Recognizing employees’ achievements has long been an objective in most successful corporations. Of all the possible options for rewarding top-performing employees corporate-sponsored incentive trips are by far the most sought after. According to surveys on the subject, nearly 70% of employees prefer an incentive trip to all other options—including cash and merchandise rewards. Having said that, incentive trips do not—and should not—remain static. Employees’ expectations and desires change as do the trends in destination choices. A lot more research needs to go in the selection of a destination and the content of the program to keep the target employees motivated and inspired year after year.
Here are a few important tips in planning that perfect employee incentive program:
Goal Setting
Beyond rewarding top-performing employees, every incentive trip should have one or more goal(s). In the early planning stage, you need to sit down with the client company management and find out if there are specific goals that need to be accomplished with a particular incentive trip—for example, team building, interdepartmental collaboration, or just relaxation and reward.
Target Audience
While the underlying principles of planning a perfect incentive trip are the same, the details that go into organizing an incentive trip for a group of young and competitive sales managers are different from an incentive trip planned for top dealers. The management should be able to measure the ROI of any incentive trip. So, get to know who the prospective participants are going to be and plan the incentive trip in such a fashion to ensure the client’s desired objectives are accomplished.
Budgeting
Regardless of goals and the prospective participants, there cannot be a successful incentive trip without a budget—typically set by management. While there are frequent references in the literature (including in our own blogs) that an effective incentive trip should not cost the corporation any incremental expenses (based on the assumption that the net gains from the improved performance of the target participants more than offsets any upfront costs). This principle notwithstanding, as an event planning company, you must obtain a budget from the company that would guide you in selecting an appropriate destination and include elements that fit with that budget.
Timing
In any organization, there are many factors that affect the choice of ideal date(s) for an incentive trip. The perfect time for an incentive trip will have to strike a balance between the choice of a destination, good weather, a slow(er) period at the office, and minimal leave/vacation requests. It is also very important to allow sufficient time to organize that perfect incentive trip (depending on the destination(s) chosen). The rule of thumb is a minimum of six months for long-haul destinations.
Destination Trends
To come up with “winning” destinations, the event planning company must strive to strike a balance between several key factors: company’s guidelines, if any, timing (including duration with the least disruption in business activities), participants’ preferences, budgets, popularity of the destination and the availability of needed resources at the destination.
Program Content
What gives an edge to an event planning company in organizing a top-rated incentive program is its ability to include elements are can truly meet the test of “uniqueness.” The program content is often a key driving factor for prospective participants and their drive to reach the goals set by their employer. To evergreen the program content for the same client, an event planning company must display resourcefulness in researching and proposing bona fide unique and exciting activities that perfectly match the profile of the participants and their expectations.
Local Content
Local content adds to a program’s authentic appeal. In addition, most corporations have an implicit or explicit policy to make positive contributions to the local community/economy where an incentive program takes place. This could take many forms including the use of local suppliers, local entertainment or various CSR initiatives at destination. The goal is to get away from the notion that the incentive trip is a “cookie-cutter.” Participants must “feel” the local flavor as much as possible.
Post Event
A good event planning company should be genuinely interested in assessing the success of any incentive trip as an invaluable tool in improving its performance on every front. So, a formal post-program evaluation and feedback process is a key tool in accomplishing that goal. Any feedback process should not be limited to the company executive but also to the actual participants. Today, social media plays a key role in employees’ lives and the event planning company is well served to use this new tool in soliciting feedback in addition to the more formal feedback tools. Employees’ assessments are critical in ensuring that the client remains satisfied with the services of the event planning company.
Conclusion
Incentive programs remain an important and popular tool for most organizations in motivating and energizing their employees. An event planning company can play a pivotal role to act as a conduit through which a corporation can collect valuable information regarding its employees’ sentiments, promote the esprit de corpsamong employees, and use as a valuable motivating factor. The steps in this blog are intended to help an event planning company to play a value-added role in helping the client organization(s) reach its/their desired objectives with any incentive program.