If It’s Right – It’s Right

The incentive industry, or motivation industry, or award industry (call it what you want) has been discussing all the reasons why you should implement a non-cash employee award program for years.  Long before the term employee engagement became so fashionable, they were extolling the benefits of recognizing and awarding employees for their performance. 

The incentive industry has been trying to prove a hard dollar ROI for these types of programs since the beginning.  Why, simply because that’s what the financial management wanted to see before they would approve the budgets for the awards.  So the industry scrambled around for years and spent millions on research just to prove that hypothesis. 

Sorry, in all we’ve seen, you can’t draw a straight line from giving an employee a $50 gift card for superior performance and the fact that what they did resulted in $127 to the bottom line. Sure it can be part of it, but there are too many pieces to the profit puzzle interconnected with employee awards to show the empirical evidence.

So stop doing it!  As Paul Hebert, a friend and extremely knowledgeable in the awards industry and enlightened contributor on “Fistful of Talent” said not so long ago…

“If you’re looking for business rationale to recognize people in your organization, you’re doing it wrong.”

Start looking at employee recognition as something other than a way to give your employees more stuff and start looking at it as something to do because it simply the right thing to do.  It makes sense, it does engage your employees, it does make them feel good, it does keep them motivated and on the job and they will stay with your company longer than the disgruntled employees who won’t. 

Have you ever noticed an employee from a supplier you work with, or service person in a retail store, or the receptionist or nurse in your doctor’s office, or teller or assistant manager in your bank, that was always smiling and genuinely ready to provide you with great service?  Sure you have.  And when you did, did you thank them for their service, or remark on how nice they were or how well they performed?  Did you ask them if they were ever thanked and rewarded for their service by their management?  You might be surprised at their answer.  Some industry research would indicate that at least 50% probably weren’t.

If your management won’t take the time to recognize good performance it’s a shame, too many don’t.  But if you want to retain and grow your best employees you should, if not someone else surely will.

As Paul Hebert says…

”don’t worry about the ROI…worry about the ROH…the return on humanity.”

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

What Motivates Best in the Workplace?

For years we have followed LinkedIn discussions from a variety of groups such as the Harvard Business Review, HR Professionals Worldwide and LinkedIn HR.  There are a tremendous number of knowledgeable HR professionals on these sites and subjects and discussion topics that can keep you involved for hours. 

“What Motivates Best in the Workplace” is a topic from a while back that brought responses from HR professionals from literally from every corner of the world.  We often see the employee engagement we deal with on a daily basis as particular only to our own culture, but they are not.  Everyone has to deal with them to one degree or another.  What is interesting is that there is a lot of commonality in the answers, regardless of the cultures. 

The topic question above added some subtext to it to stimulate the responses.  This subtext included:  “Is it money, personal ambition, team, leadership, all of the above? When faced with a demotivated workforce, what common thing among people consistently brings out the best in us all?”

If you would like to read the string of responses from places like Saudi Arabia or India, please click here.  We think you will find it interesting

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

Have a Wonderful and Safe Holiday Season

All of us at Ultimate Choice wish you and your family a safe Holiday Season and Healthy and Happy New Year.

Thank you for your support this past year and we sincerely appreciate the trust you’ve placed in us to provide you with the finest gift card recognition award system to achieve your objectives.  

Designing the Best Workplace Wellness Program

As discussed in our last post, wellness programs have been around for at least two decades but there is a surprising lack of empirical evidence that they achieve their stated goals.  The reason according to the experts is that they are rarely designed and implemented properly.  This paper by Johns Hopkins provides sound advice on ways to make a wellness program successful.  Following we have listed some of that advice. 

Administering health risk assessments only

Simply surveying employees for risk and even providing the screenings and other health tests does not motivate change.  You must give your employees tools like making wellness activities convenient and accessible and give them the ability to track their behavior.

Give it time

Health change is a process that needs to be sustained.  It will take up to five years to start to lower health care costs and decrease health care use.  You won’t change poor health habits by just asking employees to fill out a questionnaire.

Long term financial incentive programs are popular but not necessarily effective

Inducements to motivate change are based on behavioral theory of consequences that drive behavior.  Consequences must be positive, immediate and certain to be effective.  Financial incentives are certainly positive, but very uncertain when dealing with health change and never immediate. Large incentives that an tie as much as 20% of the cost of health coverage to achieving a health goal are very rare.  

Offering smart incentives

There is strong evidence that incentives to drive participation rates, preferably $ 50 to $100 will keep employees engaged and motivated to begin efforts to achieve self-determined health goals can be effective. 

Short term promotions ineffective

Short term or random acts (Biggest Loser, Pedometer challenges etc.) may be good to add excitement at the beginning or your program but not effective in the long term. You need to concentrate more on long term progress. 

Effective communications are essential

A healthy company culture is built intentionally.  Use communications to build a total health model into every aspect of business practice, from company policies to everyday work activities. Use communications that’s supportive of career, emotional, financial, physical and social well-being – not just an health fair.  Strategic communication will lead to lead to greater engagement

Leadership commitment and support 

It should go without saying, but complete commitment from all executives and continued ongoing support at all management levels is critical to a successful health promotion.  They must also lead by example. 

You can’t impose workplace health

Workers must own the program, understand how they benefit and the company benefit and are given a role in the ongoing operation with regular surveys and focus groups.

There are a myriad of ideas and things that can be done to build a culture of health in your organization.  By searching those out and adhering to the above practices you have the best chance of implementing a program that will produce the long term results you are looking for.

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