When I wrote " The Seven C's of Employee Engagement ," I included Compensation among the "C's". Here's the reference: C ompensation ... employees must associate recognition and reward with accomplishment. If genuine accomplishment requires "above and beyond" effort, then it is not hard to see that a company will need to recognize and reward such effort in order to sustain it. Sustained "above and beyond" effort is employee engagement. I promised to write more about this later. It's been a while, admittedly, but here it is. My first and most critical observation: the words "recognition" and "reward" are not synonyms . They have, in fact, very different meanings. In my experience, companies make their most consequential mistake, an act of omission that impacts employee engagement negatively , when they inadvertently treat recognition and reward as the same thing. Think of it like th