Incorporating a comprehensive strategy through the incentive-travel planning cycle helps companies make a difference for their employees. By Nicola Kastner CMP, CMM, February 24, 2010
Industry professionals must educate stakeholders about the true strategic value of meetings, events and incentive (ME&I) investments.
To be effective, incentive-travel programmes should provide people with experiences they will remember and talk about for the rest of their lives. But as someone who has spent her career building these programmes, I know that success is not just about showing the participants a great time. While delighting the winners is important, the incentive must drive desired performance for the entire audience overall. If it doesn’t affect everyone who competed, whether or not they qualified, then it has missed the mark.
The meetings and incentive industry has received a lot of negative press from the fallout from the AIG Crisis. In April, 2008, AIG ran an incentive programme to Southern California, spending $440,000 on an “executive junket” — including $23,380 on spa treatments — to show 110 AIG executives a good time. Unfortunately, this came right after AIG received $85-billion of federal bailout money, which incensed the press, public and even President Barack Obama. What wasn’t reported by the press: This was actually an incentive reward trip for independent sales agents of AIG’s insurance products. Of all the people attending, only four AIG executives served as hosts on the trip for the top brokers. The media also didn’t address the fact that strong sales were critical to pulling AIG out of receivership. Keeping the salesforce motivated was key to their recovery, so making good on the incentive programme that had already been earned and paid for was more logical than it appeared.
I’ve spoken with many industry experts about the AIG crisis and we all agree that if the company had had a properly designed programme in the first place, they could have articulated the value that the incentive trip brought to the organization — and there would have been no story.
Educating Stakeholders
Industry professionals must start to use their voices to educate stakeholders about the true strategic value that meetings, events and incentive (ME&I) investments can bring to an organization. We need to speak about the business of meetings, not the meeting- planning business.
In the industry, we talk about incentive travel. But incentive travel refers only to the reward (the trip), but doesn’t address the motivational aspect of the programme as a whole. At Maritz, we use the term “motivational event.” A motivational event is designed to motivate the entire audience and that motivation is what moves the business. We help our clients understand, enable and motivate their customers throughout the lifecycle of the programme — before the event takes place, on-site and after everyone returns home — to move the performance of the majority and realize true business results. Although it sounds simple, most companies don’t do this.
Incentive-travel programmes are unique in their ability to appeal to audience aspirations and imaginations, drive powerful one-to-one communication opportunities and create bonding experiences and lasting memories. When structured properly, they are sound business investments. A well-designed incentive programme includes five integrated strategies to drive motivation, performance and engagement: audience analysis, programme design, communication strategy, the trip experience and measurement.
Audience Analysis
Historically, incentive-programme design has been based on nebulous concepts like instinct, past experience, managerial judgement, budget and the CEO’s personal preferences.
What’s missing is a focus on the audience, whose performance the incentive programme is meant to drive. There are four distinct demographics in the workforce today and each is motivated differently and has differing opinions of what constitutes effective and meaningful engagement. Factors such as age, household composition, income and generational diversity all must be considered when designing an effective motivational event. How do you get the information you need? Ask your people. Surveying them well before designing the programme will give you valuable insights; understanding the entire audience will enable you to create a truly aspirational experience and greatly increase the programme’s motivational power.
Programme Design
A study published by the Incentive Research Federation in January, 2009, found that 78 per cent of organizations do not use a professional to design their programmes. That’s ludicrous! Why would organizations spend millions of dollars annually on their incentive programme rewards — but put very little thought or expertise into the actual design of the programme? An incentive programme that focuses only on the ‘incentive’ misses the point.
The ultimate success of an incentive programme lies in its ability to drive increased performance and to maximize business results. Many programmes are designed to motivate only the top performers and that is why, year after year, you get the same people winning the trips. I once met with a potential client who proudly told me that her audience had very high expectations about the destination selected, because they had about a 70-per-cent repeat factor of attendees. Although the destination is important, she should have been asking, “how can I structure this programme to drive the right level of motivation in the entire audience? How can I ensure that the same people don’t win, year after year?” With that level of repeat factor, their incentive programme had become an expected form of compensation — not a programme that could drive increased performance.
Communications Strategy
Many companies overlook the value of integrating communications into a motivational event programme. They consider communications an unnecessary expense, instead of seeing it as an investment that will aid the effectiveness of the programme overall.
Consider this: An organization has decided to run a motivational event to increase sales by 5 per cent. They know their audience well and have structured the rules so that the programme has the ability to drive optimal performance, and selected a destination that is going to motivate them to perform. They’ve done all the right things. But they launch the incentive at their annual sales meeting and don’t mention it again until the end of the qualification period. Do they really think that is going to achieve the intended results? In order for an incentive programme to work, an effective, engaging and informative communications strategy is critical. To stay motivated, the audience needs to understand how they can qualify, know how they are tracking and be reminded about the programme regularly. Internet and e-mail have greatly improved the simplicity of programme communications and can be used in an extremely cost-effective way to support the programme goals. It just needs to happen!
The Trip Experience
The underlying purpose of an incentive programme is to enable a company to achieve optimal results. The trip is the ‘carrot’ that drives motivation by providing an aspirational experience that the participant could not, or would not, do on their own.
On-site, programme design can yield fantastic extra opportunities for networking and motivation. In the past, senior executives joined an incentive programme, only to shake hands with the winners at the banquet and then fly out again. Such a missed opportunity! Think about it — you’ve got the top people from your organization in one location. They’re spending several days together, and the organization is realizing one of the key benefits that motivational events provide: the formation of a powerful connection between the participants and the company. Why not capitalize on it? Give the senior-level executives the chance to get to know these people and tap into the minds of their star performers. The participants will welcome the rare time with senior stakeholders. In addition to the immediate benefits of rich dialogue and information sharing, it will also create deeper engagement and have lasting advantages once everyone returns home.
On-programme is also a great time to provide your team with a preview of new products or an advance look at the company’s direction for the coming year. This will help improve performance and boost sales — driving results forward, instead of just looking at the trip as payment for results already realized.
Measurement
Measurement is a hot topic these days and one that is personally meaningful to me. I have long advocated the measurement of ME&I investments, and the change that has affected our industry over the last year will drive the right type of accountability. Incentives need to be justified more than ever before. The focus on ME&I travel has now moved up into the c-suite of the organization — where it should have been all along — and there is greater alignment between incentives and business objectives. In fact, the silver lining in all that negative press is that the cycle of legacy incentive programmes has been broken at last.
A key component of incentive-programme design is analyzing all factors that will affect success. Unfortunately, most organizations think about understanding and reporting their success after the programme ends — but by then, it’s way too late. The time to consider and document what success looks like is when the incentive programme is first designed. Begin with the end result in mind. This includes defining the measures of success for participants, internal stakeholders, programme management and the target financial and operational metrics.
Properly designing a programme with success metrics in mind ensures that your incentive programme is aligned to business objectives and can withstand any type of scrutiny. If AIG had established proper metrics, there wouldn’t have been anything negative to report.
As our industry begins to emerge from this economic slump and the turmoil of the AIG crisis, we all need to think about how we can do things differently. Incorporating a comprehensive strategy through the full planning cycle helps you make a difference for your employees, your sales force and, ultimately, your business.
— Nicola Kastner, CMP, CMM, is the Mississauga, Ont.-based manager of Strategic Event Marketing, at Maritz Canada Inc.
Originally published in Meetings & Incentive Travel Magazine
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