Continuing the Continuing Case for Non-Cash Rewards

It’s been a great week for news singing the praises of offering non-cash rewards to your employees and in your incentive programs. Today, Incentive Magazine posted an article titled “IRF: Companies Using Rewards Post Higher Revenue Growth,” by Alex Palmer. The article gives the reader a rundown of the Incentive Research Foundation (IRF) and Aberdeen Research paper, titled “Rewards and Recognition as a Vital Compensation Component.”

According Palmer’s article, the IRF research concludes that, “Companies using non-cash rewards boast annual revenue growth more than three times those without non-cash rewards… While organizations offering non-cash rewards enjoyed a 9.6 percent revenue increase, those that did not only had an increase of three percent.”

The data contained in the IRF and Aberdeen report is the resulting outcome of an extensive survey of 291 companies released in late 2011. According to Palmer, “The survey categorized the companies into ‘best in class,’ ‘average’ and ‘laggard,’ looking at company performance and sales results, with 83 percent of best in class companies achieving annual quotas for the year compared with just 51 percent for average and 22 percent for laggard companies.”

As it turns out, the companies categorized as “best in class” were also more than twice as likely as other companies to provide non-cash incentives. In addition, “The research found that organizations that provide non-cash rewards enjoyed a 2.1-percent increase in revenue from one year to the next, while all others saw an 0.7 percent decrease,” as quoted in Palmer’s article. “Additionally, organizations that provide non-cash rewards enjoyed 34 percent shorter sales rep time-to-productivity and 10 percent shorter sales rep time-to-hire than those that do not use rewards.”

Read more from Incentive Mag here and check out the full IRF/Aberdeen report here.