It’s the End of February – 3 Things You Must Do if You Run an Incentive Program!

Ahh… you’re relaxing aren’t you?  

You spent the last quarter of last year putting the final touches on your annual incentive and recognition program.  You beat up your reward vendor, you talked with managers about what they wanted to see, you met with Sr. VPs to get their input, you agonized over whether you will come in on budget for all the design and administrative changes you made to the system and the communications.

You’ve earned a break.

Nope… now is the second most important time in the life cycle of an incentive and reward program.  Now is the time you need to see if all that work you did in the fourth quarter last is going to pay off.

9 out of 10 people will not do what I’m going to tell you to do.  They ignore the advice (mostly ‘cuz they don’t want to hear the responses.)  

If you want a program that gets results, do the following before March 1…

1. Check your stats on the program web pages.  Yeah, I know, simple.  But people forget to look and see if anyone is even checking into the website.  If the web page is an intergral part of your communication plan you better check and see if it’s doing it’s job.  Do a deep dive.  Are participants hitting it?  Are they hitting particular pages?  Are they ignoring it?  Where are they coming from?  Work?  Home?  Mobile? (yeah, check mobile – it’s the new black dontcha know.)
2. Ask your reward/incentive vendor for their stats on customer service calls and/or emails.  Ask them how many calls/emails they’ve received.  Check the topics.  Is there a pattern?  Is there a particular thing that’s causing a problem?  You have to ask – no provider will bring you the news that all the work they just billed you for isn’t doing the job.  Trust me on that one.  Call.  Ask for the data – if they don’t get it to you – take trip and visit them and sit in on the phone.  You’d be surprise what you might hear.
3. Run a quick survey/quiz on the program rules and how people qualify and earn awards.  No one does this but it is the surest way to take the temperature of your audience relative to their understanding of the investment you’ve made in recognition and incentives.  Wouldn’t it be nice if they actually understood the rules and the rewards?  Yeah. 

All three of these suggestions need to be done NOW.

• You cannot wait until November to find out they couldn’t access the site from work (or home.)  
• You cannot wait until November to find out no one knows where to redeem their points or what a point is.
• You cannot wait until November to find out no one understood what “net calculated average profit contribution income” was on the program rules.

You cannot wait.

Investments Require Review

Your incentive and reward program is an investment in the people who add value to your company.  You cannot assume everything is going great guns.  Just like your investment portfolio for your retirement account (retirement?  what’s that?) you need to review what’s going on.

The sooner you catch these problems the easier it is to react and revise.  It’s better to fix a problem in March than explain it to your boss in December.  Just sayin.