As part of our ongoing stages of incentive programs series, we have gone through planning, budgeting, implementing, kicking off and ramping up an incentive program and are now ready to examine how to keep your program running smoothly. I have four tips to ensure your program progresses and completes its first year successfully.
Adding Components to Maximize Participation
Often times when a client comes to us, they have many ideas and plans for their employee incentive program that do not end up fitting into the schedule for getting the program started. Since administrators and participants are more familiar with the incentive program, you will have more time to start dedicating your efforts to these components. Knowledge centers or libraries, quizzes, peer recognition modules and other incentive program ideas are often put off but can now be implemented. All of these extras help to get people to understand what desired behaviors are for your organization and how they can demonstrate these behaviors in order to earn employee incentives.
I recommend that instead of tackling each project at once and feeling overwhelmed, break down each initiative into its own project and introduce them separately to participants over the course of the program’s first year. Since most of these ideas are integrated into the incentive program website, you will also need to work closely with your account representatives to set up expectations and functionality. By introducing these new reward program features, you are keeping the program fresh and relevant to participants and asking them to interact continuously with the incentive program website. Spreading awareness of the incentive program by introducing new program ideas is an excellent way to maximize participation.
Reducing Numbness to Program Communications
You probably had a whole barrage of incentive program communications developed for the kick off of the program: emails, flyers, posters, announcements, award cards and the like. Now that your employee incentive program has had enough time to start running, you will need to reduce the numbness participants will feel towards program communications by redesigning and introducing new incentive program supplements.
Since most incentive programs are designed around branding guidelines or a theme, I do not suggest that you completely change the incentive program website and all program components. For my clients, I usually leave the website layout alone and focus and mixing up the colors and shapes used on the program communications so that when a person comes across the new design, it will grab attention.
Introducing New Goals
In addition to changing up the design of your incentive program supplements and implementing new ideas into the program, if you held back on some goals initially, you will want to introduce them now. For sales incentive programs, often clients will run short term sales contests after the program has started up and is running. Safety incentive programs may start out with short term goals and introduce longer term goals after the program is up and running. When you introduce goals in sets, you are able to put equal emphasis on goals in each group and not overloading participants with too much information up front.
Communicating the Incentive Program and its Progress
Once your incentive program is up and running, you should have access to statistics on what people are doing: what people are ordering, what goals are being achieved, who is improving, which groups are outperforming others… Communicating the incentive program’s progress is a great way to perpetuate its acceptance, relevance and continued participation. Incentive programs can be communicated to emphasis its importance and tout its benefits both online and in print.
You can add extra pages to the incentive program website such as newsletters, leader or score boards and spot light pages to highlight program activity and impact. If you have not already started sending out individual monthly account statements via email or with paychecks, this is an important consideration for larger incentive programs with people who may be more comfortable receiving statements than visiting the website.
Communication is a two-way street however, and though you are communicating to participants about the incentive program, you must ensure that there is a way for them to talk back to you about the program. If you have not already implemented a suggestion box or online feedback form in the ramp up phase, do so now. An anonymous feedback form can provide valuable insight and advice that you will need to consider during the next phase of your incentive program’s life cycle.
There are only two more stages in the incentive program life cycle left to discuss! Check back the last Tuesday in March for the next stage, analyzing and reporting your incentive program.
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