The Motivation Conversation

Group Travel Rewards- Stepping over Dimes to Pick up Nickles

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The media has unfairly been characterizing incentives using travel to nice places as evil, wrong, somehow anti-American, “rich people” taking advantage of the “little people”. Nothing could be further from the truth.

These incentive programs reward people when their performance has generated incremental profits. They are not junkets; they are often self-liquidating programs that are paid out of the resultant profits. The participants are not privileged, they are demonstrated winners.

What other marketing programs only pay when measurable profit goals have already been achieved? What better way than to reward your best customers or employees after they’ve reached ambitious goals? Wouldn’t you want to pay your highest performers in a tangible non-cash way where the perception of the reward is so great that it costs less than the corresponding cash bonus equivalent to create excitement and a feeling of accomplishment?

These are programs that pay; they don’t cost. That’s why so many companies in sectors ranging from Pharmaceuticals to Financial Services to Technology to even your air conditioning contractor actually use them; why it is a $34 billion industry employing millions of people from airlines, hotels and restaurants, transportation, entertainment and event planners; and why so many of your and my neighbors have experienced them.

Having spent 25 years in the incentive industry, it has been clear to me that most of these winners are not rich, cosseted elite. The winners I’ve met are the hardworking people of America: plumbers, carpet and copier store owners, pharmaceutical sales reps, customer service agents, computer and software sales people, automobile sales and service employees from the local dealership, Avon salespeople operating out of their homes, window fashion dealers, insurance agents, small business owners, bank tellers and loan officers, even TV and Radio and Print media customers and sales people. You know, regular people, our neighbors.

People who work hard to achieve ambitious goals deserve rewards and recognition for their accomplishments.

With the economy in a nosedive, with increased jobless reports and fear so thick it has weight, I understand that incentive events look desirable or even excessive. But that is the whole point of inventing desire, changing behavior.  Some programs are excessive, stupid, ill-conceived and poorly administered. But that is not the whole story, just the smallest part of the story we’re being told. As the media inflame passions and ratings with outrage, class warfare, and a hypocritical populist fervor, it is easy to ignore the value of incentive events to the companies that sponsor them, the winners who enjoy them and the people who make their living delivering them. This human value chain drives a large part of our economy.

And most times when a CEO is coerced into cancelling an incentive or recognition event, the unintended consequences are very real, in a very bad way, to many people. In the last 60 days one of the largest segments of our service economy, hospitality and tourism, has immediately shed tens of thousands of jobs in places like Florida, Nevada, California and New York as a direct result of the hysteria that spending money to reward performance is a bad practice. Latest projections show that almost a quarter million jobs in the hospitality and tourism sector will be lost this year. Hundreds of thousands of winners will have the contract they have with their employers or suppliers broken, even though they did more than required in an extraordinarily difficult time.

Common sense and that quintessential American value, reward for performance, should not be sacrificed on the altar of public opinion and a quarterly balance sheet.

Let’s not step over dimes to pick up nickels.