Employee of the Month: Why It Often Backfires

A framed certificate costs almost nothing, which is why employee of the month looks like recognition without a downside. Several field studies of awards like it found the opposite risk: the prize can lower the very behavior it celebrates. In a randomized field experiment in California schools, published in 2021, students mailed a surprise award for perfect attendance went on to miss more school the following month than students who received nothing.¹

As usually run, with one winner a month chosen on loose grounds, the award is a weak bet. Recognition itself is not the problem, since unexpected, specific thanks has raised effort in experiments. The trouble sits in the format, which can leave most people as losers, invite gaming and signal that good conduct is rare. If you run one, the repairs are plain: publish the criteria, take nominations from colleagues with reasons, add a team award and say exactly what the winner did. For the wider picture, see how researchers and Gallup define engagement.

Prefer to watch? The video covers the same ground as this article.

VideoEmployee of the Month: Why It Often BackfiresWiserHours

Is employee of the month a good idea? The evidence is thin

Employee of the month has almost no direct evidence in its favor, and most of the closest tests point the other way. Wikipedia describes the program as honoring one employee, traditionally each month, with a certificate, trophy or similar, judged on things such as performance, quality and attendance.² We found no randomized trial of that exact format in a real workplace.

The nearest test is a pair of lab experiments by Douglas Johnson and Alyce Dickinson, published in 2010. People keyed in data as members of a made-up team competing for a “Check Processor of the Week” title, with a 50-dollar bonus added for the winner in the second experiment. Everyone was told they had placed between second and fifth, the position of an unrewarded runner-up. The authors concluded that such programs do not sustain better performance and may even do harm.³ The full paper sits behind a paywall and its abstract gives no effect sizes, so none are quoted here.

That setup is the everyday reality of the format. In a team of 20, one person wins each month and 19 do not, and over a year most people may never win at all.

So start by auditing what you already have. List every winner from the past year, note what each was recognized for, and count who has never been chosen. If the same few names recur, or the reasons are vague (“great attitude”), the program is sending a message you probably did not intend.

Why a surprise award made students miss more school

The strongest evidence on simple awards comes from schools, but it tests the same idea. A team led by Carly Robinson, with Jana Gallus, Monica Lee and Todd Rogers, mailed students either a promise of a certificate for perfect attendance or a surprise certificate for a perfect month already achieved, and compared them with students who got nothing.¹

The study

Moderate evidence

How 15,329 California students in grades 6 to 12 reacted to a surprise attendance award

Students in grades 6 to 12 across 14 districts in one California county were randomly assigned. The promised award did not improve attendance on average. The surprise award was followed by about 8% more absences in the following month, and attendance also fell once the promised award was no longer offered. In a second, online experiment with 311 young adults, the researchers found the award suggested that perfect attendance was not the norm, and told recipients they had already done more than expected.¹

Per student the change was small, a fraction of a day, but it ran the opposite way from what the researchers and most educators expected. The researchers also surveyed educators beforehand, and only a small share of teachers and district leaders predicted that a surprise award would reduce attendance.¹ The main caveat is that these were secondary-school students receiving one letter, so the finding is a warning to test rather than proof about offices.

The mechanism carries over plausibly to work. An award for something everyone is supposed to do quietly says that most people do not do it. And the winner can read it as a credit already banked, which the authors call licensing.

Be wary of awards for baseline expectations such as turning up on time. Recognize contributions that go beyond the job, and treat ordinary reliability as ordinary.

What happened when a US laundry plant tried an attendance award

The most detailed workplace evidence comes from an industrial laundry company in the US Midwest. Timothy Gubler, Ian Larkin and Lamar Pierce compared plants in a quasi-experimentalquasi-experimental: Describes a study that compares a group that got something with a group that did not, where the researcher did not do the assigning: a policy, a rollout or people's own choices did. Because the groups were not formed at random, they may have differed before it started.Full entry in the glossary analysis, setting one plant that introduced an attendance award against four sister plants that did not.⁴

The design was close to a classic employee-of-the-month scheme. Each month, everyone with no unexcused absence or late arrival was named at a plant meeting, and one name was drawn for a 75-dollar gift card. Head office ended the program after about nine months, because executives felt it rewarded behavior that should be expected of everyone.⁴

Workers who had often been late improved, but only while they could still win. Once someone was disqualified for the month, they went back to old habits, and workers became more likely to take a single unplanned day off, which the authors read as calling in sick rather than arriving late and losing eligibility, though that result faded in one of their robustness checks.⁴ Most costly, workers whose attendance had been above average before the program lost about 8 percent of their efficiency in their daily laundry tasks, work the award did not even cover. The authors attribute this to a sense of unfairness: the reliable staff had never been rewarded for their good attendance before.⁵

Not every workplace study points this way. A one-year quasi-experimental study at four manufacturing plants, published in 2002, found that absences fell markedly under a public recognition program for good attendance, and employees viewed the program favorably.⁶ Only its abstract was open to us, and it does not say which country the plants were in.

The laundry study covers one plant, not a randomized trial, and a gift-card raffle is not a pure honor. Still, it shows how a cheap award can cost more than it pays, mostly through the people it was never aimed at. Before launching any award, ask who already does the target behavior unprompted, and how they will feel watching others win a prize for it.

Myth

A certificate or a small prize is so cheap that it cannot do any harm.

Fact

At one US laundry plant, an attendance award was followed by gaming and lower efficiency among workers who were already reliable.

The disadvantages of employee of the month: four ways it misfires

The studies above point to four ways a monthly award goes wrong. The evidence leans heavily on attendance awards and lab tasks, so read these as risks to check for, not certainties.

