Corporate incentive travel is a great way to motivate and reward your valuable employees. Incentive travel can be group or individual, and the destination can be local or international. But every successful incentive travel program begins with careful planning.

The following are tips to help you plan a corporate travel program that fits your company’s culture, size and available budget:

* Determine your corporate incentive program goals. In specific terms, establish what the incentive program should accomplish. This could be an increase in sales, increase in production output or profits, or a reduction in defective products, sales returns or lost contracts. Be sure to assign a value to the improvement or reduction – a percentage, absolute number of units or contracts, or a dollar figure.

* Select the target group for the program. This could be management, employees, salespeople, or even customers.

* Discover what the target’s values, interests and preferences through paper surveys or interviews. Then browse our corporate incentives guide to match up preferences with available packages in your budget range.

* Considering past performance and employee behavior, establish reasonable tasks for your target group.

* Make sure you have a performance tracking system in place with a clear way to measure incentive program results.

* Brainstorm what obstacles may exist to the success of the incentive program. This could be current employee morale, organizational structure or market conditions.

* Determine whether the program will be managed internally or outsourced to an agency.

* Understand applicable tax implications. Travel can be taxable to recipients under certain conditions, and special tax forms may be required.

* When selecting a corporate incentive travel company, make sure it agrees to fulfill what is promised for your budgeted cost, and that you understand its cancellation policies.

* At the end of your program, survey winners and non-winners to determine whether the program was successful in meeting the objective.

Corporate Travel on a Smaller Budget

Even if you can’t afford to whisk your top performers away to Europe on a private jet, you can still reward your employees with incentive travel that they can enjoy.

If you can afford to send your team away on a teambuilding retreat, it doesn’t have to be far away. Campsites and resorts, even a day on a chartered boat can create a memorable experience. For individuals, it’s a better idea to send your recipient somewhere exotic enough to be memorable. If possible, allowing a spouse or children to accompany your employee is also a good idea.

An employee incentive getaway generally lasts from three nights to a full week, but weekend getaways can also work for smaller budgets. Accommodation could be in a bed and breakfast. Check travel and hotel websites often to catch their “travel best bets.”

Conclusion

For any corporate incentive travel program to accomplish its goal, you must determine how much you can spend, what options are available and what people want. And you must anticipate potential problems both within and without your organization. A clear system for measuring results will help you with future planning. Even on a smaller budget, corporate incentive travel can benefit your organization.

Corporate incentive gifts can be very effective whether you want to motivate employees or simply entice potential
clients to give you a few minutes of their time. The greatest challenge a company faces when exhibiting at a trade
show is often that there are so many other companies there too, and attendees only have a limited amount of time to
spend visiting each booth. That’s why offering incentive gifts can help your representatives convince them
to spend time at your booth. Likewise, incentive is a terrific motivational tool for employees that can improve
productivity at the office.

Corporate Incentive Gifts At The Office

Consider this: It’s crunch time. Your company’s sales are down for the year, and the year’s almost over. You know
things have become a little stagnant at the office, and the staff just doesn’t seem that fired up anymore. What do
you do?

Well, you could take your losses and hope for better sales next year. You could also fire the under-performing
employees, and hire new people. What about solving the real problem? The staff isn’t fired up? So come up with an
incentive that will fix that! Corporate incentive gifts can often boost morale in the office and motivate
employees to improve efficiency and perform better. You can always try your other options if incentives don’t work,
and this way you continue to work with the people who have the experience and know-how to give your company what it
needs.

Incentive gifts can be anything from a gift basket to a trip for two to a popular destination. Make sure you choose a corporate gift that is commensurate with the goals you want your employees to achieve. For small, easily achievable
goals, corporate gifts such as a restaurant gift certificate or a gift basket might be enough. Larger goals, like
helping the company hit a new high water mark in sales, deserve something more substantial such as a free trip or a
new stereo. Remember to be creative, and choose a gift that people will want to compete to win.

