I interviewed a half-dozen or more people for this issue’s cover story on trends in sales incentive programs and workplace motivation. I mentioned to each of them at some point during the discussion that I have been writing on this topic for longer than I care to admit.
If you want to attach a number to it, it’s 1989. That’s the year I started work at a product tabloid in downtown Minneapolis and was introduced to the world of non-cash incentives. I may have written a hundred articles since then on why cash doesn’t motivate as well as merchandise and incentive travel.
Early in that process, I began to call regularly on John Jack, a vice president at BI WORLDWIDE, a Minneapolis developer of performance improvement programs. I can still picture the first time I visited John in his office. He pulled out a manila folder bulging with articles and other research he had amassed on how individuals respond to certain stimuli. I assume there was such a thing as behavioral economics in the early 1990s, but it wasn’t a term that was tossed around as commonly as it is today, and there certainly weren’t any best-selling books on the topic.
Clearly, John had invested a lot of time learning as much as possible about the motivational power of cash vs. non-cash incentives. He handed the heavy folder to me and invited me to take it home to dig through it for insights.
I called on John every time my annual “bash cash” cover feature rolled around. He had a lot of knowledge about the motivational might of non-cash incentives in his head, but he summarized it the same way each time we talked: “More money isn’t what makes Sammy run,” he’d say.
Our title for the cover feature in our November/December issue is my small homage to John and all those times he sat with me to talk shop for my features. He left the brutal winters of Minnesota behind long ago and now summers in North Carolina and winters in Florida. I’ll make sure he gets a copy of this issue.
No one talks about “what makes Sammy run” this time around, but there are new insights that reinforce the importance of recognizing stellar performance with something more than money.
Chester Elton, co-author of the new book, “What Motivates Me,” reminded us that there is good reason we revisit this topic at least once a year. “The oversimplification of motivators is a dangerous thing,” he told us. “A friend of mine explains it wonderfully: We now understand that the customer experience will never exceed the employee experience. The more we understand our people and their motivators — what they are passionate about — the better employee experience we can create, and that immediately translates to the customer experience.”
