For years I have been encouraging, (make that more than encouraging, call it more like a loud haranguing) clients that they must analyze their award programs from every angle, top, bottom and sideways, and at the very least from a financial standpoint to see if what they paid for the program produced tangible results.
In the old days (as well as now) it’s common practice in the award industry for companies to analyze the ROI on sales incentive programs. The reason, they had the data, and it wasn’t too difficult to draw a line between a program implemented during a set time, the cost of that program and resultant return. Of course many other things entered into this analysis, but nonetheless one could say that the program expense worked…or didn’t as may be the case.
With the advent of employee recognition award efforts, the measurement lines became very blurred and most companies either couldn’t figure out how to measure performance or didn’t want to take all the time necessary to do it. So comprehensive analysis of these employee engagement programs were either never done, or done so globally that they were inconsequential. Things like we recognized and rewarded our employees, our employee satisfaction scores went up, so the program worked. That was ok until the CFO got a look at what was spent and wanted to know what the company received as a financial benefit. And the end of that story is why so many companies cut these budgets during the hard recessionary times…they couldn’t draw that conclusion.
So what does this have to do with the good governor of California (didn’t they once call him moonbeam?) Well, I’ll tell you. He’s looking to save his state from financial ruin and cutting everything he can find that’s not essential. My guess is he’s going for the low hanging fruit because that’s a lot easier than arguing with constituents over trying to lay off folks. And some of the low hanging fruit is promotional products, all those key chains and coffee cups and tee shirts that they purchase. You know, those legitimate communication items that encourage quality performance, improve morale, or help to produce a safe work environment?
Maybe, just maybe, had the departments done some analyzing of their expenditures of budget dollars that were tied to all-inclusive efforts to produce better results, and they showed incremental revenue or cost cutting because of it, they would have kept these budgets intact and lived to use them again to produce positive results. But then that’s only a maybe, we are dealing with a government bureaucracy here remember!
Related Articles:
0 comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks for reading Your Baby's Ugly, we are certainly interested in your thoughts.