Page 129 - Peerless Performance Travelers Proposal

brand, and that literally equals your value in the marketplace. When those are so tightly connected, organizations are going to have a much more important conversation about internal culture.”
And many companies need to have that discussion, says Weede, citing a Deloitte study showing that 75 percent of companies’ associates don’t understand their company culture well. “Culture is not putting a ping pong table in the middle of a room or having casual dress every day,” she says. “Cultures are associates. It’s what they think, how they act, how they feel. My bet is if [employees] don’t understand the culture, then they don’t understand the mission, they don’t understand the values, and they don’t understand the goals.”
Which helps explain why Gallup says more than half of the associates in the United States are disengaged, Weede adds.
That in turn means the rewards and recognition industry will be asked more and more to use the data it captures to “help organizations solve wider HR problems or human capital problems,” Van
Dyke says. “Because in many instances, reward and recognition systems have deeper performance data than most organizations even currently realize.”
That lack of insight can be costly. In March, United Airlines suffered a public meltdown when it replaced a $300 quarterly bonus for all employees with a lottery of a $100,000 top prize, Mercedes automobiles and vacation packages, and smaller prizes in
the $2,000-$5,000 range. The result was enraged employees, especially once the media picked up the story and started reporting on how much money the new bonus lottery would save the company.
There is a lot of academic research showing how motivating tangible and experiential awards like those trips are, Blank says. And the lottery idea has plenty of precedent
in the incentive business in the form of
“spin and win” games so popular as
dealer channel programs. But it is never
a substitute for fair compensation, and it
is certainly not a good idea to take away cash compensation -- and there is plenty of research showing that regular cash bonuses are soon viewed as compensation -- says Blank.
In behavioral science this is called loss aversion, says Van Dyke. It means simply that you will fight harder to hold on to what you have than you will to gain something new. And, she adds, people will “put in even less effort in once it has been removed.”
If United had done a controlled experiment with a small group of employees, the company would have been able “to see how it would play out,” Blank says. “How people would feel about it and how it would affect performance.”
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