Over the past ten years, I’ve been on judging panels for many different industry awards. This is something that has really helped me appreciate the role business awards play in driving our industry forward by showcasing and celebrating great work.
That’s the reason I’m working with the Stevies to promote their awards for Great Employers. To tell us more about the categories and the judging my guest this week is Michael Gallagher, Executive Chairman and Founder of The Stevie Awards.
Michael also talks about the reason he set up the Stevie Awards for Great Employers, discusses some of the previous winners and shares details about the special awards they have introduced to recognise HR’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast is provided by the Stevie Awards, the world’s premier business award programs, including the American Business Awards, the International Business Awards and the Stevie Awards for Great Employers, which is currently accepting nominations. From now through until July 22, get the national and international recognition that your human resources achievements deserve by nominating your HR team and members who make your organization a great place to work. Visit StevieAwards.com recruiting future to request the entry kit. That’s StevieAwards.com recruiting Future.
Matt Alder [00:01:04]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 280 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Over the past 10 years I’ve been on judging panels for a number of different industry awards. This is something that has really helped me appreciate the role business awards play in driving our industry forward by showcasing and celebrating great work. That’s the reason I’m working with the Stevies to promote their awards for great Employers. To tell us more about the categories and the judging. My guest this week is Michael Gallagher, Executive Chairman and Founder of the Stevie Awards. Michael also talks about the reason he set up the Stevie Awards for Great Employers and shares details about the special awards they’ve introduced to recognise HR’s response to the COVID 19 pandemic. Hi Michael and welcome to the podcast.
Michael Gallagher [00:02:05]:
Very great to be here. Thank you for inviting me to be on.
Matt Alder [00:02:08]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Michael Gallagher [00:02:13]:
Sure. I’m Michael Gallagher. I’m the founder and Executive Chairman of the Stevie Awards. I created the Stevie Awards in 2002 with the goal of them eventually being recognized as the Oscars for business. Around the world and in many quarters we’ve come close to achieving that. We currently run eight different Stevie Awards programs annually that attract Together more than 12,000 nominations from organizations of all types and sizes in more than 70 nations. We began the first program I created was called the American Business Awards, which I started to work on in 2002. We staged the first American Business Awards event in New York. In 2003 and 2004 we started two more competitions, the International Business Awards and the Stevie Awards for Women in Business and we’ve since created awards programs that recognize achievement in the workplace in the Asia Pacific region, in German speaking Europe. This year we created a program to recognize innovation in the Middle east and North Africa. We have a program to recognize achievement in sales and customer service worldwide and five years ago, we created a program called the Stevie Awards for Great Employers, which recognizes achievement primarily in human resources. And considering the character of your audience, I imagine that’s the program we’ll talk about most today.
Matt Alder [00:03:50]:
Absolutely. And I want to talk about that in depth in a second. Before we do, though, obviously the awards have been a great success and keep growing. Give us a little bit more insight into why you set them up in the first place. Why did you want to create the Oscars of the business world?
Michael Gallagher [00:04:06]:
Well, I believe that all great enterprises, all great businesses come from the intersection of what people know and what people love. And one of the first jobs I had out of university in the early 1980s was working for a small company in New York City that staged annual film festivals and television awards, radio awards, advertising awards. And I worked at that organization for six years, and I loved it. But then my wife and I decided to move out of the New York area, so I had to find something else to do. So. But that was something I always was. There was a place in my mind that said to me, you know, you got to get back to that place at some point. So one of the things I did for a While in the 90s and early 2000s was, was. Was working sales and marketing in the dot com world. And I decided to leave that in. In 2001 and was thinking about whether I wanted to start a business or buy a business. And I thought, well, I always liked doing awards. And I felt, you know, the world doesn’t need any more film festivals or television awards. There’s plenty of that. But why isn’t there an Oscars for business? Now, you may recall at the time, in the early 2000s, there were a lot of business scandals, especially in the US and when I consulted with people that I had worked with and people that I respected about possibility of starting a business awards program, they almost all said to me, you couldn’t possibly have picked a worse time to do this. Business is held in fairly low esteem right now. But my nature is to be a contrarian. I thought, well, if everyone thinks this is a bad idea right now, maybe there’s something to it and I should do it right now. So, yeah, I knew how to do it. I knew how to. To solicit nominations and organize judging and stage an award ceremony. So, yeah, so I did it. So, you know, when I. When I think back on how difficult the first couple years were, my. Every time I do that, my hair gets a little grayer. You know, it’s quite difficult. You know, because every process that we now take for granted, we had a great from scratch back then. So, you know, obviously with any enterprise it gets a little easier as time goes on because you’re relying on processes that work that, you know, that have been in place for a long time. And you know, we didn’t have any of that to fall back on in the first couple years. But you know, we’ve, you know, it’s gratifying to see how quickly in some sectors the awards were accepted. You know, when people say to me, you know, why? You know, we have a standard list of reasons why we think people should, organizations should consider submitting nominations to the awards. But one of the things I recognize is that every organization is different. You know, even organizations of the same size within the same industry will be quite different. Culturally, they’ll be quite different. We have, you know, we have eight competitions with lots of categories that recognize that, you know, there’s a, there’s a rainbow of organization types and industries and cultures around the world. And we want to be able to accommodate all of their needs to pursue recognition for their achievements.
