The Rewards of Going Green

 Reposted from Meetings & Incentive Travel - click here for link

Green meetings have returned to the spotlight. Both sponsors and program participants continue to place growing importance on green events and incentive-travel strategies.  As a result, many organizations are taking the time and strongly rethinking what it means to be green.

My colleague, Brian Hunt, and I recently attended and presented at the Green Meetings Industry Council (GMIC) Annual Summit this past April.  Our presentation, Green Strategies that Create both Business and Attendee Value, was an open discussion among more than 90 attendees.  Filled with great dialogues and exchanges, many questions came up regarding the difference between green-focused and green-friendly meetings/events and incentive travel integrations.  From those discussions, we offered up three ways to improve green strategy and create awareness within an organization.

• Green in the Absence of Vision, Mission and Values - It’s important for companies to openly communicate green-related positioning, goals and practices.  When an organization lacks "green" identifiers and/or inclusions in its vision, mission and values statements, it’s highly likely that the culture doesn’t perceive the company as either green-friendly or green-focused.  Each organization needs to take a well-positioned stand to ensure it effectively communicates their position and the level of importance green means to them.  In doing so, employees, customers and channel partners are more aligned and help spread the "think more green" movement.

• From a Single to a Triple Bottom Line - To draw forward the values of what green-related strategies can mean, organizations need to evolve beyond standard performance concepts.  In this case, it’s a Triple Bottom Line (TBL) concept that provides stronger strategic direction and a set of performance metrics based on People, Planet and Profit.  When green-related adoptions take place with only one or two of these in mind, we simply miss the mark of achieving the most effective value.  Evaluating across the TBL requires an appreciation of both tangible and intangible values of fiscal, quantitative and qualitative insights.

• ‘Crawl’, ‘Walk’ and ‘Run’ Approaches - Organizations are interested in how green adoptions affect program operations, economics and overall participant experiences.  To more thoroughly understand these areas, we need to consider the progressive steps that help grow our green adoptions from both an organizational sponsor, as well as from a participant’s viewpoint.  Not too fast, not too slow, but at a pace that inspires adoption, provides meaningful experiences and influences future commitments.

Companies can easily assess how green they currently are and establish a benchmark for progress moving forward by asking the following questions:

• Do we integrate green efforts early in the meeting/event or incentive-travel planning process?
• How are we translating our green principles into actionable practices?
• Are our green practices strategic or do they represent standalone tactics?
• Do we work with sponsors, suppliers and vendors that align to our core principles?
• How are we evaluating performance?

Going green requires long-term and unwavering commitment to the Triple Bottom Line – People, Planet and Profit.  Answering simple questions about current green initiatives and setting future benchmarks helps provide direction for future efforts.  As companies progress, it is important to celebrate success, openly promote and advise others, and challenge those within the organization to change for the better.

Together, we all make a greater difference.

Game Changers in Incentive Travel - Interview

In a recent interview with Te Revesz, who runs a fantastic internet radio weekly talk show - Global Reach from VoiceAmerica, I had the opportunity to talk about how organizations are enhancing employee, customer and channel partner relationships through business events.  Take a listen...



Here's the synopsis:

It’s an exciting time in the incentive travel industry. Companies that abandoned meetings, events and incentives (ME&I) in the economic meltdown have seen those savings outweighed by eroding customer, channel partner and employee engagement. Now they are coming back, but to a new paradigm. My guest, Jim Ruszala of Maritz Travel, is a recognized thought leader and innovator in incentives, loyalty and engagement. He’ll talk about the essentials of building a better ME&I strategy. Innovations in program design that can boost the returns – tangible and intangible – for your incentive investment. How to measure the performance of that investment. Why companies need to include both stakeholders and attendees (guests) when creating ME&I programs. How including families and adding corporate social responsibility elements can both be powerful motivators without busting the budget.

Interested on learning more about Te Revesz and her Global Reach program - click here

Behavioral Sciences Applied to Business Events - Interview

While at the IMEX Frankfurt event for 2012, I had the opportunity to speak with Roger about the values of bridging behavioral science disciplines and learning into meeting, event and incentive travel strategies.  Together, related approaches can significantly help create the breakthrough in performance many of us are looking for today.

