Monitoring Employee Incentive Program Impact during Tough Economic Times

Organizations have always wanted to maximize the potential of their incentive programs, but often among a plethora of other objectives, incentive program reporting and assessment fell by the wayside. The economic recession is providing companies with the opportunity to take a hard look at the real return on investment that their incentive programs produce and with our new Report Dashboard, this task is easier than ever for my clients.

I have always recommended to new clients with online incentive programs to review the award program progress on at least a quarterly basis. Usually this entailed me preparing and emailing over three months worth of incentive program information to clients for their review which can be cumbersome and overwhelming to say the least. After all, there are many different areas in which companies may want to review the program impact and results.

Armed with our Report Dashboard, my clients are able to more regularly to review and revise the incentive program to ensure effectiveness, relevance and that a positive ROI is achieved. This means instead of holding a formal quarterly review meeting, a company can view incentive program progress at a glance via the Report Dashboard and quickly present this information to upper management and budgetary committees.

As an Account Manager, I set up custom reports to automatically display desired information as soon as an incentive program administrator logs in for a quick snapshot of the award program. In addition to these customized reports, administrators also capable of:

• Monitoring the number of assigned/redeemed points to maintain award program budget goals
• Tracking participant logins to gauge participation and interest in the incentive program
• Auditing point awards by goal completion to maintain award program relevancy
• Reviewing participant performance for each goal and plan for new goals or revised ones in future
• Evaluating incentive program results for different participant groups or locations
• Finding out the top gift selections for award program marketing and improvement in the future

Since all of this program information is available online anytime, I feel that more clients are better enabled to regularly monitor the incentive program progress and make any necessary changes on at least a monthly basis. Given the turbulent economy, this reporting capability is especially useful in giving administrators insight into how the incentive program can be tweaked in order to better achieve its purpose of increasing sales, referrals or performance.

To learn more about tracking and reporting employee award program results, please take a look at this past blog article on the topic.