Can Negative Feedback Be Effective?

No one likes to hear bad things about themselves in a performance review.  From a behavioral perspective this negative consequence can fuel feelings of shame, frustration and helplessness. Fear is one of the most powerful motivators and when you fear losing your job, either a quick change in performance can be apparent or a malaise that spins downward to eventual dismissal.  Either way, negative feedback is effective.

From a more positive view researchers at Columbia Business School found a strong link between social rejection coming from a negative review and a temporary boost in creativity.  While it may seem counterintuitive, we often do our best creative work when we are backed into a corner.  This is not unlike people who would prefer working under the pressure of a deadline.  Aftershocks of negative feedback can help clear the way for sharper inner focus and more determination.  This is just what managers would like to see when they give negative feedback. 

Actually a survey done by Zenger Folkman, a leadership development firm, supported the idea of receiving negative feedback at work. They found that being alerted to mistakes did more to raise performance than positive feedback and praise.

Another upside to negative feedback is that experienced workers want to hear it. They appreciate useful bits of information that fine-tune their performance. 

So the next time you enter into a performance review, remember that negative feedback delivered in a constructive way can motivate positive future performance.  In fact, because employees tend to ignore advice given with positive feedback as much as 70% of the time, negative feedback can take on an added sense of urgency that can drive positive performance.

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

Having Total Choice is Bad in Reward Selection

Having been in the incentive industry for over forty years, we were always under the belief that if you wanted motivate someone with awards, you needed to give them a wide choice of options to choose from.  The greater the choice, the more successful the program, or so it went. 

Now it appears that a study by Ashley Williams, assistant Professor of Negotiations, Organizations & Markets at Harvard Business School may have a different answer to the question of choice.  She says that the answer to a simple question of…”What would you choose between time and money to determine the best way to design a reward program?”...says a lot about what will motivate you. 

She feels the answer is critical to understanding in general how to engage anyone in business or life…as well as how to select rewards.  She recently completed her dissertation for a Doctorate degree in Social Psychology entitled “Exchanging Cents for Seconds: The Happiness Benefits of Choosing Time Over Money.” Her research focuses on “understanding how people invest their time and money to promote health, well-being and happiness.” The choice between time and money, she asserts, helps predict how people will spend money to maximize their own sense of well-being and in this spectrum helps determine the right types of awards to use for incentive programs.

After studies with thousands of thousands of people representing almost all demographic groups, her takeaways are that…

“People who have a general orientation in their lives focusing on time over money generally experience greater happiness, greater social connections and greater meaning in life.”

Knowing whether people value time or money will help determine how they respond to your organization’s offers to them in terms of incentives, recognition, rewards, and promotions or, for employees, scheduling changes, career advancement or more.”

According to Whillans companies should limit choice of awards because people will make suboptimal choices, and the program will not have the impact for which it was designed. While we can certainly understand why you would want to know if an employee valued time over money we look forward to more conclusive evidence that less choice within the two main alternatives has the negative impact mentioned. 

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

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. 

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

How to Maximize Your Recognition and Incentive Budget

When implementing employee recognition/incentive programs, one of the toughest challenges is managing your budget.  A number of factors must be taken into consideration when deciding how much to allocate to a given program.

To help make these decisions, Incentive has released a new white paper that breaks down more than two dozen tips for getting the most from incentive spending.  The tips cover a wide range of budget considerations such as:

·       Spending Strategically

·       Leveraging Technology

·       Protecting Your Incentive Budget

A main area to consider is leveraging your corporate buying.  All organizations have dissimilar award budgets spread out over an array of departments and divisions. These budgets are often used to motivate and incent the same employees for different objectives and can in fact be at odds.  You need to total all the awards purchased throughout the organization to find economies of scale. As there are usually different gatekeepers in these silos you may encounter some push back in determining this total for fear that the silos will lose their autonomy. 

The report also includes a section on "cutting strategically," with tips such as "be transparent with everyone across the company" and "prioritize and shake things up."

The full report also has a section on "Making the Case for Value-Based Award Selection" that urges planners to remember that "whether it is a merchandise award, a gift card, or a travel incentive trip, an award will have a greater impact if it is personalized to the individual receiving it." 

Click here for the complete  white paper on budgeting for incentives.   

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