It’s that time of year when you start planning for next year’s incentive programs. The new year starts and your first incentive program is launched to motivate your team. It starts with a big bang and is very successful. However the year is progressing, your schedule is building up, the next program is delayed and left for a couple of months. Then it’s time again to motivate the team and another program is launch with a big bang and not as successful as other priorities have arisen. Then all of a sudden it’s the end of the year, targets need to be met and another big bang incentive program is launched. Get the picture.

The key to a successful incentive approach is making motivation a habit. Regular, ongoing rewards and communications are more effective than once-in-a-while rewards and communication. Use a series of small steps to build and maintain employee motivation.

With a small amount of initial discipline, you can create the habit that requires little effort to maintain. It’s sort of like going to the gym after doing it for awhile, it becomes routine; it becomes a habit.

Here are some tips for creating the habit and making it stick:

Stay Consistent. The more consistent you are, the easier it will be to stick. Schedule a monthly planning meeting, a weekly action meeting and daily activities to focus on. When cues like time of day, place and circumstances are the same in each case it is easier to stick.

Remind Yourself. After a couple of weeks into your commitment it can be easy to forget. Place reminders to execute your habit each day or you might miss a few days. If you miss the action it defeats the purpose of setting a habit to begin with.

Keep it Simple. Chose simple goals to start, even if they are not impressive. Once you’ve succeeded at achieving the simple ones, reward yourself and go on to achieve more elaborate goals.

Start Small. Trying to motivate the whole team all at once isn’t a good way to build the habit. For example you can start with writing 5 handwritten notes thanking employees for their past and current performance or speak with 5 employees and ask them if there is anything they think can be done better.

How will you be approaching your incentive strategy for 2008?

Often when we are dealing with new clients they are keen to know ratio of their budget should be spent on rewards, administration and communication.  They have some idea that it is a formula and if they get the ratio right they will have a successful program.  This assumption is based on their research about incentives programs ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’.

We try to get customers to focus on their objectives rather than following the formula. Incentive Intelligence has a great post “Old Saws Are Usually Dull” that covers this perfectly.