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.

The Incentive Destination’s Role in Driving Business Performance

Reposted from Elite Meetings Blog - click here for link

As 2012 quickly progresses, trends in incentive travel destinations continues to be a hot topic. Budget constraints as well as economic, political and social pressures will heavily dictate the growth of incentive travel and destination choice. Yet, among all of these considerations that come into play when identifying a destination, a program’s ability to drive desired results among its participants should remain paramount. So, what’s most motivating to participants? Let’s look at the trends:

• First, where are most group travel programs going?  Mainly driven by costs, not to mention likely residual hesitancy and concerns around public perceptions, organizations continue to place greater emphasis on short-haul and domestic destinations. A 2012 Incentive Travel survey conducted by the Incentive Research Foundation revealed that 27 percent of respondents shifted from long-haul to North American destinations to meet budget constraints. According to the study, destinations reflect economic realities with 83 percent of planners providing incentive travel within the U.S., 55 percent going no further than the Caribbean, 52 percent including Europe and 29 percent targeting Central America. Less than 18 percent are considering destinations in Asia, South America, Africa or the Middle East.

• Second, what are incentive travel participants telling us?  Through various insights from the Site Foundation and the Incentive Travel Council, it seems incentive travel participants are willing to trade-off other design elements in favor of a more motivating destination. According to a recent U.S. National Study, titled the Participant’s Viewpoint, study participants stated that “aspects of the destination” were more important than other incentive travel design elements such as length of stay, activities, hotels, etc. Also, based upon both national and independent studies from Maritz Travel Company, destination selection ranks among one of the top motivational values for program participants.

• Third, what can we learn from leisure-based travel?  According to Stephanie Ramos of Maritz Journeys, “Individuals, couples and families are looking to make the most of a limited number of destination bound vacation days, and, a mix of both domestic and international destinations continues to weigh on travel planning decisions, with seasonality also playing a big part. The idea of introducing leisure-based travel is that it helps distinguish what we, as individuals, would most ideally like to experience and how that compares and differs with destination choices for incentive travel. A mix of choices will likely exist in your ideal list, whether it includes the likes of Queenstown, New Zealand; Hong Kong; or domestic choices such as Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Should leisure and incentive travel based destinations be all that different?”

Recalling The Return on Investment of U.S. Business Travel study at the advent of the recession, the U.S. Travel Association and Destination & Travel Foundation research revealed that an employee’s total base compensation would need to be increased by 8.5 percent to achieve the same effect of incentive travel. However, to simply provide a pay raise wouldn’t necessarily help drive higher-level business goals such as building trust, loyalty or morale, nor would it foster improvements in teamwork or job satisfaction. Additionally, from an ROI perspective, Incentive Travel was found to yield an ROI of more than $4:$1. These intangible, hard-to-measure benefits, on top of tangible fiscal returns, provide a unique perspective when it comes to the current need to stretch dollars. Businesses need to invest wisely in key areas to effectively deliver the greatest returns.

The spirit of this post is not about promoting domestic over international destinations, or vice versa. It’s more about identifying the greater need to provide destinations with the most motivational value for program participants that will ultimately help achieve business objectives. We’ve all had to hunker down and tighten our belts these past few years, while continuing to make a lot of hard decisions. When it comes to incenting, rewarding and recognizing employees, channel partners or customers, identifying the right program design is tougher than ever; especially when budgets remain constrained and the cost of rooms, air and food & beverage continues to rise.

Destinations play a keen role in program design and business value creation. Beyond the affinity values associated with any destination choice, surrounding elements hinge on what a program has to offer. Activities, tours, cultures, scenery, history, related group events and other onsite elements can be important decision factors on the destination. And, depending upon the diversity of interests, passions and preferences of your program participants, destination selection can either agree or disagree with what effectively motivates your audience. Where you decide to take your business can be greatly influenced by where you decide to take your next incentive travel program. Overall, we need to spend less time and effort on ways to stretch our incentive dollars across broad design inclusions and focus more on specific areas that matter the most.