Matt Alder [00:07:15]:
Tell us specifically about the Great Employers Award. What is it that you’re recognizing? Why did you create that particular category of awards?
Michael Gallagher [00:07:25]:
We always look for opportunities to recognize people and achievements that otherwise may be neglected. And I’m a student of business, I read a lot of business media, I have an mba. And if you’re a student of business, you know that HR people are among the most self deprecating and least recognized people in the world of business. And there just seemed to be an opportunity to create a global mechanism for recognizing the achievements of human resources professionals around the world. And similarly to recognize great employers that are driven by the work and the mechanisms created by those human resources professionals. And of all the programs that we have, that was the Great employers. I spent the most time deliberating what the name of the competition should be. It could have been the Stevie Awards for HR Achievement or something like that, but I really wanted a name that stuck out, that stands out. And when you think about what the end result of a great human resources achievement is, it’s making an organization a great employer. And when I finally said to myself, the Stevie Awards are great employers, all the bells and whistles went off. It was just a name that resonated. I expected that it would become one of our fastest growing competitions because I guess that there was a real hunger for recognition in the HR community. And that’s been the case.
Matt Alder [00:09:10]:
To clarify, it’s not just a Single award, is it? You have various categories?
Michael Gallagher [00:09:16]:
Yeah, as all of our competitions do, we have a lot of categories and we have a number of category groups. We have categories for Employer of the Year in more than 30 different industry segments. And that is the only category group in all eight of our competitions where the results are determined by the ratings of both professional judges and the voting of the general public. So the initial judging in all of our competitions is done by professionals around the world who we invite to participate. For example, when we open judging for this year’s Great Employers competition this month in June 2020, we will invite all of the past judges in the competition to judge again. And we will invite all of last year’s winners to be among this year’s judges. And each of our competitions typically fields anywhere from 150 to 250 professionals to participate in the judging in the Employer of the Year categories. In this competition, we will add to the average score given to the nominations by the professional judges one full point for every thousand votes that the nominations get from the general public. And by general public, I can mean the the employees of the nominated organization and anyone else that they can get to vote for them. So that’s unique. Among all of our competitions, we also have categories for HR individuals such as HR Executive of the Year and Training Executive of the year. We have 16 of those categories. Other ones include Benefits or Payroll Professional of the Year, Compliance and Safety Professional of the Year, UN Research IT Professional of the Year. We’ve actually eliminated the entry fees for 14 of those 16 categories this year. As with other of our competitions, we found through the first four editions of the STEVIE Awards for Great Employers that organizations were submitting a lot of nominations for the top executives, top HR Executives, but not that many for the lower level HR professionals. And as I mentioned earlier, we guess that was because they weren’t willing to pay entry fees for nominations in those categories. So we decided this year to eliminate the entry fees for those categories. So for categories like Internal Communications Professional of the Year or Onboarding Professional of the Year or Recruiting or Talent Acquisition Professional of the Year, organizations can now submit nominations to those categories without having to pay an entry fee. Other category groups include HR Achievement of the Year, and some of those categories include Achievement in Coaching and Mentoring, Achievement in Compliance Training, Achievement in Diversity and Inclusion, Achievement in HR Technology, and so forth.
Matt Alder [00:12:27]:
These awards have been running for a few years now. Tell us a story of some of the past winners.
Michael Gallagher [00:12:32]:
Well, we look at last year’s winners, for example. We have in each of our categories and all of our competitions. There’s the potential for three levels of awards in our system. Across all competitions, judges rate each nomination they read or view. Because nominations now can be submitted in video format or text format, entrants have a choice. They rate each nomination on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest score, and they must provide a brief constructive comment on each nomination. And we do make those comments after the results are announced available to the nominees. Every nomination that receives an average score of at least 7.25 out of 10 is recognized as a finalist and will win some level of recognition. Gold, silver or bronze. The highest rated qualifying nomination in a category will receive the Gold Stevie Award trophy. Other qualifying nominations that receive an average score of at least 8 out of 10 receive a silver Stevie Award medal. And other qualifying nominations that don’t receive gold or silver will receive a bronze medal. In each of our competitions, we have Grand Stevie Award trophies that are conferred. And in the Stevie Awards for Grant for Great Employers, we conferred two one for Organization of the Year and one for Highest Rated Nomination and Organization of the year. In the 2019, Stevie Awards for great employers went to IBM globally, and we determined that by the number of awards won. The other Grand Stevie for Highest Rated nomination went to Toyota Motor in Turkey, and that’s literally the highest average score given by the professional judges. Among the other major winners in the 2019 competition included Cisco Systems Worldwide Advisor Group in the USA and Everrise in Singapore. Other notable winners included L and T Technology Services Limited of London, United Kingdom, which is one of the top winners in the Employer of the Year categories, and Globe Telecom in the Philippines. But the list is rather long for each of our competitions each year. And I would encourage your listeners if they want to see the full list of winners in any of our competitions, to go to StevieAwards.com or in the case of the Stevie Awards for great employers, steveowards.com HR obviously, we’re talking in.
