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.

 

 

 

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.

What do Incentive Travel Participants Think about their Program?

The Site International Foundation and the Incentive Travel Council (ITC) commissioned Dr. Scott Jeffries and Monmouth University to conduct a joint study focused on The Incentive Travel Participant Viewpoint.

With the study currently underway, insights and findings will be shared over a period of time beginning with initial outcomes in mid-October release, providing dialogue for 2011 IMEX America and the Site International Conference events in Las Vegas. The full published report will be released at the end of the year and will be distributed globally via both organizations.

"Collaborations like this one are important and benefit a diverse group of industry professionals, said Steve O’Malley, SITE International Foundation president. “When we leverage the power of shared resources we can deliver some amazing data. We are positive The Incentive Travel Participant Viewpoint study will deliver insight into participant behaviors and key motivators that each of us can consider as we design and deliver extraordinary motivational programs in the future."

Jim Ruszala, past president of the ITC commented, "The incentive industry has made strong strides over the past few years in better providing transparency into the business values achieved through incentive programs. However, the industry is still starving for specific incentive travel based insights on ways to improve that business value by creating more meaningful, motivational and memorable experiences for its incentive travel participants.  Organizations are increasingly facing new as well as unique business challenges every day. To overcome these challenges and help achieve business performance objectives, we need to approach incentive travel design differently with an added attention towards how we can better engage and improve participant experiences.”

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.