Corporate Incentive Gifts For Potential Customers

Another way corporate incentive gifts are commonly used is to attract potential clients. You’ve heard of raffles for
a color TV or a chance to win a free car if you listen to a time-share pitch, right? Well, the reason companies offer
incentives is they work! Incentive gifts can be anything a potential customer might want that will convince
them to give you a few minutes of their time. Be sure to select an incentive gift that is enticing enough to provoke
potential customers to listen to you, and remember that it’s just like advertising. If spending the money on
corporate incentive gifts can help you improve sales and increase your number of clients, than it’s money well spent.

A study of how a properly designed and executed Technician Incentive Program can reward your dealership with benefits beyond what you intended and how it is so important to the success of your service department

Benefits of a well designed plan

If you don’t have an effective Technician Incentive Plan in place you are missing out on one of the most powerful tools in your management arsenal to drive a high performance service department. Technician Incentive Plans, or TIPs for short, can be so powerful they can drive behavior far beyond what you might expect from an incentive plan.
And if you already have one, maybe it is time for a tune-up to make sure your TIP is driving the behavior you need to develop a profitable service department and accurately reflect your dealership’s current priorities and initiatives. Incentive plans have a shelf life and need to be kept fresh to remain effective. Just because it worked last year, or five years ago, doesn’t mean it will work this year or next.

Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of a well designed and executed TIP. First of all, and maybe the most important, is to reward your best technicians. Let’s face it, top technicians are in high demand and you can probably ill afford to lose one who already knows your product and your customers. Your TIP should reward top techs so that they will be “appreciated” and not be looking for jobs with your competition. If your TIP only does that one thing, it will probably be successful. But a good TIP will go far beyond that initiative.

One sign that we often see in a struggling service department is a high turnover of technicians. This affects the quality of work being performed and increases training costs and lowers technician efficiency. A good TIP will give techs a reason to stay, not just your top techs, but your mid-level techs as well. Retention will improve with an effective TIP.
When recruiting new technicians, a TIP can give you an edge that your competitors may not be able to offer. Highly qualified recruits, no matter what the experience level, are always impressed by and attracted to a company that offers an incentive for doing good work. And that is usually the type of new hire you want anyway.

For any service department to be profitable they must pay attention to and drive a high revenue recovery. That is they must be charging out a high percentage of their labor hours. A TIP can be a useful tool in driving a high revenue recovery. If an element of the TIP drives billable hours, you will find that non revenue hours will be minimized and thus your margins and profits will improve.

Another side benefit of a TIP is that it can provide an objective evaluation and measurement of your technicians. Too often when it comes time for a personnel review for techs we depend on subjective observations. Your Human Relations Manager will appreciate the objective nature of your technician review. A TIP, if consistently executed, will give you the data to evaluate technicians on the criteria that is being measured and monitored.

Training your technicians is absolutely vital in retaining techs and making sure that they are keeping up to date with the newest technology. If you don’t train them someone else might. Many TIPs make it easier to spot the areas that a particular technician might need more schooling. TIPs can provide the structure for evaluating the types of jobs that a technician usually does well at and the ones that he seems to struggle with. Those struggling areas need training and schooling and both the technician and department will reap the rewards if you invest in training for those areas. By determining your training needs based on known deficiencies you will be able to maximize the impact of your training dollars.

In short, TIP benefits are so numerous and potentially profitable that they should be considered by every management team. And a good TIP that is properly designed and consistently implemented will more than pay for itself, it will improve your service profitability. It should pay for itself many times over.

TIPs will promote Happier Technicians and Happier Technicians will result in Happier Customers. Happier Customers will drive service revenues and profits.

Elements of an effective plan

The most important element of any incentive program, especially one for technicians is to have 100% support and buy-in by all levels of dealership management, even at the very top. If there is any doubt about this support it is unlikely that the program will be long-lived and successful. There will definitely be times that the plan will be challenged and tested. It will be those times that this upper level support will ensure the TIP is kept intact and becomes an established program at your dealership.

