8th August 2008 - Promotions and Incentives

As organisations battle with the current credit crunch, they need staff to perform better than ever. Pepping up training with rewards makes for effective results, discovers Stuart Derrick

As the economic screw turns tighter month by month, companies are focusing ever more on getting the most from employees. With recruitment freezes in place at some companies, the emphasis is on ensuring staff are delivering to their maximum potential.
Training is becoming more important as organisations seek to do the simple things better and so boost their performance. However, to ensure it does not become an exercise in box-ticking. Some organisations are looking at the role of incentives in making sure people take training seriously and that they retain and use their new knowledge.
According to Ian Luxford, director of learning at the Grass Roots Group, the best employee engagement or motivation programmes blend training, measurement and reward to create a positive working environment that is sustainable.
“When these components aren’t operating in tandem, the individual activities run the risk of appearing disjointed and tactical, with only short term, if any, benefit. The links are most obvious in training aimed at some aspect of the revenue generation or protection process.” he says.
Grass Roots was able to bring the three strands together for work with the Call centre teams of a major mobile telecoms brand. The teams’ role was to discourage callers from canceling their existing arrangements and switching to a competitor brand.
Grass Roots targeted callers with distance learning activity for eight weeks. This was supplemented with three one-hour motivation sessions, where operatives looked closely at what they were being asked to do and reviewed how best to do it. An interactive telephone quiz tested them on the knowledge they had acquired in their work. The best performing teams each week won high-value travel-based prizes.
Luxford says: “It was the learning, measurement and reward in tandem that helped the teams achieve their improved success rates in turning around callers and discouraging them from defecting to rival providers.’
P&MM executive director John Sylvester says a well-constructed motivation programme will test that the core skills necessary to carly out a role are in place. “‘Training plays an important part in the process. If people simply do not know how to do something, no amount of reward will achieve the result.”

Public recognition
Linking training to a well-targeted recognition programme can help ‘lock down’ newly learned skills. “The programme should work alongside any formal training that is being done to reinforce knowledge and behaviours,” he adds.
Grass Roots’ Luxford agrees that where the behaviours the training program me is aiming for are rewarded, there is far more chance of them becoming the norm. Furthermore, the nature of the reward is less important than how it is delivered. A handwritten note is more powerful than an email and public recognition in front of colleagues is more effective than a private pat on the back.
“Our own Exceeding Expectations programme asks managers to acknowledge the recipient of an award openly at a ream meeting with a few words and a round of applause, rather than simply leaving an envelope on their desk.” says Luxford. Although the current economic environment provides incentive for organisations to look to a more holistic approach to training, reward and recognition.
Colin Davis, chairman of Argos Business Solutions, warns against introducing a programme as a short-term measure. “If you simply introduce incentives to bolster training as a one-off exercise, then it will he difficult to make it viable enough to make the learnings stick,” he says. “You need to work out what the critical success factors are for the business and look to introduce a programme that reinforces them over the long term. Training might he one, but so is absenteeism, safety, and recommending a friend for a reward.”
Crucially, businesses also have to work out what they want to achieve through their training regime and ensure that ii is something that has an impact on [he bottom line.

Ongoing programme
With organisations under pressure to adhere to a growing amount of legislation and ensure staff are conversant with it, distance learning has become a more widely used tool, and one that sits happily alongside recognition prorammes such as Argos’ managed online solution. “Companies can run learning schemes where staff are encouraged to complete various mod- tiles by the collection of points. hut it does have to he part of an ongoing programme that staff buy into,” says Davis, “We are seeing significant increases in markets such as call centres where performance is very measurable and success-driven.”
Another area that is measurable is safety. According to the British Red Cross, six million working days are lost each year through work-related, reportable injuries. This adds up to £5-8 billion a year in lost work.

Companies have health and safety training, but getting staff to engage with it can be challenging. Reward and recognition agency Michael C Fina has launched the Safety Recognition programme to use recognition and non-cash rewards to reinforce safety goals and initiatives within an organisation. On demonstrating compliance with heath and safely training objectives, employees are eligible to receive an incentive reward from a range of gifts such as premium electrical, ornamental, leisure and household goods.

Safety procedures
The programme is primarily suited to industry sectors where safety is paramount, such as transportation, manufacturing, healthcare and construction, but it is applicable to all businesses as health and safety becomes increasingly regulated.

Sheila Sheldon, director of European operations at Michael C Fina, says reward and recognition is a proven method of reinforcing safety lessons and ensuring they remain a primary concern for staff. “Employees don’t want to get hurt or to hurt others, but in a pressure-filled world, accidents occur,” she says. “Recognising employees’ efforts to comply with safety procedures not only establishes a culture in which employees help promote safety procedures while on the job, but will also cut the associated costs when health and safety standards are not met.”

The web-based solution integrates with I IR systems and databases so programme usage, participation and results can be tracked. Such measurability is one of the more attractive elements of linking training and recognition, but measurement needs to he linked to the training objectives and contextualised, says Grass Roots’ Luxford. This can range from a simple ‘expectations met’ questionnaire at the end of the programme, which can have limited value, to a proof of knowledge test.
“in the retail sector, where our focus is often on helping our client to create a differentiated customer experience, the measurement technique might involve mystery shopping. In the automotive sector it might involve an outbound telephone call to rate the customer experience around the delivery of their new vehicle.” he says.
Whatever the measurement methodology, it is becoming clear that combining training and reward and recognition is an effective method of driving home the lessons learned by staff and making the results stick.