLife Auto & Home has a formal employee recognition program. And although the Warwick, R.I.–based insurer's Best of the Best program is, on the surface, similar to many other companies' recognition programs, there are some very interesting differences that set it apart from the common recognition initiative.
For while the five-year-old program is a centrally created initiative supported by senior executives, it is managed and administered by frontline employees—all volunteers. Even the program's national manager, Recognition Chairperson Ronnie Brennan, oversees Best of the Best in addition to her "real" job as claims technical administrator. And the recognition champions who oversee the program in the field, at each office or business unit, are associates or local supervisors. It is truly a bottom-up recognition program.
Which is the way upper management wants it. "The direction of the program is determined by the Recognition Champions Committee," says Marge Rody, the vice president of customer service operations, who signs off on the program. "We really wanted it to be peer recognition in local offices, let local recognition champions create the program. It can't be top-down."
That is how Tommy Lee Hayes-Brown, MetLife Auto & Home's first recognition chairperson, developed Best of the Best in 2003. "In order to build it as part of our culture, the leaders had to buy in and believe in it," says Hayes-Brown. "At the same time we realized for it to be effective, it couldn't be anything that was mandated or pushed down in order for it to be really successful. So we count on the experts, which are the folks out there, our associates." Even the budget is left to individual offices.
While he gave up the title in 2006, Hayes-Brown still actively mentors his successor. He is, after all, the company recognition expert and a member of the board of directors of Recognition Professionals International (RPI), an organization he discovered while looking for advice on how to create the Best of the Best program.
"When I got this new role of corporate recognition chairperson, I went out on the Web looking for some help," Hayes-Brown says, noting that while MetLife Auto & Home had long tried to foster a culture of recognition and employee engagement, it had not had a formal program of any kind, except the standard sales-force-only incentive plan. "I saw their Web site [RPI was then called the National Association for Employee Recognition] and saw that there were other folks like me out there looking for best practices and wanting ways to sharpen their skills for recognition."
Five years later, the Best of the Best program is showing solid results in the form of steadily rising employee satisfaction and retention. Looking at the largest department in MetLife Auto & Home, the claims department, employee satisfaction scores rose from 3.89 to 4.43 on a one-to-five scale between 2003 and 2006. In that period, customer satisfaction and retention rates grew at roughly the same rate as the increase in employees who said on the company's job satisfaction surveys that they felt recognized. At the same time, justified customer complaints fell at approximately that same rate.
"Our company is stronger today than our competitors because of this program," says Rody. "If this remains part of our culture, which we intend it to, it will give us an advantage over our competitors forever more."
The Details
The Best of the Best program is broken into three tiers. The first is On the Spot, which Hayes-Brown describes as "your immediate recognition, your pat on the back, thank-you" from a manager or supervisor on a day-to-day basis.
Next is the more structured middle tier, known (perhaps somewhat confusingly) as "informal." This is a Web-based system with a nomination process based around four corporate objectives. Nominations are vetted by each office's committee of two to five volunteer recognition champions, generally on a monthly basis, and winners can choose a gift from an online catalog.
Finally, there's the "formal" level, an annual selection of a few names from every business unit (up to five from the largest office) will be sent to Brennan's corporate recognition committee, which will choose 33 winners—one percent of the 3,300 employees—to be recognized at the corporate level and travel to a ceremony hosted by the company's president. This award is handed out by the recognition champions committee, overseen by the recognition chairperson. All of those nominated by their local recognition champions are honored, whether they are selected or not, Hayes-Brown says.
"One thing that I love about our recognition program is that while there are certain criteria—our key recognizable behaviors that you nominate people under that [are determined at the] corporate level—the actual individual recognition is left up to each office," says Hayes-Brown. "So we can keep the culture of each individual office. Because our Texas office may have a whole different culture than our St. Louis office.
"The four key recognizable behaviors are collaborating, innovation, learning and caring," he continues. "These were strategically chosen because we feel if our associates are exhibiting these behaviors on a regular basis, we'll be a successful company."
The on-the-spot awards are the least structured part of the program, and are really the responsibility of office managers and supervisors. "We believe that everybody should be recognized at least once a week, if possible, in some way, shape or form," says Hayes-Brown. "Whether it's that nice note in your file that says, 'You handled this very well,' or [your manager saying], 'Hey, I saw that you took over John's desk yesterday. You were a lifesaver, here's a pack of Life Savers.' That type of thing."
