The
incentive industry has been struggling with putting teeth into employee
recognition programs for many years. Most
of the large performance improvement companies of today were founded to create
and manage incentive programs to increase sales for their clients. But in the last two or three decades, the
entire landscape of the business awards industry changed. Executives realized that if merchandise and
travel awards could motivate their sales force as well as their channel
partners to increase sales and profits, many of the same techniques and strategies
could be used to motivate their non-sales personnel to better performance as
well.
But
for one simple reason, the incentive companies ran into a roadblock and it wasn’t
as easy to sell these new programs (commonly referred to employee recognition). Sales programs had a built-in a measurement
and an ROI. That isn’t true for the employee
recognition efforts where the goal was more loosely defined and based on
satisfaction levels, rather than clear cut bottom line performance. And executives wanted to see more results
they could take to the bank. Recognition budgets were a hard line budget item with
no or little ROI. Sales programs were
implemented based on incremental performance, often without the constraints of
the budgetary process.
So
now, over a half century after the large incentive houses were selling millions
of dollars of sales incentive programs, the other award companies are competing
to convince the C-suite to spend more and more on their non-sales personnel,
and it seems to be working. Now they
have another interesting quandary, the recognition programs have been overtaken
by the employee engagement programs. And
it appears that some of the same issues exist…how to justify the expense to
senior management.
This Recognition & Recognition Network article of the same title as this blog provides a comparison and insight
into the
In
reading the article, there are two perspectives we feel need further
examination. First, the three “industry leaders”
as mentioned amount to only a fraction of the sales revenues of the top three
full service performance improvement companies who that are still with us, and
still selling “recognition programs” so the lines of “leaders” are blurred. And second, the distinctions between
recognition and engagement programs offered appear to be without any empirical
evidence to justify the distinctions…and the lines between recognition are
still somewhat blurred as well.
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