Top 2012 Performance Trends for Incentive Travel

Reposted from Meetings & Incentive Travel - click here for link


Peering into the looking glass for incentive travel trends, one key area stands out amongst the rest as a clear and distinct focal point – incentive travel design. The industry has greatly capitalized on driving operational cost efficiencies and achieving flawless execution. But, it’s of even greater importance that we ensure our strategies are leading us down the best paths of participant engagement if we’re going to achieve today’s more aggressive business objectives. This requires a more people-centered set of design practices that provide for approaches that are more connected to and aligned with participant stakeholders. Here are five elements to consider as you begin incentive travel design discussions for future programs:

1. Participant-Driven Design
Participants having a stronger hand in helping co-create incentive travel design will continue to rise. While we’ve tended to ask participants in the past what they thought about program experiences, we’re realizing more and more that we also need to ask them what they think as well - beforehand. It’s this forward looking view that helps organizations unlock the greater potential value that exists for better motivating incentive travel participants. This practice will be the linking pin for those organizations that are looking to move performance outcomes from good to better.

2. Beyond Generational Diversity
Today’s participants are more diverse than ever. This is commonly thought of as “generational differences”, but incentive travel design decisions have to go beyond this as a sole consideration point. For instance, experiential, educational and cultural diversity are other considerations that simple generational segmentations don’t consider. These and other forms of diversity are influencing how we think and act at both the organizational and participant level. The growing engagement of incentive travel participant stakeholders in conversations during the design stage will help lead to improved decisions, stronger motivational appeal, and better business outcomes.

3. Maintaining Motivational Engagement
There have been a number of consolidations – organizationally and incentive travel specific - the past few years, plus a shift to more open-ended incentive program structures. These are a few examples that are resulting in more participation and more earners on programs. So, what about the ability to effectively network, interact between peers, management, leadership, etc.? That doesn’t have to diminish, and organizations are looking for what their best options are from the participants’ viewpoint. These are resulting in program waves, where two or more groups follow one another at a destination to maintain cost and operational efficiencies but also retain high levels of engagement with more manageable attendee levels. In addition, organizations are also creating tiered performance thresholds; of which, keep earners engaged even after they achieve minimum program goals so that they have the opportunity to further plus-up their reward and recognition experience even further.

4. Family Friendly Incentive Travel
About 70 percent of American children live in households where both parents are in the workforce. Now, add to that that the average American only has 13 days off per year. Sure, we now have more mobility thanks to technology, but nearly half of American workers are now bringing work home with them regularly. Incentive travel family participants are struggling to create some degree of work/life balance. Program design considerations with family friendly guest policy features will create a significant shift for incentive travel strategies over the next few years. As such, organizations need to avoid making broad assumptions and gain a clearer perspective on how they can be not only more accommodating, but friendlier to participants with a family. What’s the potential for distraction from agendas? Would participants’ without children mind? Do we help pay for, subsidize or create buy-in rate options? These and other questions need to be identified and answered to secure the longer-term relevancy of your program’s design.

5. Redesigning Qualification Structures
So, the waters of open-ended versus closed-ended qualification structures will be tested once again, but there’s more to it. Here’s the thing, this approach to rewarding and recognizing performance comes with higher performance standards for achievement. A limiting factor is that closed-ended incentive travel qualification structures are often meaningful to only a discrete number within the participant base – top performing “A-players”. Breakthrough performance will require new thinking about how to engage the broader participant audience. This will bring in deeper discussions on qualification structures (open vs. closed) as well as the potential returns for added, more targeted incentive travel program tiers – think of these as programs based upon what levels of performance participants achieve. These added programs might involve different features, or be totally separate designs to provide a stairway of motivated performance.

Understanding what’s important from the participants’ viewpoint has to do more with what views are shared between the organization and their program participants – past, present and future. This doesn’t occur in a vacuum, it has to involve active and on-going efforts to clearly understand and gain insights on participants’ needs, wants and preferences. Every organization is unique, so too are their incentive travel participants. Running a one-size-fits-all design approach can be a gamble and operational hazard in the short, mid and long-term.