For the past six months, I have been blogging about life cycle of an incentive program. From planning your award program to getting it up and running, I have covered a lot of ground. All of your seeds have been planted and as the incentive program has grown and begins to reach its first year mark, you are surely ready to take a deep look at the incentive program and see what changes, if any, should be made. This month we will take a look at the first part of this stage, analyzing the incentive program. There are three areas you will want to analyze in order to evaluate your award program: program activity, budget expenditure and organizational metrics.
Program Activity
Tracking participant, order and award activity needs to be done on a regular basis but at the very least on an annual basis for long term incentive programs. Participant activity will detail how many people have logged into the website at least once and how often people are logging in. Information on participant activity will help you to determine how aware and how comfortable employees are with the incentive program.
The next area of activity to analyze is orders. Take a look at how many people have placed at least one order. Find out what time of year had the most orders or if orders were flat all year round. Take note of the most popular employee rewards that have been ordered. By gathering information on order activity, you will find out more about interactions and behavior.
The last area you want to analyze is awards and point activity and this is the most extensive area to research. I often gather this data for clients and present it in chart formats. These charts detail:
-How often are points awarded
-What goals are being met the most/least frequently
-Which locations have the most/least points
-Total points per group, per group per month
For incentive programs that also include sub-administrators, I provide reports on their activity as well. Clients often want to track whether administrators are using up all their points or not and which groups have the most points versus the number of participants. By understanding point activities, you will be able to understand the consistency of points being posted and how much people are participating in the incentive program.
Budget Spent
Analyzing your award program budget will depend on if you are paying for points upfront or only after points are spent on brand name employee rewards. You can compare your allotted budget by looking at how many points have been awarded if you prepay for orders or for billed upon redemption accounts, you will want to look at the total number of points spent for the year. If you spent budget on promoting the program or pay any fees, be sure to include these in your total budget. Take note of how close you came to spending your annual budget as this will be a key consideration when evaluating the incentive program.
Gathering Company Metrics
Incentive programs can include a wide variety of goals that once met, will impact your organizational metrics. Depending on what your award program goals are, you will need to calculate the year over year changes. Many companies look at productivity, safety, profits, attendance, customer service statistics and retention and are able to link these metrics to the incentive program.
However, incentive programs often have an effect on organizations that is not quantifiable. To help gather information on the intangible impact of your incentive program, use the end of the first year of the incentive program to ask participants to fill out a short survey about the award program. I have a few standard questions to include in an incentive program feedback form below giving you an idea of what the form should be asking.
-Inquire about employee engagement levels
-Find out if the incentive program adequately provides an avenue for employee recognition
-Ask participants to provide their suggestions or ideas to improve the program
-Ask participants to grade the quality of the employee rewards they have received
Return on Investment
After you have analyzed what budget has been spent and your targeted areas of improvement, you should be able to determine your incentive program