Incentive programs were initially designed to reward achievement, to focus the efforts of the target audience on a specific goal. Over the years, some participants are driven by greed not by the sense of achievement. When this happens, the awards become entitlements for performance and not the recognition they were once meant to be. Participants want to know WIIFM (What’s In It For Me)? Losing sight of the objectives of the program and just relying on the greed of the participants is dangerous ground. In any incentive program there will be participants that are only motivated by the prize and not for the achievement but if this is pervasive, all future programs are in jeopardy.
The actual award should be secondary to the program. We all know we can’t necessarily change motivation because it is intrinsic and that means it’s different for all of us, but we can change habits, swapping out bad habits for good habits and rewarding that conversion. When the prize becomes the focus and the motivation is greed, we all lose. I remember one of my first incentive programs (I didn’t design it, just communicated it to the participant audience) and someone in the audience said “What, no car?” A competitive program was offering a car for performance and now that is the standard prize to get their attention and focus.
If we allow greed to be a factor in our program design, we are destined to create ever more lavish prizes to get participant buy in and acceptance of the program. Incentive programs are for rewarding performance that is above and beyond normal performance. They should be designed to reward the incremental effort that it took to achieve the stated goal. Too much focus on the prize and we now have a program that more sweepstakes than incentive. People that play the lottery are focused on the prize, there’s no additional effort required, just buy the ticket. Don’t let your performance improvement program become a sweepstakes.
