Incentives to Improve
Author: Alex Palmer
Date: October 31, 2008
If you're not growing, you're dying." Strong words, but they sum up what many experts agree is a vital part of a happy and engaged workforce: continuous improvement. While some employees may be comfortable in their jobs, and do them well, experts say that organizations must also encourage their workers to keep looking for ways to strengthen their performance and expand their responsibilities, to help them stay enthusiastic about their work.
"It is to everyone's advantage for employees to be continuously growing and developing in their positions," says Liz Bywater, the president of Bywater Consulting Group, an organizational consulting firm based in Yardley, Penn. "It benefits the organization, it benefits the individual and it benefits the team to be sure that people aren't simply stagnating."
Bywater emphasizes that without these opportunities, employees may become apathetic about their work, or just look for employment elsewhere. On the other hand, if their organization is giving them ways to learn valuable new skills or knowledge, the workers will not only know how to do their jobs better, but will become more energized in the process.
While this development may be an incentive in itself, organizations are finding that incorporating merchandise and travel into improvement programs is a potent way to keep a workforce growing.
Planned Growth at Red Pepper
For example, at the advertising firm Red Pepper Inc., based in Nashville, Tenn., employees are encouraged and rewarded for improving themselves. Tim McMullen, the company's president, calls it "planned growth" -- intentionally advancing or improving one's knowledge and skills.
The agency frequently holds these planned growth programs. A recent six-week program was called "Apple For the Mind," so named partly because it aimed to get employees to nourish their thinking through self-initiated improvements. The employees were asked to learn something new each week and share it with their coworkers in a new way each time. McMullen explains that this process is not only about learning, but also about teaching, which strengthens the retention and value of the new knowledge.
"When you've got twenty-some-odd people who are creative and love to inspire each other, the sharing is actually more important than the learning," says McMullen.
The "Apple" in the name had a second meaning as well. Red Pepper gave away an iPhone, iPod nano video, three iPod Shuffles and the grand prize of a MacBook Air. Employees would share in a unique way how they had planned their growth that week and be entered in a drawing for the Apple products. They had the option of sharing as often as twice a week, every week of the contest, which would give them 12 chances at winning the MacBook Air.
"I get on them about planned growth all the time, so for one, I had to put my money where my mouth was as far as offering true incentives, and two, being creative in how I asked them to do it," says McMullen.
Employees wrote blog posts, made posters, held contests and employed all sorts of ways to get their new information across. McMullen himself visited an art museum and created a video to convey what he had seen and what value that held for his work with the company. Others shared case studies that they'd come across in industry publications or recent research they had read.
To help give the employees more avenues to share what they had learned, the company started a private Ning page. At Ning.com, groups can create their own "social networks" where members can post video, audio and discussion threads, and use other types of media to interact with one another. "As a matter of fact, Ning itself was one of the first learnings when somebody asked, 'What else is out there for social networking?'" says McMullen. "Everyone in the company is now a member of it, and we use it as a central tool, and we've even since used it with clients."
Ning wasn't the only successful idea to grow out of the Apple for the Mind program. Other employees took the opportunity to learn more about mobile marketing. Their better understanding of this area developed into a successful pitch to one of Red Pepper's clients.
McMullen says that the natural impulse for a person who encounters something new is that they "turn their head down and stick to the daily grind" of the familiar, but by rewarding the learning of new work-related knowledge, he says, Red Pepper has its employees searching eagerly for something new to learn and teach.
McMullen says all this learning boosts the energy of the office, and that the company's low turnover rate reflects the workers' engagement with their work.
"It gives us a competitive edge," says McMullen. "There are things that we're doing that other agencies that we're competing against aren't even thinking about, because they're just so busy getting through their day. We'd rather bill a little bit less and learn a little bit more."
Back to the Land
Running a cutting-edge marketing campaign requires a vastly different skill set than managing the wine list of an Italian restaurant. Yet personal development and a constantly evolving knowledge of the work involved are both necessary for the greatest success in either field. Nice Ventures, a restaurant management company that owns and operates three full-service restaurants in San Francisco, has received accolades for its food, wine, ambience and service, including the James Beard Foundation award for best new restaurant in the country (for its Italian restaurant Rose Pistola). The company's success can be attributed in part to the efforts taken by its owner to develop the staff through exciting and educational travel.
The company sponsors about two trips a year for its staff, to culinary destinations where they can not only enjoy themselves, but take in the ambience and learn more about the cuisine and culture that attract their customers to the restaurant.
Last fall, Nice Ventures' Owner and CEO Laurie Thomas took the team from the company's pan-Mediterranean restaurant, Terzo, to New York, including the chef, his wife (a part-time chef at Terzo), the general manager and company CFO. The trip may have been an energizing and fun experience, but it was also a disciplined one, with a detailed itinerary that ensured the leadership would be seeing a variety of restaurants, from standard-bearers like Joel Robuchon to hole-in-the-wall tapas bars; to fit in all the eateries often meant two dinners a night.
Two years ago, the sous chef and general manager from Rose Pistola toured through the Mediterranean culinary capitals Nice, Venice and a number of smaller cities and towns, witnessing prosciutto-making and food preparing, and taking in the culture of the region.
"Every year we try to do it," says Thomas. "Once the restaurant is open, I think it's really important to get back over to the region where the inspiration for the restaurant comes from."
Thomas sees the trips as particularly valuable for staffers who are still fresh to the industry. The experiential education gained from actually eating the food or watching how the wine grapes are grown gives her staff members a knowledge base that infuses the work they do for years to come.
Thomas points to Simon Anixter, the wine director of Rose Pistola, who visited Italy for the first time earlier this year. An employee with Nice Ventures for two years, he had been overseeing the wine list of Rose's Cafe, the company's sidewalk bistro-bakery, and recently took over the more extensive wine list at Rose Pistola. After spending the first four days of his trip at Vinitaly, a major wine show, Simon and a friend toured the Piedmont and Liguria regions of Italy by car, with Nice Ventures paying his salary and covering expenses (Simon's friend paid for himself).
It was part incentive trip, part fact-finding mission. Thomas saw this as an opportunity to give the director experience with the region, visiting restaurants and local wine stores and taking in the area so he could return more knowledgeable and more likely to excel at his work. At the same time Anixter enjoyed a fabulous trip with a friend, acquiring memories that he will savor for years.
"It really invigorated him. You go over there and you realize, 'Wow, this is really what we're trying to do,' and 'Wow, there's a whole lot more to learn,'" says Thomas. "They come back and they're grateful for the opportunity, and they add a lot more value to the restaurant."
Upon returning, Anixter put together a full write-up of his experiences and what he's learned, and also discussed the trip with his coworkers at the restaurant.
This follows a point Liz Bywater makes about the value of this kind of personal development: Constant improvement is both an internal reward for the individual and an external reward for the entire culture of the organization.
"When there's an expectation that people are going to continue their learning and expanding their skill level, it will just become the organizational norm, and individuals will want to fall in with that," says Bywater.
home
search
email