Five Tips to Ensure a Successful Incentive Program

Reposted from Meetings & Incentive Travel - click here for link

As organizations look to reinvest in their incentive travel strategies, the question of how to ensure a program will help achieve the best value for the investment is typically a major topic of discussion. To fuel those discussions, consider how your organization and strategy goes about identifying and understanding the program elements that generate the strongest appeal, interests and participant engagement. In years past, this discussion primarily focused on destination and activities. While these are important components, successful planners will expand their framework, and do so while keeping in mind business objectives and budgets.

Sounds like a big challenge, but it doesn’t have to be. Achieving more effective incentive travel design hinges on addressing five fundamental points in your planning process. While any one item can add tremendous value, look towards incorporating each in concert based upon your organizational and program participants’ unique needs, interests and preferences. Doing so will help make for a much more meaningful, motivational and measurable set of performance outcomes.

The experience - The travel experience must be compelling enough to the individual participant to get them excited to improve their performance efforts. Based on extensive participant research, experience elements that drive the highest levels of excitement include:

• Sun and fun destinations
• Expanded guest policies
• Unscheduled time for leisure activities
• Meaningful reward and recognition activities

Today’s participants are more savvy and particular about the type of experience they have the opportunity to earn. The true measurement of today’s incentive travel program is based upon engagement. Before, during and even after a program, participant engagement is something that has to be earned, retained and nurtured. Focusing on the experience throughout the lifecycle of the program lends the best approach towards more effectively incenting participants and effectively achieving business objectives.

The qualification or rule structure - Above all, the qualification guidelines must be perceived as fair and attainable. For this reason, we recommend companies evaluate their program structures to entertain opportunities of what design enhancements might afford; such as, a more individually based performance structure or going beyond historical glass ceilings where only the top one to three percent of participants qualify as earners. One program design where the same people earn year-after-year can inhibit the meaningful and motivational interests of non-earners.

 

Communications and management buy-in - Client studies continually show that as many as one in four participants in an incentive travel program are unaware they are even eligible or that there is a program present at all. Promotional communications represent a truly performance critical area in establishing and maintaining strong participant engagement throughout the lifecycle of the program. From kick-off announcements, regularly scheduled updates on performance and standings to maintaining continued buzz and excitement, promotional communications can greatly help avoid your program from “being kept a secret” so that you can better ensure broad and steady participant engagement. In addition, encouraging leadership and management to communicate and reinforce program goals by incorporating reminders and updates in formal team meetings and one-on-one engagements helps inform and advise participants on progress and towards ways of stepping up their level of effort.  

 

Measure for effectiveness- Let’s say that an incentive travel program is based upon helping to successfully achieve some prescribed sales target. With that, we believe it is a good idea to leverage sales leaders to model exceptional sales skills by enlisting them in promoting brand values and further equipping participants to become more effective business objective ambassadors. Conducting pre-to-post and additional post-post (30, 60, 90 days after the onsite experience) surveys can provide you further insight and a deeper understanding into the important contribution these people play before, during and well beyond the travel experience. By doing so, you go beyond traditional ROI approaches and gain deeper insights on the intangible values of how your program helped improve the attitudes, behaviors and intentions of program participants.

 

Invite participants into the design process- Design decisions on such program attributes as trip length, location, guest policy, and activities can greatly be informed by surveys, direct inputs from sales advisory councils and past program participants (earners and non-earners). Leveraging these “voice of the participant” insights can really help better align and fine tune your program design to create a much more meaningful, motivational and memorable experience while better supporting core business objectives. Today’s incentive participant places more weight on the type of experience offered before they make engagement choices based upon the added time and effort they need to put forth to earn the reward. Without participant insights, organizations can run great risk with hit and miss outcomes that drive unnecessary costs and simply fall short of providing for a more ideal, overall experience.

 

There are varied types and levels of available practices available to consider in today’s incentive travel strategies. Following these five tips will help design an approach and incentive travel experience that provides for more meaningful and motivational value to program participants. Further aligning to participant interests, needs and preferences creates for more exceptional opportunities to meet, achieve and exceed business performance outcomes that create short and long-term value for both the organization and program participants.

 

 

 

Incentive Travel: Incorporating the 'Voice of the Participant'

Reposted from micePLACES - click here for link

More and more these days, we’re finding ourselves heading further into a marketplace that is returning to, and putting more value back onto, relationships. Establishing, building and retaining relationships with today’s employees, channel partners and customers requires more time, effort, focus and long-term commitment. As this shift continues to grow, many organizations find themselves at a crossroads with an “engagement compass” on relationships that’s not pointing north; it’s pointing west, east and in some cases south.

With so much attention focused on cutting costs and gaining efficiencies, organizations are realizing diminishing returns from these approaches and are beginning to make a U-turn by mapping their strategies back to their No. 1 asset, their people. It’s people who take care of customers and business performance. And it’s a leadership team’s responsibility to take care of this valuable asset by recognizing, rewarding and incenting their people.

Another Chair at the Table
This is where we can start to recalibrate our engagement compass. If people are the key focus, then we need to turn our traditional thinking on its head. A lot of organizations are still making decisions on programs using gut instinct and past experience – and I think we can all agree that there’s a degree of pre- and post-program evaluation that’s necessary to hit certain benchmarks, understand what worked and what didn’t work, and make it better the next time.

Over the last few years we’ve added chairs around the design and decision table. We have procurement, finance, marketing, sales, and planners – but there’s still one chair missing, and that’s the participants. We need to better understand and be able to distinguish, from the participants’ perspective, what is and what is not aligned to demand; such as program features and activities. For example, having these insights helps avoid situations where you identify 20 planned activities and cross your fingers and hope that you meet everybody’s needs, wants and preferences. Getting these insights from participant inputs – bringing the voice of the participant into play – gives us a much clearer perspective that can be used to help make more informed decisions that can cut those 20 activities down to, say, 10 before we start designing a program. This provides an opportunity to make targeted investments in those things that are more broadly meaningful and motivational at the individual level.

In other words, we’ve spent years asking participants what they thought, but we rarely, if ever, asked them what they think – before the fact; before the program was planned and designed.

Choosing to Engage

A successful incentive travel program is a delicate balancing act. When you’re talking about trying to bring a team together and motivate groups or departments, you have to really look at what your goals are from a business standpoint, as well as the needs, wants and preferences of attendees. When you look at the participant value chain of the experience, there’s a thing called ‘engagement choice’. At any point of the program, whether before, during, or after, participants can choose to stay engaged or disconnect themselves from the process.

So how do you make sure there are no weak links in the overall chain? Again, it’s all about the voice of the participant. You have to consider the participant in terms of what features, functions and activities they want to participate in or take advantage of. For instance, is there a specific group they’d like to go with to create some extended team camaraderie and networking opportunities or engage in other alternatives during scheduled leisure time? Or, are there participants who just prefer to do their own thing? Program participants who earn incentive travel rewards can either be engaged or disengaged. And if you force them into something they really don’t care for, they’re going to resist on some level, and the program next year is going to suffer as a consequence.

The bottom line is that incentive travel adopters, buyers, stakeholders and suppliers need to be able to benefit from that one-on-one conversation with incentive travel participants, and that can be facilitated in a variety of ways – whether it’s through meetings, social networking, emails, group settings, surveys, you name it. However you do it, it’s really important for effectively establishing, building and retaining relationships with your people.