Most Recognition Programs Don’t Conform to Best Practices

According to a recent article from the RewardsRecognitionNetwork.com, nearly all attendees at the recent RRN Expo in Chicago agreed that most recognition programs fail to conform to the best practices revealed by almost 20 years of research from dozens of independent sources.

Since the 1970s and 1980s the Incentive Research Foundation and the Incentive Marketing Association have done a wide variety of studies on the effectiveness of properly designed recognition systems.  It appears most companies aren’t listening!  They have seemed to ignore the fundamental principles of effective design for these programs. Why?

Unfortunately, there is no way for RRN to obtain accurate data on this conclusion as most companies don’t publish their program design and most suppliers of these programs don’t either.  The evidence to support this conclusion came from “discussions with many incentive, recognition and loyalty company principals and their corporate clients, and reviewing the incentive, recognition, loyalty and promotional programs prevalent in the marketplace.”   

The two main culprits of this poor design that fly in the face of the research include:

• Focusing on only the 20% of participants to drive performance rather than the middle 60% of the organization
• Failing to integrate the many parts of engagement to actual behaviors and performance outcomes 

Having sold in this industry for many years, we might add a couple more:

• Poor industry training for companies to truly understand incentives
• Poorly educated industry salesforce who almost always take the path of least resistance in order to make the sale
• Competing vendors in the engagement industry are all vying for the same budget dollars diluting the message in favor of their own deliverable
• The recognition industry as well as clients chase the short term, quick fix profit goals ignoring more expensive designs that can lead to potentially greater long term results.

 Where actual hard dollar corporate investment is concerned, companies don’t feel the outcomes of engagement efforts can be accurately measured.  And that has been the problem for the recognition industry since inception.  Truth is that it can’t, there are just too many variables to definitively show management what they actually receive in terms of bottom line results from recognition.  It’s a soft dollar discussion.

This situation is not new.  Over 25 years ago the Industry Research Foundation did a study with the American Productivity and Quality Center that provided the best template for effective program design.  In that study there was a very enlightening yet relatively obscure fact that the overwhelming majority of clients were not using their vendors for anything but the fulfillment of awards; not measurement; not design; not analytics; not communications.  It would appear that not much has changed in the last 25 years.

Ultimate Choice contains leadership who has combined incentive & recognition experience approaching 100 years.  We also sell the single most sought after award in the industry….GIFT CARDS.  And will still provide at no charge the expertise to help you design programs that will conform to the best practices to help make them as successful as possible. 

For more information on Ultimate Choice Inc.’s products or services or other white papers please contact us at Ultimatechoiceinfo@cox.net