What Happens When Incentive Program Design Fails?

There are legions of stories in the incentive industry of programs gone bad, some very bad, some that destroyed careers, fiscal years, channel reputations or even lives.  Many did not achieve the objectives outlined or over achieved them and budgets skyrocketed out of control. Still others were just embarrassing like using alcohol to motivate salespeople (some of whom were recovering alcoholics) or sweets to diabetics…you get the point.

Recent research conducted by the Incentive Research Foundation found that while the two thirds of the companies used outside suppliers for awards, less than half looked to suppliers for expertise in the best ways to recognize or motivate participants.  Why?

You can’t learn incentives in college like marketing or communications, or advertising.  It’s not taught.  Yet it is a subject that uses upwards of $100 billion in corporate budgets annually in all its forms.  A great incentive/motivation program requires the combination of sound research, skill training, dynamic communications, a complete award offering the information technology to run it and professional analytics to tweek it and make it effective. 

If you interested in how incentive have gone wrong, Google “Incentives and the BBC”, or Lehman Brothers, or Well Fargo, or the teachers union in Atlanta about the “No Child Left Behind Act.”  Certainly all of these programs started with good intentions, but good intentions don’t make up for poor design planning. 

Most companies have marketing communications departments, but when they want to undertake a multi-million dollar corporate change they look to outside Marcom’s or their own advertising company to lend a hand. But when it comes to incentives the majority of companies think they can do it themselves.  But when you do remember that there are many things that can go wrong, not the least of which is a program that spends lots of money and doesn’t achieve results.  Basedon our experience that happens up to 50% of the time. 

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