I've posted before about the fact that the first year is a learning year with employee incentive plans, and about the importance of actively managing, reviewing and updating incentive plans to ensure that they stay relevant and effective. An important facet of active plan management is evaluation, and a great time (but hopefully not the last time) to evaluate your incentive plan is at the end of the first year (after payouts, if any, have been made).
I also endorse involving plan participants - employees - in the plan evaluation process. I spent a morning last week at a client organization where we have completed the first year of an employee incentive plan and are preparing to roll out version 2.0 (or is it 1.2?). During this meeting, we met with a large group of participating employees for the purpose of reflecting on how the first year of the plan had gone. We formed smaller groups out of the larger one, and asked each group to discuss and then select their top responses to a couple of questions, like:
What positives did the incentive plan produce this past year?
How could the plan be improved to work better for employees and the company?
It was a terrific session where we received a lot of interesting and insightful comments from employees. Human Resources and the top management team are now working to assess the input to determine whether and where changes to the plan are appropriate. Not surprisingly, employee input was more focused on the communication around the plan than on plan design itself - which makes good sense since most of the innovation and improvement in incentive plans takes place in the communication and implementation arena.
While the responsibility for plan evaluation and management typically resides with Human Resources and leadership, the only way to discover how the plan is really operating at the ground level is to speak with the participants themselves.
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