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.

Incentive Travel Council Honors GROWMARK's Dana Weaver as Advocate of the Year

October 10, 2011 – Naperville, IL – The Incentive Travel Council (ITC) has named Dana Weaver, marketing services manager of GROWMARK, as its 2011 Advocate of the Year. GROWMARK is a regional agricultural cooperative based in Bloomington, Ill.

This marks the third Advocate of the Year Award presented by the ITC, which is a strategic industry group under the Incentive Marketing Association (IMA). It recognizes an individual, business, or organization that demonstrates outstanding leadership in enhancing, educating, and/or promoting incentive travel as a value driver for achieving organizational performance.

At the ITC awards ceremony, held Tues., Oct. 4, 2011 in conjunction with the Motivation Show, Jim Ruszala of Maritz Travel, who nominated Weaver, said, “Dana has become a significant asset to the Incentive Travel Council and the industry as a whole. From various speaking engagements, and panel discussions, to the sharing of best practices and further perspectives, Dana has been a true leader in helping our industry understand and further tap into the fuller potential value of incentive travel.”

ITC President Carol Wain said, “Our industry is indeed fortunate to have individuals like Dana Weaver, who, as an incentive travel adopter and buyer, has made a significant impact in clearly articulating the value that incentive travel provides both to the companies and the travelers alike.”

“I am honored to be recognized by the ITC,” Weaver said. “At our company, it’s a privilege to recognize our top achievers with rewards that are meaningful, motivational and memorable. I truly believe travel incentive programs provide the most trophy value for our participants.”

Weaver joins both Dahlton Bennington of the SFN Group and G.J. Hart of the Texas Roadhouse restaurant chain (who is now with California Pizza Kitchen), as Advocate of the Year winners. “Together, these individuals have and continue to help shed stronger light onto the significance of incentive travel, both at the organizational and participant level,” Wain said.

Family Friendly Incentive Travel

So, what’s up with kids and incentive travel programs you ask?  Well, there’s certainly a growing shift towards being more family friendly these days, which is being driven by a variety of factors.  Primarily, these would involve today’s demands at work with leaner and “doing more with less” philosophies, family lifestyles as well as the idea and desire of organizations to create stronger motivational value for participants in order to achieve greater business performance.

If you or anyone within an organization have been thinking about whether or not a "Family Friendly" element within your incentive travel strategy is a worth while idea, consider reading this article - click here

As organizations make family friendly decisions, concerns typically surface regarding potential distractions, objections by participants without children as well as with regard to how they would fund such inclusions. Here are a few short insights to keep in mind:

• Distractions – Typically this surrounds the desire to have an educational, networking or award element within a program. With the right destination selected and good planning, there are a number of ways to have one-on-one time with your participants, and they with their families.
• Participants without Children – Based upon a National Study by Maritz Travel and Maritz Research, we found that nearly 4 out of every 5 incentive travel participants without children believe that kids should be allowed to participate. It seems that they want to celebrate with their colleagues and peers, as well as get to know their families better too.
• Budgets – Whether you’re paying for, subsidizing or creating special buy-in rate options, incentive travel earners are looking for ways to bring their families along and reward them for their support in helping achieve business objectives.

Overall, organizations that don’t’ think family friendly incentive travel programs can play a big role need to think again. Helping create the opportunity to share these rewards and experiences go a long way in building stronger affinity with the organization. While it might not be right for every program, it’s worth the time and effort to do some research and gain a better view of what’s best for your participants and your organization.

Behavioral Economics of Incentive Travel

Reacting to recent input from members and industry sources, the Incentive Travel Council of the Incentive Marketing Association released a perspectives paper on the Behavioral Economics of Incentive Travel in conjunction with the 2010 Motivation Show in Chicago. This paper covers the economic, business and participant impact experienced through Incentive Travel strategies. A great read for anyone wanting to continue in driving continued business performance - click here for a link to the full paper.

In good times and in bad, Incentive Travel is POWERFUL

Published in Return on Performance Magazine - 2nd Quarter 2009

It’s no secret the incentive travel industry has been under tremendous pressure over the past several months. As the economy began its unfortunate and downward spiral, the virtual vise became tighter and tighter for companies that had to justify every dollar spent. With the advent of the American government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), a series of unfortunate events created a seemingly perfect storm on the use and benefits associated with incentive travel programs. A massive level of negative, and often precarious, media attention generated an ominous surge of public and government outcry.

None of us seeks to validate lavish and ludicrous expenses racked up by out-of-control executives. But it’s important to note the magnitude at which the hospitality and travel industry has been affected by this uproar. The U.S. Labor Department reported a loss of nearly 200,000 travel-related jobs in 2008 and predicts an additional loss of 247,000 jobs in 2009. During the first two months of 2009 alone, the U.S. lodging industry lost more than $1 billion in revenue from the cancellation of corporate meetings and events. Travel incentives clearly have merit in our society at large, and at our companies, too.

Organizations -- especially publicly held companies -- are now being held accountable as never before to share how their incentive travel program decisions are made. Not only that, executives must demonstrate the values these programs deliver against associated expenses.

While determining hard ROI figures can be difficult, the established merits of incentive travel are easy to recite. From driving sales, strengthening channel relationships, improving employee morale and loyalty, rewarding and recognizing performance excellence and a variety of other targeted objectives, incentive travel programs provide substantial value to companies. A variety of studies have been done to support these statements; the Incentive Travel Council recommends the following key resources:

• The U.S. Travel Association http://www.ustravel.org/
• Incentive Marketing Association http://www.ropmagazine.com/
• Incentive Research Foundation http://www.theirf.org/
• SITE http://www.siteglobal.com/
• The Forum for People Performance Management and Measurement http://www.performanceforum.org/

In cases where the values of Incentive Travel programs aren’t necessarily in question but rather the spend itself, think about how you'll continue to strive towards achieving organizational goals during a down economy - it's already challenging in and of itself. Consider your participants' perspectives. Should public or shareholder perception be of concern, think long term. Reducing or taking away an incentive travel program from your employees, channel partners or customers can have negative consequences against the very objectives originally targeted. At the end of the year, the gap created through the incentive travel program’s absence will show itself in the worst possible place - your bottom line.

So, at the end of the day, in good times as well as in bad, when every penny counts and you want to ensure you’re getting the most value out of your spend dollars, think about how that can be done. Few alternatives provide the same degree of motivational power to drive performance and lend the levels of incremental value and sustained benefits as Incentive Travel programs.