Neon Agency is a team
of experienced performance
improvement experts
We work across multiple
industry sectors UK and Worldwide
By Peter Brooks, Chairman of Neon Agency Ltd
I entered the performance improvement market 46 years ago as an employee of the market leader, American owned E.F, Macdonald Incentive Company, to give its full name.
EFM as it was commonly known, was selling a service very new to the UK and I soon learned the job was to be part missionary part performance improvement (PI) consultant. In those days we created solutions for clients without getting paid for what was the difficult bit and earned all our income from the redemption of Prize Points through a glossy, full colour 2,000 item Award Collection. We also offered group travel for top awards and package travel for those earning lots of Prize Points.
The Award Collection was regarded by the company and clients as a highly effective motivational tool, renewed each year and launched to great fanfare. These were deluxe productions at the heart of every programme we ran. Many colleagues at the time believed it was the awards choice that determined exactly how effective a campaign would be, as did quite a few clients.
To begin with I accepted that truism and pushed the awards hard at every meeting, gaining fair success doing it. However, the more clients and prospects I met and talked to, to understand their issues and objectives and the more participants I met, it dawned upon me, that several elements needed alignment to create the best environment for incentives to succeed.
I realized many issues could become barriers to success, such as:
1. If you set participants tasks they didn’t fully understand, feel comfortable with, or appreciate the logic and you haven’t checked.
2. Not issuing clear unambiguous targets and time scales for the required performance.
3. If you haven’t checked or refreshed the skills and knowledge required to undertake the task and identified how capable the participant feels of delivery.
4. If you don’t provide constant detailed feedback on achievements and comparative analysis to support.
5. If your objectives are around tasks such as recruiting new customers, or identifying prospective customers, without offering support and guidance for the best practice and techniques.
6. If you don’t gain full engagement with individuals and create supportive dialogues encouraging them to give feedback and share their challenges and thoughts throughout the programme.
7. If you don’t make the rewards value appropriate to the scale of the task.
This list can, and sometimes does, get longer and it does clearly illustrate the many pitfalls that can devalue your investment in performance improvement.
Neon Agency are performance improvement specialists, and we apply a solution that is the embodiment of 45 years of experience with our performance improvement process, for employees and brand ambassadors in business partners, we call it Optimum Performance.
Delivered via mobile app, Optimum Performance is a tried and tested approach which results in a custom-built solution that is a perfect fit for your people and organisation. There are lots of agencies who will want to persuade you that their SaaS solution is a total performance improvement solution. Before buying-in try holding their offer up against the list of above barriers to be sure it can really help you overcome them.
To discuss your performance improvement needs contact us.