1. One winner, many runners-up: most people miss out every month, and those who already did the right thing can feel overlooked
2. Working the rule: people chase the criteria, such as staying eligible for an attendance award, rather than the goal behind them
3. The wrong signal: an award for ordinary conduct can suggest that conduct is rare and not really expected
4. Visible work over shared work: a single winner picked on broad impressions can favor work that is easy to see over help that is easy to miss

Most people lose every month

A single winner means many runners-up, and Johnson and Dickinson built their experiments around exactly that experience.³ At the laundry plant, the damage came from reliable workers watching others compete for a prize for what they had always done.⁵

People game the rule

Clear criteria invite strategy. Laundry workers improved punctuality only while still eligible and appear to have called in sick to protect their streak.⁴ Any single measure, from sales closed to tickets resolved, can be chased at the expense of the work around it.

The award says the behavior is rare

Robinson’s team found that an award can signal that the behavior it praises is neither common nor expected.¹ A monthly prize for being helpful can imply that helpfulness is exceptional here.

Visible work beats shared work

This risk is reasoned rather than measured. Jana Gallus and Bruno Frey distinguish awards based on explicit, preset criteria from discretionary awards that rest on broad performance evaluations, and warn that awards can backfire when they provoke envy among coworkers.⁷ A manager picking one person on broad impressions will tend to see the work that happens in front of them. The colleague who quietly fixes a teammate’s spreadsheet rarely makes the shortlist.

Two smaller risks sit on top. The authors of the school study note that surprise may wear off when the same institution keeps handing out awards.¹ And Gubler’s team frames the laundry losses as crowding out, the idea that an outside reward can displace people’s own reasons for doing good work, which intrinsic and extrinsic motivation research explores in more depth.⁵

To use the list, hold your own award against it: who has never won, which rule people bend, what the award implies is rare, and whose work never comes into view. A “yes” to any of these is a design flaw you can fix.

Do awards and recognition motivate employees?

Some forms of recognition do raise effort, and the difference lies in design. Christiane Bradler and colleagues tested this with a field experimentfield experiment: An experiment run in a real setting, such as a workplace, shop or website, with people going about their ordinary lives, usually with random assignment. It shows how an effect plays out in practice, though often for one setting and one group at a time.Full entry in the glossary in Germany: they hired more than 300 people, mostly students, for a three-hour data-entry job. In some groups, a thank-you card signed by the head of the institute arrived unannounced after two hours.⁸

Performance rose after the cards, most when only the best three of eight workers got one, and mainly among those who did not receive a card. Where only some were thanked, the researchers said that management valued everyone’s work but could thank only a few personally.⁸ Their reading is that people want to keep up with the norm and to return a kindness. The job lasted three hours, so the study says nothing about how long such effects last.

A second experiment shows that recognition can last. At Wikipedia, Gallus gave a purely symbolic award to randomly chosen newcomers, and the award raised how many stayed active, with the effect persisting over the following four quarters.⁹ These were volunteers, not staff, and the paper’s abstract was the only part open to us.

Set against the school study, a pattern emerges, though no single study has tested it head to head. Recognition seemed to help when it thanked a real contribution and treated everyone as valued, and to hurt when it rewarded ordinary conduct or left people feeling overlooked. Gallus and Frey, in a 2016 strategy paper, likewise argue that well-designed awards can raise motivation and help keep valuable staff.⁷

Recognition is one of the motivators in Herzberg’s two-factor theory, and it is worth seeing how recognition ranks among the drivers of employee engagement before investing in a program.

How to choose employee of the month fairly, if you keep it

A fairer employee of the month publishes its criteria in advance, draws on colleagues’ views, recognizes teams as well as individuals and says exactly what the winner did. These steps follow from the studies above rather than from trials of the fixes themselves, so treat them as a checklist to test.

Explicit criteria make the award a confirmation of known standards, the type Gallus and Frey contrast with awards resting on broad evaluations.⁷ Keep them about contributions beyond the job, not attendance, given what the school and laundry studies found.

Nominations from colleagues, each with a written reason, widen what gets seen and make the reasons public. A team award next to the individual one gives shared work a route to recognition. And when you announce the winner, say what they did, in a sentence a colleague could repeat.

A support team of 12 could swap “Agent of the Month” for a monthly note naming two contributions colleagues nominated, one individual and one joint, each with a line on what changed for customers. Nobody is ranked, and the reasons are on record.

If you keep the award

• Publish what counts, in writing, before the month starts
• Drop attendance and other baseline duties from the criteria
• Take nominations from colleagues, each with a written reason
• Add a team award beside the individual one
• Say exactly what the winner did and why it mattered
• Review the year: who has never won, and why

Designing a whole recognition program, and deciding between public and private praise, are bigger questions than one award, and each deserves its own treatment.

What can you do instead of employee of the month?

The best-tested alternative is specific thanks, given soon after the work and without a contest. In Bradler’s experiment, a short personal card with no prize raised effort across the group.⁸ Tie thanks to a concrete act, deliver it close to the event, and make sure the people who are not named this time know their work counts too.

If that was weeks ago, you have found the gap a monthly award was meant to fill, and it is cheaper to fill it directly.

The bottom line

A monthly award for one person is a weak tool, and the few studies that test awards like it found gaming, resentment among reliable staff and, in schools, worse attendance after a surprise prize. If you keep it, give it explicit criteria, collect colleagues’ nominations, add a team award and drop attendance from the list. Better still, thank specific contributions as they happen.