Every organisation I have worked with spends real money on employee recognition. Programmes. Platforms. Awards. Annual ceremonies. And most of them will tell you, quietly, that it is not working the way they expected. I know first hand as I ran this programme for 110,000 employees in the global hospitality sector.
The question I always ask is: working for whom?
Because here is what the data and the lived experience consistently tell us. The person who gets recognised goes through a change. Their sense of value shifts. Their relationship to the organisation shifts. And the person who was not recognised that day goes through a change too. Their sense of belonging recalibrates. Their engagement quietly adjusts. Their trust in the process gets tested.
Recognition is not a reward event. It is a change event. And we have built an entire industry around delivering it while leaving the individual completely unequipped to process it.
HR Is Carrying a Load It Was Never Designed to Carry Alone
Right now, HR is being asked to run recognition strategy, lead change management, drive D&I initiatives, support ERGs, and act as the primary nervous system for workforce wellbeing. All at once. Often with shrinking teams and growing mandates.
That is not a resourcing problem. That is a design problem.
HR, D&I, ERGs, recognition leads, and change practitioners are all, in their own way, trying to manage the human response to change inside the organisation. They are doing it in separate workstreams, with separate budgets, through separate lenses. And none of it converges on the one place where change actually happens: the individual.
The result is that employees feel the weight of change, including the change that comes from being seen or not being seen, without any framework for understanding what is happening to them or what to do with it.
We Train Employees for Everything Except This
Think about what every organisation already trains its people on as standard. Ethics and compliance. Financial management. Expense policies. Data protection. Leadership fundamentals. We invest in building individual capability across all of these because we understand that these are not just organisational responsibilities. They are things every person in the workforce needs to be able to navigate for themselves.
And yet, despite the fact that change is the single most constant feature of modern working life, we do not teach people how to manage it personally. We announce it. We
communicate it. We cascade it through leadership frameworks. But we do not give the individual the tools to recognise when change is becoming personal, to understand their own response to it, or to move through it with any kind of agency.
That gap is not a minor oversight. It is one of the primary reasons recognition programmes underdeliver, transformations stall, and engagement scores plateau despite significant investment. The programme exists. The individual capability to receive, process, and respond to change does not.
Recognition and Change Are the Same Conversation
When an employee is recognised publicly, something shifts inside them. Their sense of identity inside the organisation changes. Their relationship with their team changes. Their expectations of what comes next change. This is not a soft observation. It is a documented psychological reality, and it creates a change event that the individual needs support to navigate, whether the recognition feels positive, complicated, or undeserved.
When an employee is not recognised, and they expected to be, the same shift happens. They recalibrate. They question. They withdraw or they overcompensate. And that internal recalibration happens quietly, without language, without support, and without any organisational infrastructure to catch it.
This is where HR, D&I, ERGs and recognition functions need to start having a shared conversation. Because the thing they are all trying to influence is the same thing: how people experience change inside the organisation. And they cannot do that effectively if the individual has no capability to meet them halfway.
The Case for Organisation-Wide Personal Change Capability
Personal Change Management is not a new category of therapy. It is not a wellbeing add-on. It is a workforce capability, the same way ethics and financial literacy is a workforce capability. It gives individuals a framework to recognise when change is becoming personal, understand their own response patterns, and take action rather than absorb and react.
The organisations that will get the most out of their recognition investment are not the ones with the best platform or the most creative awards scheme. They are the ones that equip their people to understand what recognition, and the absence of it, actually does to them. That self-awareness does not just improve individual resilience. It improves team dynamics, manager conversations, and the honest dialogue that makes recognition mean something in the first place.
The responsibility here does not sit with HR alone. It sits with the whole organisation. Recognition leaders, D&I practitioners, ERG sponsors, and change professionals all have a role in sharing what they know about human change with the wider workforce. Not as a top-down cascade. As an equipping mission. As a risk mitigation mission. As a Change Readiness transformation.
We already know what happens when we do not. The programmes land. The individuals do not move. The investment does not convert into the change we were hoping for.
It Is Time to Teach People How to Change for Themselves
Every transformation I have studied, every recognition programme I have observed, every D&I initiative I have been involved in comes back to the same bottleneck. The organisation had a strategy. The individual had no capability to receive it.
We teach people how to manage money. We teach them how to behave ethically. We teach them how to lead others. It is time we teach them how to manage change for themselves. Because until we do, every recognition programme, every transformation initiative, every belonging strategy will keep delivering results that fall short of what we know they could be.
The individual is not the last mile of change management. They are the whole point of it.
Dr Grant Van Ulbrich is the Founder and CEO of SCARED SO WHAT® and the creator of the world’s first dedicated Personal Change Management (PCM) model, certification, and technology. His doctoral research and published frameworks are endorsed by The Oxford Review. To learn more or get in touch, visit www.DrGrant.com
