Lithespeed's Jason Hall understands that keeping employees engaged and happy is important. Toward this end many organizations have reward systems: bonuses, shares, company lunches, even massages and boxed chocolates (thanks, Google!). But Jason highlights for us the fact that these rewards are doled out according to a hierarchical meritocracy: someone, whether a VP or senior manager, is deciding whether and who deserves recognition. While Jason thinks this is great and he has no beef with a meritocracy approach per se, but it doesn't reinforce team-based collaboration.

Jason shares his experience at Lithespeed where they experimented with different rewards/recognition programs. First they tried a token- or penny-based system before landing on their "Recognize at Lithespeed" program -- a peer-based system that, Jason says, "hits the nail on the head": real-time recognitions that people email to each other rather than waiting til the end of the quarter, for example, which was the previous token-based model.

SolutionsIQ's Josh Fruit hosts at Business Agility 2017 in New York City.

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