Page 127 - Peerless Performance Travelers Proposal

The Four Pillars of Behavior
Before many companies actually attempt to change
behaviors of recognition, reward, and engagement program participants in a positive way, they are putting an effort into understanding how the brain works. This can be basic chemistry -- neurotransmitters both reflect and impact whether people are happy and trusting (oxytocin) or stressed and fearful (cortisol)
-- and it can be more subtle, such as an understanding of
the difference between repetitive and creative thinking, says Weede.
“So much of what happens in our day-to-day lives at work, unfortunately, is tied to that part of the brain that focuses on habits where we do something well or we do it okay, but we keep doing it,” she adds. “We do it repetitively. When that happens, it shuts down the part that promotes and supports the exploration of new ideas and curiosity and creativity. So, when you’re using one, you can’t use the other.” And stress is one of the best ways to shut down creativity.
Once we understand this and other factors that drive behavior, “we have a better shot at really engineering a culture and establishing or aligning core values,” Weede says. “I can’t tell you how many times I walk in these companies and their mission is tied to some type of performance standard, which we all know is a byproduct of why you come to work every day.”
In order to create the behaviors that businesses want in order
to get better results, it is necessary to use mechanisms that help nudge them along the path that will help them achieve what they need to in order to earn a reward, says Cameron Conway, vice president and general manager of sales effectiveness at Maritz Motivation Solutions.
“We try to ensure that we have four strategic pillars in all of the programs that we do,” Conway says. These are an attention strategy, goal commitment, sharing feedback on progress, and having a reward that makes the desired behavior worthwhile.
1. Attention strategy. This is pretty self-explanatory: you need to attract people’s attention to the behavior you’re trying to change, he says. Such as a reward or recognition program.
2. Goal commitment. “This is critical,” Conway says, pointing to a channel program for a property and casualty insurance company. “We asked agents to commit to a specific level of customer satisfaction” on the assumption that higher levels of customer satisfaction will lead to more business. Compared to agents who did not participate, the agents who set a goal sold more policies, at higher average premiums. And, of course, had higher customer satisfaction scores.
3. Progress feedback. People take more action once they have started
to accomplish something. For example, Conway says that enrollment
in a multi-year, points-based incentive program for a pharmaceutical company jumped 147 percent after the participant pool was shown how far they’d come to reaching their goal in the previous year. “Just by showing people that they’re already making progress towards the goal as opposed to people that have to start from zero,” he says.
4. Meaningful rewards. Setting a reward that makes people want to reach their goals is hardly something new to the recognition and reward business, but there is plenty of innovative new research showing not just why it works, but also why non-cash awards work better.
Uncovering True Desires
When it comes to selecting rewards that will actually change behavior, top incentive practitioners are looking into what program participants really want rather than what they say they want. There is a growing body of behavioral science that says that non-cash awards work better, for a variety of reasons that the incentive industry has long known (based on experience rather than proof). This starts with the fact that people tend to view cash awards as compensation to be lost rather than an award to be won.
Beyond that, an upcoming report by the Incentive Research Foundation (IRF) cites research that found “if cash rewards are removed, motivation, performance, and engagement among past recipients may drop even below levels that existed before the reward was introduced.”
Also, cash tends to be used for practical needs rather than special indulgences that are more memorable and desirable.
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