Minto Group: Building Recognition Into Its DNA
Minto Group’s employee recognition program has proven to support engagement, performance and retention goals. Along with Social Recognition, the team celebrates work anniversaries with Service Milestones and rolled out Inclusion Advisor to offer a “tangible tool” for DEI micro-coaching.
Social Recognition
Service Milestones
Community Celebrations
Table of contents
- How has Minto Group’s recognition program evolved over the years?
- How does recognition impact company culture?
- What business outcomes does recognition foster?
- How has Workhuman’s Inclusion Advisor fostered diversity and inclusion across Minto Group?
- What is it like to partner with Workhuman?
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The employee recognition program at Minto Group, a fully integrated real estate company based in Canada, launched in 2016 and has proven over the years to increase engagement and performance and be effective in reducing turnover.
Hear from Dave Bond, Vice President, Total Rewards & HR Systems, on building recognition into the Minto Group community, why his team chose to partner with Workhuman, and how data from peer-to-peer recognition reaffirms that he’s achieving company goals.
This interview was recorded at Workhuman® Live 2023 in San Diego.
How has Minto Group’s recognition program evolved over the years?
"I think the story of our evolution is how important it has become as part of our culture. Very early on, we had quite high adoption from the get-go, which was really, really good. It indicated to us that maybe we had this pent-up demand for people to want to recognize their
colleagues.
We do seem to have a very tight-knit cohort of employees, or group of employees, that genuinely like each other. We had a number of different ways employees could recognize each other before we rolled out this program. And we didn’t really understand how frequently that was happening because there was no metrics around that until we had the program that we rolled out. Then we realized how pervasive [it was], [and how] almost affectionate employees are to one another."
How does recognition impact company culture?
"Peer-to-peer recognition is by far the highest utilized form of recognition in the company, and that’s been from the get-go. It is my peer employees who recognize me and vice versa. We have manager-to-direct report recognition, and that utilization is good and strong, but it’s not even close to the amount of peer-to peer-recognition we have. Over the last eight years of the program, what we’ve seen is it’s just become part of our DNA.
Before we had a recognition program at Minto, we said we had a very strong sense of community. It was a family-started company, 65 years ago. There was a strong sense of community, strong sense of family, and that was all very sincere and legitimate, and it’s
still the case. What our recognition program allows us is another avenue to demonstrate that."
What business outcomes does recognition foster?
"We participate in an annual employee engagement survey. One of the surveys that we leverage has a very specific question related to recognition: 'Have you been recognized in the last three to six months?' And the answer to that question is very specific. It’s meant to say, specifically, in this period of time, you were recognized.
But there’s another element to that question, and that is, 'Do you feel like you are being recognized?' Even though that isn’t stated in the question, we hear from employees that that’s what they’re thinking when they answer the question.
And our score in that particular question has been consistently quite high and quite strong across the organization. And that’s really reaffirming for us – that when we do this very important pulse check of the organization and the level of engagement, that employees feel like they are being recognized. To say that we have lower attrition as a result of our recognition program is a true statement."
How has Workhuman’s Inclusion Advisor
fostered diversity and inclusion across
Minto Group?
"It’s an evolution, and it’s going to take time, education, and practice for people to change how they communicate, how they interact. Inclusion Advisor is important and a tangible tool to help in the overall process."
What is it like to partner with Workhuman?
"Working with Workhuman has been fantastic, in short. We first met Workhuman when we were wanting to establish and roll out a formal recognition platform, and they were one of our vendors through the selection process.
We attended the first Workhuman Live event as a prospective customer. It was at that event that we realized that every employee we met at that conference–every speaker, the attendees–were all passionate and genuine about wanting to bring recognition to the workplace. And not because it was selling a product, but because it was absolutely the right thing to do. And that was what sold us. We said, 'Look, we can develop a recognition
program with anybody. But you guys believe this stuff. So that’s who we
want to partner with.'
And that’s the key word, is partnership. I would put Workhuman clearly, far and away the number one partner, vendor, that we work with."
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