Posts from the ‘Articles’ Category
Are you using gift cards as non-cash incentives within your organization? You may think that the recipients of these cards would be more likely to actually use them if provided more time in which to do so. However studies have shown that a faster expering gift card is more likely to be used. One such [...]
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Compensation for a job well done can take on many meanings. To most of us, it’s simply a means to an end. We need to pay the bills and support our families. Our rate of pay is necessary to maintain our lifestyle. Most of us correlate our lifestyle and status to our income. And most [...]
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Any frequent coffee user can confidently describe their local Starbucks. Coffee, pastries, lattes and cappuccinos are all served up by happy, smiling employees shouting through the buzz of machines and blaring background acoustics (available on iTunes). Every item on the overpriced menu and every collectible on display seems to be handpicked. Not surprisingly, it is [...]
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Santa’s View on Pay for Performance By Jason Kearns, Canidium, and Scott Barton, NewSigma It’s the most highly anticipated time of the year: year end, holidays, bonuses and token gifts. This year, many cash-hording companies will open their purse strings to say thanks to their overworked masses. It takes the form of monetary bonus, gift [...]
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Last month while attending a World at Work conference I heard an alarming confession. During one of the sessions on vendor evaluation, a customer confessed that they didn’t focus on hard dollar ROI because they didn’t feel the system would ever be able to provide ROI based on hard dollar costs. The vendor doing the [...]
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Recently portions of the Health Care Reform bill went into act. We are all trying to grasp how it will affect us individually and as a nation, but in our industry how will it affect SPM (sales performance management) systems and compensation as a whole? After researching regulation changes, increased premiums, and some policy options [...]
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Canidium and partner Merced Systems will host a webinar at noon Eastern / 9:00 A.M. Pacific on Tuesday, May 11th. The key speakers will be Canidium Principal Consultant (and frequent Alpha Comp contributor), Jason Kearns, and Merced’s VP of Business Consulting, Matthew Katz. Kearns and Katz will be discussing the classic progression of incentive compensation [...]
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Heard an interesting piece on NPR this evening (transcript here). One of the participants, Lisa Ordonez, a management professor at the University of Arizona was citing some examples of what she calls “Goals Gone Wild.” Here is what Ordonez had to say about a corporate goal of GM’s to achieve 29 percent market share: And [...]
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In recent years the “Christmas Bonus” has been a species in decline. Once an American staple, it went out of favor for a couple of reasons. First, you couldn’t call it the Christmas Bonus anymore if you wanted to be politically correct. And unfortunately, “Year End Bonus” or “Holiday Bonus” just doesn’t have the same [...]
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One aspect of compensation that has always fascinated me is the psychology of motivating people to do what you want. People are motivated by a lot of different things and there’s a lot of literature around that. However, the common belief is that money is number one and always will be, especially amongst sales people. [...]
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