Their opinion, stated as fact, is that gift cards, because they are denominated in dollars “ go to pay the bills, groceries, gas or other common household costs,” and therefore are not tangible evidence of success and are not positive and don’t have a long lasting impact on employee performance. Sorry, gift cards are tangible, they are in effect what they can be redeemed for, and the TV set purchased with a Best Buy gift card is every bit as positive a reminder of how they earned the award as the TV set ordered from the merchandise incentive catalog. The big difference of course is that with the gift card, they get that TV for about half the price of the incentive merchandise catalog, and they’ll still have money left over to purchase a DVD player to go along with it. These merchandise award companies have been hiding their pricing behind point schemes that are frankly laughable in today’s business world where determining the value of an item is a short click away. If they are still using these arcane arguments, my guess is that they are still losing business to the lowly gift card….you think?
The way this post is written is typical of an HR world that has been duped by the award industry for years regarding cost and value of awards. But Gen X & Y and the Millennials will have nothing to do with it. They know the value of things and are not easily swayed by the rhetoric of days gone by.What is a little disturbing about this post is that they take the very difficult subject of employee retention and correlate it to the award being used to recognize performance. That’s quite a jump; obviously the author was reaching for some way to tie the article to awards, but saying that “the question employers need to ask themselves is “are we using the right reward to retain employees?” is rather ludicrous. If it were as simple as that, every award company in the world would be researching and investigating every possible combination of awards to prove their “package” was the best to retain employees. The winning company would have access to billions of dollars in non-cash recognition award budgets, not to mention cash recognition that is significant budgets as well. Recognition awards may play a part in employee engagement, and employee engagement certainly plays a part in retention. But there are many pieces to the employee retention puzzle; awards may be one of them, and only a small one at that.
Lastly, I was interested in the reference to the World atWork Trends Report 2011 and the mention that “employers should use non-monetary rewards and exclude cash-equivalents such as gift cards from the mix, regardless of how popular they appear to be,” as if that were a part of this study. Having written for World at Work I am well versed in their position on fact based vs. opinion based material. I have also reviewed this report on several occasions and it is completely fact based. I can find no mention of the qualitative use of non-monetary awards. That’s just a clever way to gain credibility by positioning your opinions as if shared by a well-known compensation association, which of course they don’t.But thanks for the post; it allows me to once again refute the disingenuous and distorted statements of the archaic merchandise award houses. And that’s always fun to do.
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Thanks for reading Your Baby's Ugly, we are certainly interested in your thoughts.