Technician Incentive Plans can take the form and shape of virtually any element of the dealership that is important to management. They will promote and encourage any behavior you desire to focus on, or any combination of behaviors. What are your departmental weaknesses, your opportunities to improve? Is it Revenue Recovery? Gross Margin? Revenue? Training? Safety? Cleanliness? Teamwork and co-operation? Quality of work? An effective TIP can promote any of these and many more. But it won’t and shouldn’t do them all.

A TIP should be focused and not try to cover everything or it will not be effective. Pick no more than three areas to focus on; more will start to dilute the program. Keep people focused on these areas which will have the greatest impact. Remember, you can always change the program in the future to reflect other priorities as they become important.
No two TIPs are likely to be the same; they must reflect the differences and variations in each and every dealership. What works at one dealership may not be affective at all in another; in fact it could be counter-productive. And what works this year, may not be the right program next year. Personnel, management, the economy and goals all change on a regular basis.

Keep your TIP simple. If it is hard to understand, hard to explain or difficult to monitor, its chance of success is doubtful. If your mid level managers and technicians don’t have a full understanding and confident that it will be administered fairly and consistently it will not drive the behavior you desire. And if you have to run complicated programs or design spreadsheets that need massive input just to monitor your TIP, you are adding unnecessary burden to your staff. They probably are already busy and won’t see this as a benefit to them. By keeping it simple you have a greater chance of success. Try to use the existing data and programs from your business system if at all possible.

The execution of your TIP is critical to its eventual success. Fairness and consistency are a must. If a technician, in fact any employee, thinks that the data being collected is not accurate they will quickly loose interest in your program and the damage can be long lasting. Keep it as visible as you are comfortable with; open communication builds trust and confidence. You don’t want to take a chance that the results can be manipulated.
No matter how hard you try to design the program to be fair and drive good behavior there will be those who will try to “beat the system”. Consider the consequences of your TIP in advance. First of all try to anticipate these eventualities and keep them at a minimum. And secondly, be prepared to face them when they occur. Do not let the effectiveness of the whole program to be jeopardized by the few.

The best TIPs reward individuals, not groups. If you are trying to motivate and reward your best employees does it make sense to share the rewards with all equally. The argument can be made that a program can encourage team work, and if that is the goal, a portion of the reward can go to the group, but it should not be exclusive. A TIP should reward exceptional behavior and exceptional employees.

Some of the many areas you can measure and reward are: revenue recovery, re-do times, training levels, technician efficiency, customer satisfaction index, safety compliance and records, billable hours, response times, upsales and others as well. Just make sure the information you are gathering is easy to gather and is accurate.

If your business system does not support segmentation and your vendor does not support a standardized labor times, you might be able to get the necessary information from payroll and accounting to implement your TIP.

And when it is all working and you are having some successes make sure you celebrate them. Your TIP has achieved its goals and now it is time to enjoy it and be happy about the technicians who have achieved their goals. Share the good news.

After procuring and training employees, maintaining and utilizing them effectively in the organization is the concern of management and personnel administration. In doing this, both the employee and management should be satisfied. The management cannot satisfy and utilize the skill of an employee effectively by keeping him in the same job that he was originally hired for. The employee has an urge to improve and move up in the organization. The services and loyalty of an employee are to be rewarded reasonably. The higher positions in the organization have to be filled from within by moving employees from one job to another. Promotions and transfers meet this.

Promotion can be defined as the upward reassignment of an individual in an organizations hierarchy, accompanied by increased responsibilities, enhanced status and usually increased income. Also, some experts define promotion as the advancement of an employee to a better job in terms of greater responsibilities, more prestige or status, greater skill and an increased rate of pay or salary. In corporate terms, better hours or better location or working conditions may also characterize the “better job” that an employee seeks, but if the job does not involve greater skill or responsibilities and higher pay, it should not be considered a promotion.

The term upgrading refers to a practice closely related to promotion. In fact, it amounts to a small- scale advance in status. Upgrading is the movement of an employee to a more responsible job within the same occupational unit and with a corresponding increase in pay. For example, in the claims department of an insurance company a junior approver moves up to the position of approver. Both upgrading and promotion are ways of recognizing and developing the abilities of employees within the organization, instead of filling positions from outside. However, for certain highly skilled or professional jobs, it is often necessary to recruit from outside.

