All Star Incentive Marketing » Brian Galonek

Forbes Article About the Coming Corporate Spring

Brian Galonek — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 21:07:32 +0000

The implications of this Forbes article are far ranging but from the standpoint of Employee Engagement the message is clear. Companies that ignore the need to interact with their employees on a higher level than was normal in decades past risk finding themselves the victim of destructive undercurrents at the hands of their own staff.

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Employee Engagement is the Key to Safety Success

Brian Galonek — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 16:15:34 +0000

In an article I recently wrote for Occupational Health & Safety I detail the importance of employee engagement as a tactic towards improving safety. The entire article can be seen by clicking on This Link.

In the article I also cover the following topics:

The need to brand and communicate your program
The keys to building a successful recognition/rewards program
The importance of culture and structure
The mistakes to avoid

1. Using cash
2. Using high value awards
3. Introducing the element of chance
4. Rewarding groups for group behaviors

Employee Engagement is the Key to Safety Improvement

Brian Galonek — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 15:20:18 +0000

The importance of employee engagement as it relates to safety is addressed in a brief article titled “Turn Apathy into Engagement” in the February 2011 issue of Industrial Safety & Hygiene News. The article succinctly calls out several of the connection points. I have pasted the best paragraph in the article below with the link to the full article below that.

“Most companies have been so focused on observations, targets, policies and lagging indicators such as OSHA recordable rates and lost-time metrics that they’ve lost a handle on the very safety culture that keeps productivity high and workers alive and healthy. The engagement process in safety and health is best accomplished through a serious culture improvement initiative and navigated through a safety culture management system.”

Employee Engagement is Key to Safety Improvement

Unique and Rewarding

Brian Galonek — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 21:02:11 +0000

Additional comment on Dan Pink’s presentation http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html. A follow up to my posting on 10/15.

In one example provided by Dan Pink in his presentation about motivational techniques he provides an example of how an obscure Australian software company occasionally gave their employees one day to work on anything they wanted to. He likened this to a Google policy that let’s their employees spend 20% of their time working on anything they want and he cited the incredibly beneficial results gained by both companies as a result of providing employees this freedom to think and innovate on their own. Remarkably his point was that that these workers were successful because they were not offered an incentive or reward. Previous to these examples he explained how offering them awards would focus their attention and limit their ability to use the right side of their brains and innovate. I say his conclusions are remarkable because offering employees paid time to stop performing their normal jobs and think outside the box to come up with radically different ideas is by definition an award.

His thinning here is so backwards its difficult to see where he went off the tracks. Perhaps he assumes every award must take the shape of a toaster, but clearly he missed the point. The Google policy as I see it seems to boil down to”…come to work and do your assigned job 80% of the time and we will reward you by giving you the other 20% of your time at work to do whatever you want to innovate for the company…”. Great example of a unique and effective motivational incentive program, thanks Dan.

Daniel Pink’s Unrewarding Presentation

Brian Galonek — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 21:56:09 +0000

Periodically the engagement industry (also known as the incentive industry, motivation industry, premium industry, etc.) faces challenges from outside sources. These sources typically are academics/authors many of whom do a fair amount of public speaking to promote their work. While it would not be fair to make the blanket claim that their assertions are baseless it would be accurate in the vast majority of situations to say that those claims are at best misleading and at worst harmful.

Case in point, most recently Daniel Pink, author, public speaker and former Al Gore speech writer, made a presentation at a TED (Technology Entertainment Design) event in which he stated that motivational techniques:

dull thinking
block creativity
do harm
only work for simple tasks

He further stated that these findings were “fact” and then went on to cite some extremely random samples. I should mention that he confessed at the beginning of his presentation that he did terrible in law school, finishing at or near the bottom of his class. Based on his shoddy extrapolations and conclusions I can see why. I know that seminar speakers need to stir up their audiences to keep things lively, and telling business leaders that they have everything backwards is one way to accomplish this, but it is dangerous to present opinions as facts and then advise people how to run their businesses.

I’ll leave it there for now but will post specific challenges to his assertions in the near future. Below is the link to his presentation if you would like to see it for yourself. I am only supplying this link and commenting on this poor presentation because we in the engagement industry face these types of baseless challenges from time to time and it is important that collectively we are able to beat them down with substantive responses.

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html