Global incentives wont work
Global incentives wont work - Incentive Business February/March 2006
I think that Alexander Pope got it absolutely right when he said that a little learning was a dangerous thing. My own smaller pearl of wisdom is that just because you can do something, it does not follow that you should.
In our different ways, Pope and I make a very good case for caution when it comes to operating international or worldwide incentive programmes. The logic of a unified approach is clearly persuasive, the economies are obviously attractive and the technology is readily available, so what stops anyone anywhere offering a simple, global solution?
My answer is that global solutions are actually not simple, but complex. Whilst people everywhere will respond in much the same way to opportunities of earning rewards, they may have quite different views as to what they actually want to receive. Taking an extreme case to prove my point, the gold watch and the carriage clock have become almost iconic symbols of employee loyalty in Europe and the USA. Not so in China, where they connote death and burial. So any employer who offered timepieces to his worldwide staff would unintentionally be winding them up in quite different ways. Time for a little more learning, Mr Pope?
Global media should not necessarily entail global messages. You need not tell everyone the same story just because it is possible (or convenient) to do so: it should also be appropriate. The real benefit of the Internet and other contemporary tools is their flexibility, and their capacity to deliver different messages to different audiences simply by effective central controls over access and navigation. Thus the company integrity and its brand values remain intact, but local sensitivities are not compromised. The Chinese need never think that we work loyal employees to death, and we need never wonder what makes them tick.