Incentives Newsletter

There's no question that things, as they say, are tough all over. And with little sign of recovery from the current economic woes on the horizon, companies are continuing to lay off workers while demanding that the people who remain "do more with less." And while it may seem an imperfect time to worry about the issue of employee recognition, as Louise Anderson of the Minnesota-based Anderson Performance Improvement Company points out, recognition is a key factor in production levels and employee engagement,...read more.

Ever since corporate America discovered, sometime around the late 1990s, that employee rewards programs could actually generate measurable results, efforts to increase incentive program ROI have been on the rise. In The Manager's Guide to Rewards (AMACOM, 2007), authors Doug Jensen, Tom McMullen, and Mel Stark of the Hay Group suggest that companies can dramatically improve their programs' ROI by establishing a system of rewards that genuinely differentiate among various team members' contributions to the organization's key goals....read more.

One could be forgiven for assuming that top level corporate executives, having achieved such lofty managerial positions, must enjoy a deep and thorough understanding of the fundamentals of employee motivation. In reality, whether this assumption is true varies greatly from one organization to the next. Some CEOs, for example, are expert at wringing maximum effort and performance from practically everyone in the companies they direct. Others, well,
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Faced with the worst recession in generations, it's hard to imagine that, outside of businesses that sell "Foreclosed" yard signs, there are many companies featuring offices filled with highly motivated, energized, upbeat employees driven to compete and succeed. These offices do exists, however, says Jon Katzenbach, author of The Discipline of Teams (Harvard Business School Press, 2009), although he admits they are dwarfed by those in the ranks of the apathetic, passive, and pessimistic. In fact, Katzenbach,...read more.