Question 1:

In order to ensure that the talent is aligned well with company goals, it is important to understand the concept of strategic alignment (Burn, 2003). It is the process through which the workforce is kept busy for working towards’ achieving company’s goals. Atos faced the challenge of involving every employee and appreciating their effort through special recognition systems so that best talent could be effectively and efficiently utilized. With a strategic focus of achieving employee recognition and employee benefits, it can be said that Atos incorporated all four elements of strategic alignment very well.

For purpose and direction, Atos clearly communicated with employees about organizational and the ways to achieve it. Atos developed the strategic thrusts like launch of Prosper (an employee benefits platform), Accolades (for publicly recognizing the achievements of employees) and a peer-to-peer recognition system. For the second element i.e. structure and delegation, Atos assigned clear roles and responsibilities for its staff at all levels. For example, CEO took part in the Accolade Hall of Fame recognition week where winners received the award money. Peers were also given roles of nominating colleagues for best performance so that the winners can be published weekly in company bulletins.

The third element i.e. information and control was also incorporated by Atos for achieving its strategic focus of employee recognition. This was done by providing timely and accurate information on daily, weekly or monthly basis regarding the series of milestones achieved. Atos carried on this by publishing peer-to-peer winners weekly in company bulletins as well as it organized a recognition month that quickly became pivotal in Atos’ recognition strategy. Similarly, weekly themes and incentives were carried on for promoting the employees. The Accolade Hall of Fame on Prosper also was organized to inform everyone about Gold and Platinum award winners. Atos Star is another example of publicly informing about outstanding employees who exhibited consistent teamwork ethos, community spirit and innovative abilities. The last element of reward and recognition was also carried on by Atos through publicly rewarding prize money of $8,500 AUD for winner and $400 AUD for eight runners up as a result of recognition month. So, it can be said that Atos has incorporated all four elements of strategic alignment for meeting its strategic objective.

Question 2:

Atos, as a leader in the digital services industry, has a long term goal of creating an engaging, diverse and technologically advanced workplace where the colleagues feel ambitious and are rewarded on basis of their talent. Employee engagement is considered to be the backbone of company like Atos that is competing in digital services industry (Peischl, Schantl, & Holzinger, 2014). I believe that for achieving the strategic objective of achieving high employee engagement through employee recognition and employee benefits, Atos had to delve deeper into understanding the workplace culture. I believe that by creating unique reward and recognition ideas that catered it’s both offline and online employees, Atos hit the mark of inclusivity through making every employee feel engaged. The company designed three different recognition programs by aligning them successfully with company’s vision and values of building a strong and positive culture of employee appreciation.

At first, Atos recognized that the new recognition programs were required to be inclusive and robust enough where all the employees could be recognized despite of the diversity of their demographics, location, status, role in organization or their service line. Since Atos has both online and offline employees, so a recognition system was required that could engage both online and offline employees. Atos, as an effort towards including both online and offline employees, launched of The Accolade Hall of Fame on Prosper at 15 different locations so that offline employees could be engaged as well along the online employees. Through these efforts, it can be certainly pointed out that Atos considered its structure and blended its recognition rewarding system well with the current culture of the organization.

Question 3:

The current reward strategy of Atos is based on the peer-to-peer nominations and recognition month. The challenges that could be faced by Atos in this regards is that the reward system without being based on performance and key performance index would not push employees enough in meeting their targets (Kerr & Slocum, 2005). According to Bjerndell (2013), peer-to-peer recognition programs are a booster but it does not ensure that the employees are exhibiting the right behaviors and actions. It is of Atos management’s responsibility to assess that the peers are nominating the colleagues for something really worthy and commendable. The way to ensure the value addition by employees is to create standards of alignment with the company values, behaviors and objectives (Hughes & Rog, 2008). Without the setting of standards for colleagues, the whole peer-to-peer recognition system could fall apart as the peers might nominate their colleagues based on the individual liking instead of the characteristics that really matters for the company. Only when executed correctly, the peer-to-peer nomination would create a common spirit of team filled with enthusiasm and loyalty.

Atos should communicate the behaviors that are worthy to be commended and set criteria of recognition for the peers to use while nominating the colleagues. Another key challenge of peer-to-peer recognition rewarding system is that peers might nominate the colleagues simply because they are friends instead of achieving the actual accomplishment (Employee Recognition, 2015). Hence, in this case, Atos should set a criteria-based reward system where the upper management can keep oversight for preventing misuse of the peer-to-peer rewarding system.

Similarly, the rewarding system of recognition month can foster a spirit of unhealthy competition amongst peers where workers could find pitted against their own fellows for rewards. Although the main aim of this rewarding system is to motivate employees and engage them, it might brew an environment within which the team dynamics can be destroyed (McKinsey & Company, 2009). It is also believed that despite of choosing one employee for the month, the rewarding system should identify a team of the month for rewarding them alike. This is because the success of a company or achievement of a target is not carried on by a single employee but it is an outcome of the whole team. Making the reward system based on team work can eliminate the possibility of unhealthy competition and stiffness amongst peers for reaching the top and can push teams to blend well together in order to outperform the other teams.

REFERENCES

Bjerndell, E. (2013). The challenges of designing and using reward systems in small professional service firms – A case study of a small consulting firm. Retrieved March 28, 2020, from http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=3918172&fileOId=3918214

Burn, J. M. (2003). Information Systems Strategies and the Management of Organizational Change–A strategic alignment model. Journal of Information Technology, 8(4), 205-216.

Employee Recognition. (2015, June 24). Peer To Peer Recognition – When It Doesn’T Work. Retrieved March 28, 2020, from https://www.power2motivate.com/news-blog/blog/peer-to-peer-recognition-when-it-doesnt-work

Hughes, J. C., & Rog, E. (2008). Talent management: A strategy for improving employee recruitment, retention and engagement within hospitality organizations. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 20(7), 743-757.

Kerr, J., & Slocum, J. W. (2005). Managing corporate culture through reward systems. Academy of Management Perspectives, 19(4), 130-138.

McKinsey & Company. (2009, November). Motivating people: Getting beyond money. Retrieved March 28, 2020, from https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/motivating-people-getting-beyond-money

Peischl, B., Schantl, J., & Holzinger, A. (2014). Energizing people’s work: Transforming organizations through gamification. 11th International Conference on e-Business (ICE-B).