Tooting Our Horn: Crain's FastFifty
You'll never guess which privately-owned company made this year's list of Crain's FastFifty companies this year. We'll give you a hint: starts with an "H"...ends with an "inda."
The New Loyalty Card
With mobile devices becoming virtually attached to most people, its role in loyalty programs will be on the rise as well. Already many companies are utilizing services like Yelp and Foursquare to attract new business. During a conversation I had last week, one person pulled out his smartphone and simply stated "This will be the new loyalty card."
Vacuums With Flare
It's definitely a cool new product in the world of vacuums but here's where things get interesting: What about an employee incentive in the form of a vacuum with a tattoo?
You Don't Need Permission To Say "Good Job"
Implementing an incentive program in your company to help improve employee engagement around the office? Awesome! Laying the groundwork for engagement begins before your program officially starts. Fostering a culture of recognition doesn't soley rely on your pending incentive program.
Reward With Experience, Not Just Tangibility
It's not really the product itself that motivates people to work harder. Sure merchandise does have a trophy value associated with it but when they receive the item, after the initial "Wow I earned something" goes away, the participant still needs some reason to still want that item. This is where the experience factor behind their new earned piece of merchandise comes into play.
Rewarding the Small Things Helps the Big Picture
One of the most effective ways to modify behaviors instead of just results is to make your program reward incremental achievements and focusing in on the small things that eventually create the big picture. When the smaller baby steps aren't being done correctly, the desired end result has a decreased chance of occurring. On Twitter last week, @Globoforce described this concept beautifully:
"Evaluating performance only once a year is the equivalent of letting students skip all the lectures and take the final."
New Waves of Digital Cameras: Merchandise Monday
A product line that has held its own well in the consumer electronics segment are digital cameras. According to Vision, the CEA magazine, digital cameras are found in roughly 81% of households today. The new selling point for these items have moved beyond just megapixels. In Vision, Chris Chute of IDC says "Vendors now realize that if they want to bring some growth back to the market they are goig to have to be more innovatice than they were in the past."