Multitasking in today’s world is practically unavoidable. But while most of us would be inclined to pat ourselves on the back for our ability to text, email, and conduct an over-the-phone business meeting all at the same time, a torrent of recent research suggests that this can lead us to overextend ourselves and effectively kill our overall efficiency and productivity.
Now, if you think about it, this idea can easily be adapted to the world of performance incentives, where clients often need to reach and motivate a diverse audience across multiple regions and even among multiple in-house divisions or departments. In dealing with such a complex matrix of occupational responsibilities, individual psychologies, and inter-organizational needs, it’s no wonder that many incentive programs struggle to seamlessly accommodate the various demands that are placed on them. Often they simply don’t have the time or the manpower to integrate all of these complicated functions efficiently, and so their scope is inevitably reduced to limit the “drag” of lost, or unrealized ROI. For example, a standard program might have difficulty dealing with any of the following issues:
- You’re running five different incentive campaigns among your distributor network, and you want to promote each program separately, or have different start/end dates. Typically, if this is the case, you would need to manually calibrate each individual program through its own separate portal, and then continually monitor each one separately as it progresses. Unless you were exceptionally well-organized, this task would be prohibitively complex and time-consuming.
- You want to segment your target audience by region, and allow different regions to participate in some programs, but not others. Again, this would need to be accomplished one program at a time, and would leave far more room for human error to occur. Plus, if someone were to change their name or job, or some other human resource issue were to crop up, this would have to be addressed for each individual program that the participant was involved in.
- Certain SKUs aren’t selling as well, and you want to adjust the point value of certain SKUs to better reflect their value. With some program portals, removing or altering particular SKUs might not even be possible—and if it is, the difficulties of doing so might simply outweigh the benefits. This could translate into unrealized sales, and not incentivizing accurately based on real market-driven conditions (i.e., payout too high on one SKU, and not high enough on another).
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These are problems that aren’t easily solved. But that doesn’t mean they’re unsolvable. When faced with challenges such as these, you need to quit trying to do the multitasking yourself, and instead, look for a better multitasking tool, one that can help you organize and operate all of your initiatives through a single online management and execution portal. Not only will you save yourself and your organization tremendous time and effort, you’ll also find yourself gaining ROI in places you never would have expected.
