The Status of Non-Cash Award Use in the U.S

The Incentive Research Foundation has recently released sneak peak at information on a forthcoming study.  Underlying the study is how incentive or recognition planners determine the right value for travel, merchandise, gift card or cash awards in an incentive recognition program. 

Unlike studies in the past conducted by the IRF, 90% of the respondents in this study were actual end-users in corporations rather than professional incentive planners who all earn their living based on the awards that they sell and are, as such, somewhat (read a lot) biased by what award they want to sell.  Supposedly these corporate incentive planners are not biased toward a specific award.  That may be, but in my experience, almost every incentive planners I have ever dealt with in almost forty years are biased toward one set of awards or another.  With this in mind it is difficult to authenticate these  results as having any true relevance.

Another question I believe needs to be addressed is the effect of the dollars actually spent on awards with a correlation to what award may have produced the most significant results.  The study does provide some actual average dollars spent per award category, but without the attendant results, what do they really mean?  For example, the average spent on cash awards was $732 per participant, the average on merchandise was $206, on gift cards $240, and on travel $3115.  All that info is nice, but what you do with it?  Without the average results of each award it doesn’t tell us much except what companies spend.  And since it’s the company’s incentive planners providing the information, it really doesn’t say what award and amounts should be used, but rather what they actually did used.  It’s kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy….like the company’s average expenditure on travel was  $3115, that only says what they spent, not what they should have spent.    I guess we have to assume that they all know what they are doing and only spending what they need to spend with what exact award to use  to drive the performance they are seeking.  Make sense? 

The $64 question to me in all of this is what’s with the cash expenditures being more than three times higher than merchandise or gift cards?  If that expenditure produced three times better results, than ok that would make sense.  But if it didn’t why would any planner in their right mind use cash as an award? 

I recall a research project conducted twenty years ago by the American Compensation Association for the White House Conference on Productivity.  They surveyed 1600 organizations and found that it took about $3 in cash to produce the same result as $1 in non-cash awards.    

If someone could just tell me the results produced by programs today, maybe we could say that nothing much has changed in those twenty years.  Now that might be worthwhile.