The heart of the Best of the Best program is the middle tier, known as "informal." Despite that name, this is a Web-based system with a nomination process based around the four corporate objectives. Nominations must explain which objective was advanced by the action in question and are vetted by each office's committee of two to five volunteer recognition champions. These are the employees "charged with keeping recognition alive in offices across the country," Brennan says.
"When someone exhibits the behaviors that an employee or manager thinks go above and beyond the normal scope of duty, they can nominate that person," says Hayes-Brown. "This can be a peer nominating a peer, it can be a manager nominating a peer or a peer nominating a supervisor." While the program is focused on the non-sales employees, salespeople often nominate support staffers.
"Then those nominations are collected by the group of associates within that business unit, within that building," Hayes-Brown says. "The committee meets and discusses the nominations for the month—usually it's a month, although some groups do it every two weeks—then they sit and decide what level of reward or recognition this nomination deserves. So again, it's all left up to the associates. Those recommendations are then given to local management to review, but in general, those recommendations are approved and announced to the office, and the person gets their recognition and then their gift."
The gifts are from an online catalog and come in four grades that correspond to characters from MetLife's brand spokespersons: Snoopy and the other characters from the Peanuts comic strip. The actual dollar value of the awards is not huge. They range from items like a CD or logoed T-shirt at the Woodstock level, to a silver Tiffany bracelet or gas grill at the highest, or Snoopy, level.
The top-tier "formal"-level winners—the Best of the Best—don't just go collect a crystal Snoopy or Lucy plaque in Rhode Island once a year, Hayes-Brown notes. Having found the cream of the crop, the corporate recognition committee skims their expertise off over the next year.
"We count on them to review things that we're thinking about doing, or get their take on new programs," Hayes-Brown says. "They are leaders of our company, and we find their opinions invaluable."
Making the annual winners members of this associate advisory panel not only provides the company a group to bounce recognition ideas off of, it adds to the prestige of the award. "They're still recognized throughout the year as an ambassador of the Best of the Best," Hayes-Brown says.
The Next Step
 Like any good recognition program, especially one created by the employees themselves, the Best of the Best program is something of a work in progress. When Brennan took over as recognition chairperson at the beginning of 2007, a recognition task force made up of a dozen employees who were not recognition champions was brought to MetLife Auto & Home's Rhode Island headquarters for a three-day conference to look at the five-year-old program and suggest changes to bring it to the next level.
Based on that committee's suggestions, the company is making some substantial changes to the program, particularly to the awards, Brennan says. In the middle tier, the Woodstock-, Lucy-, Charlie Brown- and Snoopy-level awards will offer winners a far greater selection. Winners will be able to combine, for example, two Lucys and choose a Charlie Brown. The top prizes will stay at the dollar amount associated with Snoopy to avoid tax complications, Brennan says.
And while that is still unfolding, the top-tier program recently underwent a fairly substantial change. The winning 1 percent has traditionally been chosen to attend the annual three-day sales conference in Rhode Island, bringing a spouse. But these are non-sales employees, Brennan notes, and the task force felt, "as much as it was a compliment to be there, maybe we could do something a little different," she says.
Last September, the 33 winners and their spouses flew out to Rhode Island, checking in on a Thursday night, she says. The employees being honored had a Friday meeting with senior staff, followed by an awards dinner where each winner was called up to be recognized by the president and top executives. Each one received a $1,500 travel voucher to use with their families—an individual travel incentive.
Other changes Brennan's task force recommended include adding e-cards to the Web-based nomination system to facilitate giving day-to-day kudos to virtual employees, to ship the middle-tier awards more quickly, and to strengthen the back-end reporting capabilities, making it easier for management to go through the 6,300 annual Best of the Best peer nominations and break out data like what behaviors are being nominated, who's doing the nominating and where more recognition training might be needed, among other things.
Which isn't to say everything's changing. Rody says that the company was considering expanding the top-tier winners from 33 to about 40, adding a few more winner slots. But in an example of how serious MetLife Auto & Home's management is about keeping Best of the Best a bottom-up program, the recognition champions shot that down. "They wanted to keep it exclusive," Rody adds, noting that only one employee has been selected twice as a top-tier winner.
Sidebar: Commiting to Recognition: Tommy Lee and RPI
Send comments to ljakobson@incentivemag.com.
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