On Thursday, I’ll deliver a brand-spanking-new presentation at an internal communications conference in Las Vegas on a concept I’ve been exploring for the last year or so. I’m calling it the Work Experience. The idea is simple: Approaching job satisfaction, morale, employee engagement, and other employment programs in the piecemeal fashion that characterizes most workplaces is inadequate in today’s world of work. Employees have access to the same resources everyone else does, including external reporting about the company and social networks where the organization is being discussed. (In fact, workers’ use of social software is increasingly as integrated into their day-to-day work as email.) They have access to tools they can use to engage in conversation with each other, including tools that hide those conversations from management view.

Yet businesses need to rely on employees more than ever as their testimonials—whether it’s about the company’s products and services or its desirability as an employer—are among the most credible. In order to ensure employees are on the company’s page, that they’re engaged, and that they’re satisfied, business needs to provide employees with a superior work experience. Just think of the efforts your organization is making in customer experience marketing and apply those concepts to the workplace. This is the first in a series of posts that will explore the notion of the workplace experience.

The annual President’s Award was one of the programs handed to me when I joined Mattel in 1984 as manager of Employee Communications. Created to reward creativity and innovation, the recognition was given to a combination of 10 individual employees and teams. The prize itself was significant: $10,000 per winner. The impact the award had on employee behavior, however, was negligible. Its lack of impact was the result of how it was communicated, both formally and informally.

Big money, small experience

Winners were recognized in a brochure that was distributed to all employees. The brochure was pure crap. It was printed in-house on cheap paper stock using amateurish sketches of the winners. The actual presentation of the awards was done in private. One by one, the winners were ushered into the president’s office. Behind closed doors, the president would shake hands with the winner, chat for three or four minutes, hand over a check and a certificate, and usher the winner out.

It wasn’t unusual for winners of this year’s award to be laid off next year. It became a running joke among Mattel’s rank and file: The president’s award brochure is a list of employees who probably won’t be working here next year.

I approached a rethinking of the President’s Award based on one core principle: Recognition isn’t for the people being recognized. It’s for everyone else. The recognition experience has to be so desirable that all the employees who didn’t win will say to themselves, “Next year, that’s going to be me in that brochure. Now, what do I have to do differently to win?” That’s one important way to behaviors and cultures.

Doubling down on the winners experience

For the first year I was responsible for the award, the presentations were made at a quarterly managers meeting, with winners on-stage, hundreds of company leaders hearing what they had done to earn the recognition. We developed a much higher-end brochure, something people would be proud to take home and show to their families, even leave on the coffee table. But most important was the winner’s event. We chartered a yacht in Marina del Rey. The winners and their plus-ones were invited to a special evening with the company leadership and their spouses or significant others. Those winners who worked in non-headquarters locations were flown in for the event.

The yacht wound up never leaving the dock. Winds were too high for safe sailing, but the views were spectacular and the president and vice presidents mingled with the front-line winners. When the winners returned to the workplace, they talked about the experience with their colleagues. We detected a change in the tone of the conversation about the president’s award. Suddenly, employees were envious of their colleagues’ experience. They wanted it for themselves next year.

The number of nominations rose for the second year of the award, as did interest in the process and anticipation of the announcement of winners. We upped the game on the brochure, adopted a theme and commissioning original art, all of it assembled by one of L.A.‘s best graphic designers (Linda Warren). Seeking to avoid the disappointment of the previous year of a cruise that never happened, we opted for the event to be held in a medieval castle in the Malibu hills. Again, winners sang the praises of the event, focusing on the opportunity to mingle intimately with executives and their wives and husbands.

The President’s Award goes Hollywood

I turned the event over to one of my staff members, Vanessa Finan, for the third year, and she created a truly inspiring event. After work on the evening of the event, winners and their others were picked up in front of Mattel’s old Hawthorne, California headquarters in limousines and whisked off to a Hollywood sound stage. They walked a red carpet into the sound stage as (fake) paparazzi snapped their pictures and (fake) fans screamed for their autographs. As they entered the sound stage, they saw a delayed video of their red carpet walk. The sound stage interior was set up like a Golden Globes award; dinner and dancing followed before the limos brought them back to their cars.

You can imagine the buzz around Mattel after the Hollywood treatment. The President’s Award had become a true badge of honor, a recognition to which employees aspired. It also reinforced the company’s focus on creativity and innovation, and provided 10 case studies demonstrating how it was implemented by people just like them in the real world of day-to-day work.

The experience of meeting the president in his office for five minutes and being handed a check produced virtually no buzz and had no impact on the culture. Turning the award into a three-pronged experience—the public presentation of the award, the appearance in a high-class book that reflected the values the award embodied, and the winners event with the senior staff—had a profound and measurable impact.

The more things change…

Sadly, after I left Mattel in 1988, I learned the new communications manager went back to a low-key event and a cheap brochure. She didn’t get the connection between an experience for employees that would get people talking and its outcome: aligning daily work with the kinds of behaviors the company wanted from staff.

Please share in a comment below: How has your organization—the one you work for now or one where you were employed in the past—made recognition an experience that leads to positive buzz, culture change, and employee testimonials in support of the company?