Incentive Travel: Incorporating the 'Voice of the Participant'

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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.