Apparently over 25% of ‘motivation’ agencies don’t even offer performance measurement services. This indicates that companies need to be wary of ‘widget sellers’ who pretend to be motivation specialists in a market often more interested in selling the end reward, than the tools to control how performance and reward costs are managed.
Massive increases in performance can be achieved by organisations, which simply clarify their key performance indicator criteria and then monitor performance against those criteria. In fact up to 75% of performance improvement potential can be achieved simply by getting this right before even thinking about developing a complex recognition & reward programme.
Take for example the wonderful piece of research undertaken right back in 1939 at a factory where they sought to test the impact of improved lighting on assembly line efficiency.
As expected, when they increased the amount of light, performance went up.
Fortunately, the researchers were sensible enough to want to see if the reverse was also true. – So they reduced the light, expecting to see performance decline.
However, the opposite of what they expected to see happened and they saw performance continue to improve right until they reached the lighting equivalent of moon-light, where presumably the health and safety officer, or latter-day equivalent, called a halt to the whole thing before somebody started losing important parts of their anatomy!
What happened here has become known as the Hawthorne effect, after the factory where the research took place.
It is a plain and simple truth, and it forms the basis of our approach to providing automated performance management and reward solutions. If people know that what they are doing is important enough to measure, and the measures of their performance are presented back to them and their colleagues in a timely and respectful manner, human nature kicks-in and 85% of them want to look good. (We’ve all met the other 15%!).
And it doesn’t only hold true for internal staff incentives, but trade promotions also benefit from communicating key performance criteria and letting them know that their performance is important enough to be closely watched and managed.
In fact, research by Gartner some time ago revealed that companies which failed to provide regular and timely information and rewards risked a 20% decline in performance as a direct result.
David Burton is a sales incentive specialist with many years of experience integrating communications, measurement and rewards to grow sales and margins. He can be contacted via his company’s website http://performancebonus.com.
