Transparencies in the Incentive Business? Rarely!

Please read this blog post from Paul Hebert at I2I, the incentive consultancy that always tells it like it is, and we always seem to agree with (well on most things anyway).

In this post, Paul shares his top ten times when you should fire your incentive or rewards companies. And, from our perspective he’s right on, especially if you are looking for the company that will provide you with a program that has the best chance of producing results. Most reward companies today spend the vast majority of their time selling you on the merits of incentives and rewards and how their particular award specialty is the one that will do the best job, yada, yada, yada. They rarely spend any time with in depth research and discussion of what you want to accomplish and the best way to do that. They prefer to spend a lot of time promoting and justifying what award you should use. The best reward to use will be dependent on what it is you want to accomplish. Frankly, we’ve seen just about every reward in this industry used in just about every combination. And, the unpleasant fact is that many programs don’t produce results at all, and even when they do, most companies don’t do a very good job of measuring what happened, when, why and how.

And, for those of you out there who purchase reward programs, the onus is also on you if your programs don’t succeed. How often do you enter a reward or incentive challenge with a predetermined idea of what award you want to use? And then you select the type of award companies you want that can provide that award. Doing this will rarely get you the transparency and experienced recommendations you need to make the right decision. Often it’s just the opposite. You’ll get a structure that plays into the hands of the award companies trying to sell you their core products. We know, we were trained to do just that! When you find yourself in that situation you might want to read this post Do Incentive or Recognition Reward Programs Really Work? This post is the genesis of Your Baby’s Ugly! Keep this in mind the next time you plan your award program. You might find yourself using an award you never thought of that will give you much better results...yes even cash if that’s what it takes.