Dangling the Performance Carrot

Date: May 13, 2008
Publication: Human Resources Magazine
Writer: Marian Edmunds

Excerpt:

Sales incentives are still an important factor, but HR directors and their teams are focusing more on enterprise-wide recognition and reward programs when it comes to incentives.

Organisations need visibility and clarity about what behaviours a program is going to drive, and what the outcome of those behaviours will be in terms of incremental benefit, says Finlayson.

Driving staff behaviour through incentives

Companies are increasingly seeking an overarching program they can put in place to allow them to establish different solutions, different processes, different mechanisms by which people are recognised and incentivised according to the business unit those people work in, says Finlayson.

“For example, you may have one business unit that prefers just to have managers being able to nominate employees while in another unit where you may want employees to nominate each other for their performance,” he says.

It can be very difficult, he says, to identify on a daily basis the behaviours that are being driven at an individual level as a result in performance:. “So give the tools to the staff.”

One trend now coming to the fore is that companies who have traditionally sold products through channels want to get a handle on the sales characteristics of their products through each channel, says Finlayson. Increasingly they want to find out why and how they are selling their product, and then be able to promote them in real time, he says.

“They now seek control and visibility into what’s happening to drive recognition and incentives across their own organisations and sales channels, and to have control and visibility across all those programs sitting under one umbrella,” he says.

Click here to read the full Reward & Recognition article online.