A recent SITE Foundation study, the result of year’s worth of research, showed that when incentive programs target individual employees, performance increases by 27 percent; when they target teams of employees, companies can see a 45 percent boost in sales. When researchers talked to the workers themselves, they found that 92 percent of them credit incentive programs as the reason they reached their goals.
Yet, half the the corporate world doesn’t buy into them, according to SITE Foundation President Mike Hadlow, president of US Motivation, Atlanta.
"It’s largely a matter of unenlightened management. There’s still a corporate philosophy out there that says, ‘We pay our people, and that should be enough,’ and the majority of companies simply think they’re too much of a hassle to administer and manage. They don't even realize they can get help with this." Toward that end, the Incentive Federation, Westfield, N.J. will launch a series of seminars nationwide, under the auspices of Northwestern University, geared toward educating the corporate community about incentives. The program will be launched at the Motivation Show this coming September.