I already own an iPod

I was stuck for a topic for this week's blog and so I asked my colleague Meena for some inspiration. She told me that I should write about how nice she is. Meena is nice, but frankly I'm not sure how such information would be that useful to you, but at least she feels pretty good about herself right now. (I'd also like to place a side bet that certain other people in my team are now nagging me about their own mentions too, but we'll save those for another week).

This week I want to talk about staff incentives - those little gifts you give to your team to thank them for a job well done and to spur them on to even greater things in exchange for even greater gifts.

Typically, these work amongst sales people, mostly because their efforts are easy to quantify but mainly because we're all a bunch of mercenary gits who would happily put our own grandmothers on eBay given half the chance.

I met with a client this week who was looking to give high end gadgets to people once they crossed certain sales thresholds. They spoke of DVD players, iPods and so on. My immediate response was that anyone capable of selling at the level they were talking about probably already owns an iPod, several DVD players, a wide screen TV, a toaster, a cuddly toy.............

A truly effective incentive needs to be something that they would not go out and get for themselves. It wants to be something that they are excited about having, not least because it will make their colleagues so jealous that they will work just as hard in order to get one for themselves. You see the truth behind an incentive is that it is not really saying "thanks" for a job well done. It's really saying "please" do a really good job for your company.

So are your incentives really working for you, or are you just getting rid of the stuff that was left over from last Christmas? Naturally we can help, so let's get together and talk about how you incentivise your staff. Remember, it's not just about finding the right gift - it's about presenting it in the right way.

Once again, I'd like to thank Meena for being nice.