What have sickness, recuperation, rest, mindset, humour, energy and diet got to do with companies? These are terms applicable in physical wellness but they are equally relevant in the context of corporate wellness.

Turnaround has become increasingly important, given the financial crisis that hit Asia in 1997, the financial scandals plaguing the Western corporate giants and the emergence of the economies in China and India. In some instances, the businesses appear relatively healthy, though they are experiencing declining market share, increasing costs, losing competitiveness and plummeting revenues. Hence, a major crisis is brewing and will hit any time when the interest rate increases or the economy goes into recession.

Unfortunately, most troubled companies do not survive the turbulence in the marketplace. The average life expectancy of a multinational company is about 40 to 50 years. Many companies die prematurely. Some companies experience poor health with office politics, egos and bureaucracy stifling human creativity, enthusiasm and commitment. Many of these ailing companies suffer from a toxic corporate climate which urgently need to be detoxified, while others are genetically flawed and are thus unable to handle changes in
the marketplace.

For centuries, we have been searching for the elixir of longevity. Today, the wellness and health industry worldwide is the one of the fastest growing businesses, and it is expected to grow exponentially to one trillion dollars in a few years’ time. Essentially, the role of the doctor should be one of promoting wellness instead of merely concentrating on curing the patient after he is inflicted with an ailment.

In a similar vein, companies are also seeking the same goal, that is corporate wellness. Corporate wellness is becoming one of the greatest and most powerful terms of the corporate dictionary. Unfortunately, it is also one of the most misunderstood. “Corporate wellness” is not merely referring to physical and mental health programs for the corporate executives.

The term “corporate wellness” depicts the desired state of excellent corporate physical and mental health. And it should be an actively sought-after goal.

“Corporate wellness” is the total well being and complete integration of body, mind and spirit – the realization that everything the corporate does, its strategy, leadership, mindset, culture, values has an effect on its well being. The term “corporate wellness” is used in this context to include the use of modern and alternative medicine.

Modern or Western medicine seeks to treat the symptoms such as poor productivity. The remedy is surgery or downsizing. Alternative or Eastern medicine treats the root cause of the corporate woes. The cause of the poor productivity is perhaps due to its dysfunctional corporate culture. Beyond disease-free medicines, Corporate wellness also seeks for new excellent levels of corporate health such as how to improve the attitude, mindset and soul of the company.

Imagine a company with happy, healthy employees, who handle the daily stresses of their job with ease and equanimity. Many studies have shown a link between job satisfaction and health, and some of the signs that your organisation is suffering are: sickness, absence, employee turnover, little socialisation between employees, employees lunching at their desk (and you thought this meant they had high work ethics), no atmosphere, and low morale. (C. Cooper, 2006)

The key to better employee job satisfaction and a happier, healthier workplace is by leading people and leading your organisation in a way that promotes qualities of confidence, self esteem and health and proves to your employees that you have their interests as a part of your bottom line. Did you know that by utilising a Corporate Wellness program in your company you can expect not only better employee morale but you will have a higher performing organization and greater results.

It is a cause and effect solution in how human capital and other seemingly intangible assets are linked to create a process, that enhances customer and financial results. Can you afford not to bring in a Corporate Wellness Program and still expect your company to thrive?

Speak to any business manager and the answer is the same: retention is a key issue that effect business success. “Companies often invest heavily in recruitment and development, yet many aren’t taking the necessary steps to protect and retain that investment,” states a top business coach when broached on the subject. It is a well proven fact that businesses large and small benefit on multiple fronts when they introduce a Corporate health and fitness program into their workplace. Positive outcomes of employee and managerial health and fitness solution are:

• Reducing absenteeism and related costs
• Staff recruitment and retention
• Improving staff morale, motivation and productivity
• Lowering the risk of stress and musculoskeletal related litigation
• Can help as an integral part of your health and safety policy
• Helping employees cope with stress related problems
• Provide early intervention with diagnostic scanning

More and more managers are waking up to the benefits of workplace well being. It’s clear that if we take healthy people and place them in an unhealthy environment – no matter what degree of hardiness and resilience they may have to begin with – the unhealthy environment will create unhealthy individuals. Is that how you sometimes feel? You arrived there full of energy and now you are stressed up to the max… or perhaps just the thought of going into work makes you feel mentally or even physically ill?

