How Do I Create a Pro-activeness Award? Seeking Your Ideas and Experiences

Dear All, Hope you're doing well and staying safe and healthy. Every year, my company holds the Employee Recognition Awards with categories including Exceptional Performance, Leadership, Customer Focus, Collaboration, and Innovation & Change. This time, the management has decided to introduce a new category to the awards - the "Pro-activeness" category.

As the key person responsible for this awards program, I have been tasked with preparing the necessary paperwork outlining how to measure pro-activeness, the criteria, etc. This is my first time taking on such a task, and I am starting from scratch. If you have any ideas or references that could assist me in creating a solid framework, it would be greatly appreciated. Alternatively, if your company has a similar award category, I would be grateful if you could share your approach with me.

Regards, Zie HR Executive

Dear Member, For the "Pro-activeness" category award, I suggest that the precondition for this award should be that the employee has demonstrated, through recorded actions/suggestions, the following:

- Process improvement
- Cost saving
- Reduction in machine downtime
- Avoiding safety/accident hazards
- Quality improvement
- Energy saving
- Any other subject that contributes to health safety, profit, and brand value of the organization.

These suggestions/actions can be evaluated by a committee based on their outcomes, impact, and relevance. Marks can be assigned accordingly. From the merit list, you can then select the top 3.

Thank you.

Dear Zie,

Being proactive means creating or controlling a situation rather than just responding to it after it has happened.

Stephen Covey, in his famous book, "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People," has placed "be proactive" as the first habit. Being proactive is the opposite of being reactive. Many times, people neglect the problem when it is small. They start sorting it out when it snowballs. However, sorting out a bigger problem takes a toll on their precious time. Proactiveness helps in preventing problems and increasing productivity as time is not required to be spent on sorting out issues.

"A stitch in time saves nine" is an age-old proverb in English. Being proactive means living by that proverb. A proactive manager always keeps themselves and others informed. A proactive manager may identify points of friction among subordinates and prevent issues from escalating.

In the workplace, defining proactiveness can be a challenging task. For example, a Purchase Manager could be proactive in developing an alternate supplier, ensuring material availability for production. While downtime due to material unavailability is measurable, how do you measure the proactiveness of the Purchase Manager?

Proactiveness is an input that helps employees meet performance standards, which are rewarded. Why introduce an attribute that is invisible? Rewards and recognition are typically for measurable or tangible outputs. Rewarding an attribute like proactiveness, which is intangible, could risk being perceived as favoritism by some employees.

Considering this, my personal opinion is not to introduce this attribute for reward and recognition at all. It may not be necessary.

Thanks,

Dinesh Divekar

Proactive actions are at times difficult to measure and can be subjective.

Challenges in Measuring Subjective Actions

When subjective actions are measured for the grant of awards, disputes or dissatisfaction can arise.

Criteria for Awards

Criteria for awards should be measurable and distinct.

Experts in the field have already given their views. As is my usual practice, I suggest that providing more information about the scenario would have helped them give you a precise answer. For example, details about the field in which the organization operates, the category of workers for whom the award is intended, etc. Please review the information at the following sites and let me know if it is useful:

- [Proactivity Research by Prof. Sharon Parker](https://sites.google.com/site/profsharonparker/proactivity-research/measuring-proactive-behaviour)
- [Proactivity Can Be a Double-Edged Sword - Harvard Business Review](https://hbr.org/2016/10/proactivity-can-be-a-double-edged-sword)

Thank you.