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TaskRay’s Top Tips on Setting Up a Solid Incentive Program for Individual EmployeesTaskRay’s Top Tips on Setting Up a Solid Incentive Program for Individual Employees In this edition of our multi-part blog series on our “Structuring Incentives for Customer Success” eBook—co-written by TaskRay and Xactly, a platform for incentive management and predictive analytics—we are looking at how incentives best support individual achievement. 

Did you know incentives can drive up to a 30% increase in productivity? That’s why, when setting up an incentive plan for your internal teams, the majority of incentives should focus on individuals. Team rewards are great for recognition and can reduce turnover, but they can sometimes lead to a loss of motivational impact on individual behavior. TaskRay is sharing a list of our top tips for building solid individual incentives to help keep your employees engaged.  Individual incentives should be:

1. Tied to strategic objectives and aligned with key accountabilities of each role.

A successful incentive plan should reinforce individual performance and your business’s overall strategy, vision, and purpose. By aligning your incentive program with company goals, you’ll ensure that employees are working towards milestones that matter. How can you do this? Tailor each incentive to your employee’s role.

For example, set a sales target for a sales team member rather than a member of your marketing or HR team. Similarly, properly-designed incentives align the interests of your business and the roles of your employees towards productive and profitable goals. By creating incentives that reinforce each person’s essential role in your organization, you not only improve your business, but allow employees to share in the returns, and therefore take a stronger interest in the overall health of your company.

2. Trackable based on existing systems and measured at every organizational level of your business.

Have a clear plan that outlines communication frequency, along with vehicles—such as conversations with managers, an internal website, a company newsletter, etc.—that are already in place at your organization. Make sure all organizational levels (individual, small team, division, etc.) of your business are included so that everyone feels engaged and motivated. Providing incentives for just one level of business can ultimately harm performance goals.

3. Three or fewer in number.

Why the Rule of 3? Research by Xactly has shown that once you exceed three measures, overall performance against all measures starts to drop. This is in sync with research on multitasking or distracted driving—when we put too many inputs into our brains, our overall performance suffers.