Low reward and recognition:

• means there is an imbalance between a worker’s efforts and the recognition or rewards (both formal and informal) they receive in return
• includes a lack of meaningful performance discussions, not recognising a worker’s skills by micro-managing them, not providing workers reasonable opportunities for career development, not providing enough feedback on their work or guidance on how to improve, or where a worker gets the praise for another worker’s work.

Identify and assess the risks

To learn if there is low reward and recognition in your workplace (or the potential for it) look at everything from the work environment to work tasks, how they’re carried out, and the way work is designed and managed.

• Consult your workers. They may tell you they feel frustrated, undermined or overlooked. They may raise concerns about fairness or lack of feedback. Talk with your health and safety reps and committee too.
• Observe work and behaviours. For example, feedback that doesn’t create improvement, or a competitive and uncollaborative work culture.
• Review information such as overtime records, time off, injuries, incidents and near misses, and workers compensation claims.
• Use surveys and tools. If you have more than 20 workers may find the People at Work psychosocial risk assessment tool useful. Head4Work is suitable if you have 20 or less workers (see Psychosocial hazards resources).
• Have a way for workers to report their concerns, and treat these seriously and respectfully. That will encourage reporting and help you fix the problem.
• Identify other hazards present and consider them together. Hazards can interact and combine to create new, changed or higher risks. For example, low reward may create a higher risk in workplaces with high job demands if workers don’t feel their hard work is noticed.
• Consider how long, how often and how severely workers are exposed to hazards. The longer, more often and worse the exposure to low rewards, the higher the risk that workers may be harmed.

Practical control measures

Here are some ideas for control measure that can help you prevent and manage low reward and recognition.

Review your control measures

You must review your control measures to check they are working as planned. If your control measures aren’t managing the hazard or is creating new risks, you must make changes.

Get feedback from those affected by the changes, and include them in any modifications to their workplace or work routines. Look at your incident records to see if numbers are going down.