Matt Alder [00:15:15]:
June 2020 and we’re still very much in the middle of the COVID 19 pandemic. How is that making you adapt your approach to the awards? How are you reflecting the current situation in the awards this year?
Michael Gallagher [00:15:30]:
Well, we went into panic mode fairly quickly because most of our revenue comes from the entry fees that organizations submit in order to submit nominations to our competitions. About 20% of our revenue comes from ticket sales for our live awards dinners. And looking at over the year in February, early March, we realized that that 20% was likely to go away completely. So we, unlike Most organizations that are now staging free virtual events via Zoom or some other platform, including free award ceremonies. I was determined that we would not have free award ceremonies that we’d have to and we’d have to make them valuable enough that organizations would be willing to pony up some amount of money to participate in them. So we decided to replicate in our virtual award ceremonies many of the features that people love about our live events, which include the red carpet photos and interviews on the red carpet and accept every winner who comes to the stage gets to make an acceptance speech and informative videos we produce about each winning organization. So we are replicating that in our virtual award ceremonies and we’re off to a pretty good start in actually selling reservations for those events. The other thing that we look to do is to support our community of organizations around the world that participated in our events, which we know even if they’re not directly impacted, if they’re in a software industry, for example, their revenue may actually be fairly stable this year. But we know that in many cases their customers are hurting tremendously, whether they’re consumer or business to business companies. So we wanted to create some categories that would recognize their responses to the pandemic. And a few weeks ago we added six COVID 19 response categories to the CV Awards for great Employers and those do not have entry fees. And I can tell you what the names of those six categories are. They are Most Valuable Employer, which will recognize the achievements of employers during the COVID 19 pandemic to keep their employees working, paid, safe and informed. Most Valuable HR Team Most Valuable HR Professional Most Innovative Work from Home Plan Most Innovative Workplace Redesign. Every organization that’s expecting employees to come back to the workplace is going to have to redesign their workspace in some way to address the need for cleanliness and social distancing in the workplace. And finally, Most Innovative Use of HR Technology during the Pandemic, which would recognize innovative new uses of existing HR related technology programs and media during the pandemic to keep employees productive, trained, informed or safe. We’ve added similar categories to our International Business Awards and we’ll also add them to our STEVIE Awards for Women in Business program, which will open for entries which will have its first entry deadline in July.
Matt Alder [00:18:52]:
So final question. How do people actually enter the awards? Talk us through the Just talk us through the process.
Michael Gallagher [00:18:58]:
Well, we would encourage anyone who’s interested in learning about any of our eight programs to visit and each of the program has its own website which are indexed through the main site, which is Steviawards.com is to visit the individual program websites. For example, for the Stevie Awards for Great Employers, that’s steviewawards.com hr and typically there’s a form on the homepage or a link to a form on the homepage where someone can request the entry kit. We advise everyone to do that. Fill out a little form, which is basically not much more than your email address, and request the entry kit, which will be auto emailed to you right away. Requesting the entry kit does not oblige an individual or organization to submit nominations. It basically just sends them a digital brochure that lists all the categories available, what the submission requirements are for the categories, how to submit the nominations through our website, how to pay the entry fees, if there are entry fees for the categories they want to enter. And it has other things like how the judging process works, what the complete calendar for a particular edition of a competition is, some tips on how to prepare great nominations, and so on. So it’s possible to submit a nomination without requesting an entry kit. Basically, all the information that’s in the entry kit is on the website, but it’s a good concise one document overview of a competition and how to participate. If someone decides that they’d like to do that.
Matt Alder [00:20:28]:
Michael, thank you very much for talking to me.
Michael Gallagher [00:20:30]:
My pleasure. Thanks for having me today.
Matt Alder [00:20:33]:
My thanks to Michael Gallagher. Just a reminder that if you want to find out more about the Stevie Awards for great employers, go to stevieawards.com recruitingfuture. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow us on Instagram. You can find the show by searching for recruiting future. You can also listen and subscribe to the show on Spotify. You can find all the past episodes and search them at www.recruitingfuture.com. on that site, you can subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
