In this month’s stages series blog, and the series finale, I would like to discuss the maturity phase of an incentive program. A mature incentive program is one in which the original goals of the program are being consistently met and that the program has grown stagnant. Participants in a mature reward program may have a lot of points earned, but they also have a lot of points spent on rewards. Furthermore, the incentive program may not fit into your organization’s mission anymore or may be leaving your company and participants with something to be desired. Once an employee incentive program has reached this stage, it is time to re-design the program or end it indefinitely.
How to Make the Decision
When trying to make a decision of whether you should re-design and re-launch an incentive program versus ending it, the original goal of the program is very important. You should consider what the original intent of the program was and how it could be changed in order to be more effective and provide a higher return on investment. Let’s say that you began with a safety incentive program a few years ago and have seen moderate success and responsiveness. You may have been rewarding workers who completed a quarter or more with no recordable accidents but after a while, everyone seems to be earning points and the program is more of a given than a motivator. If safety is always going to be a concern to your organization, then perhaps evaluating new goals that could help to motivate employees to create a safety culture would be worthwhile.
On the other hand, let’s say that you started with an incentive program that allowed employees to earn points for reaching anniversaries with the company and also gave them birthday rewards. After a few years, these rewards may also become an entitlement and so you may decide that using the budget towards another type of incentive program altogether would be better than keeping it the same. One organization I am working with right now is in this situation and has decided to use their incentive program budget towards a wellness program in the future.
How to make a Smooth Transition
If you have decided to change the incentive program and re-launch it, then I recommend really starting at the beginning of the incentive program life cycle. There have probably been a lot of new techniques and strategies developed in the incentive program arena since you began the incentive program and you will want to find out how these can be used to your advantage. Try to schedule a demo of an incentive program with your current provider to see what they are selling to new clients to get ideas of these new technologies.
A few tips to keep in mind:
-Treat the new program separately from the old
-Create a new look and feel for your incentive program website and all communications
-Decide on whether to roll over points earned under the previous program or expire them
-Plan a new kick off to let people know how the new program works and how they can participate
How to End an Incentive Program
Ending an incentive program may be something you decide is best and if so, you want to ensure that people are not put off with an abrupt ending. Communicate when the last day is for people to earn points and how long they will have to use or lose the points. Your communications should not be limited to just one media; you will want to inform those who have the potential to lose points that could be redeemed for rewards by at least two methods at least two times. You may want to consider explaining why the program ended so that if in the future, you decide to implement a similar program, people will feel inclined to participate. Once the employee incentive program has officially ended, be sure to keep some reports and information on-hand so that you can reference it in the future. You may want to keep some screenshots of what the website looked like along with some examples of administrative reporting capabilities.
When an incentive program becomes mature, it is not necessarily the end but the start of a creative destruction process in which you will be able to take key lessons learned and free up some budget to use for something else in the future. Hopefully, you will be able to identify future situations in which an employee incentive program can help your company to reach its goals. With the experiences you have had with your incentive program, you will better prepared to implement a successful reward program designed tomaximize your returns.