The symptoms are often difficult to treat and easily misdiagnosed because they hide behind other primary disorders such as… chronic absenteeism, nagging colds and flu, mental and physical illness as well as a lingering sense of dissatisfaction around the workplace. More often now we here reports of employees suing their company for putting them under stress. In one extreme case a Telstra employee committed suicide due to work related pressures… Makes you cringe, doesn’t it?

Statistics reveal that the costs associated with loss of workplace well being can create a myriad of problems i.e. the occasional mental health day, or “sicky”, is more often than not used to address family responsibility, social outings, friends associations, etc. Ultimately faced with mounting pressure, some employees simply just leave, at more often than not inconvenient times, leaving a big mess for some other unfortunate employee to clean up.

A recent survey of 1,100 Australians found that 25% of workers consider themselves to be desk potatoes, while 21% are tied to their desks for six to eight hours without a chance to stretch their legs. The survey, conducted by recruitment firm Talent2, also found that 47% of workers believe employers have an obligation to encourage and even subsidise fitness at work. In 2003, 38 per cent of AMP’s employees participated in a health promotion activity. Of these, 98% found it beneficial and 68% were inspired to make a lifestyle change.

Popular programs can include: massage, yoga, pilates, nutrition, weight loss, smoking cessation, and exercise and can also include boot camps of various types to suit your organization. These program can build team cohesiveness, greater job satisfaction, and have wellness benefits that will eventuate in greater success for the entire company.

‘balancenoosa’ specialise in the preparation and administration of Corporate Massage, Pilates, Yoga and Corporate Fitness Programs. We are flexible with booking arrangements. We prefer to visit your premises and determine the optimal format for your session. We gauge factors such as the space available, lighting, number of participants and their skill level. Reward an entire team with pilates and massage, or energise a team with a fitness program and yoga. Perhaps a morning stretch class would do the trick?

One of our uniquely tailored ‘balancenoosa’ Corporate Wellness solutions will assist employees in dealing with the situation at hand i.e. the work load may remain the same, they will have more control of their emotions feelings and general well being. It’s the Supervisors or Manages job to make the work load manageable. It’s our job to ensure the people doing the job have a healthy mind set and the ability to complete the work and at the same time not becoming burnt out.

When an employee is sick or injured, many times it has a direct affect on an employer’s cost of health care, disability, worker’s compensation, increased absenteeism, lower productivity, reduced safety and morale.The object of an employee incentive wellness program is to improve the health of a company’s workers and to improve its productivity. This type of program helps ensure consistency with an employer’s long-term strategy on health care management. It aids in forming the framework for effective wellness, health improvement and care management programs.

Wellness incentive programs need close coordination by a company’s human resource department; otherwise these programs are less effective. If there is no coordination or follow-up, it is difficult to measure outcomes and performance. The best incentive programs work on a collaborative approach between the health management company and the employer. The goal is to find cost-effective solutions to meet budget needs and reinforce them by performance-based service guarantees. The bottom line is the employer wants to see reduced health care spending and show a return on the health management investment, as well as improvement in the health of employees.

Investing in a corporate workplace wellness program is a good way to improve overall employee morale as well as reduce employee turnover and overall health care costs. By initiating a workplace wellness program in your organization you create a positive, energetic and productive workplace that provides meaningful gains for your business.

Components of a wellness incentive program include preventive health screenings, health fairs, health risk assessments, wellness programs (weight reduction and exercise), Education, newsletters, employee wellness surveys, incentive strategies and employee communications.