Motivating people. Cultivating an engaged
workforce. Inspiring a team to meet and exceed its goals. These may all
be worthy ends in themselves -- but that might not be enough to
convince a client or company leader to invest in an incentive program.
That requires the demonstration of the all-important three-letter
acronym: ROI.
For this episode of the Incentive Podcast, we look at return on
investment and the hard numbers of motivation: The numbers showing that
for every dollar an organization spends on its rewards and recognition,
it's getting far more in return -- in increased sales, higher
productivity, or any number of other bottom-line benefits.
We
discuss how to accurately measure ROI and how the concept has evolved
just in the last year or two; what metrics matter and how to be sure
you're getting the most out of the data you already have. For these
questions and more, we speak with two people who know quite a bit about
crunching numbers for incentive programs: Melissa Van Dyke, president of
the Incentive Research Foundation; and Paul Hebert, senior director, solutions architecture for Creative Group.
They bring up some surprising points about the art and science of ROI --
that intangible rewards are playing a greater role than ever in
assessing a program's impact, that there is a difference between
accuracy and precision, and why many incentive program owners might be
focusing on the wrong numbers entirely. Listen here to find out why.