Today’s post is a guest post by Paul Hebert.  Paul is the Managing Director of I2I – a marketing and incentive design consultancy.  I2I designs new, or audits existing motivation, incentive and reward programs to increase their effectiveness and reduce your costs. Through the use of proven motivational theory, behavioral economics and social psychology I2I can help drive extraordinary company performance.  In addition, I2I assists clients leverage social networks and other marketing tactics to influence behaviors in targeted audiences.  Paul presented at the EEA Networking Expo this past June on how social networks can be used to engage audiences.

Engagement isn’t one-way – it’s not push.

Engagement – whether we’re talking business to business or business to consumer or even consumer to consumer – requires a dialogue. So in effect, any engagement initiative has to have a dialogue as part of the equation or it is simply more promotional pabulum.

It’s Now or Never

Questions abound when it comes to social media – or social networking – or whatever name you want to give the trend of allowing users to interact and engage around your product or service. I like to think of social media as the stuff you generate – and social networks as the place your stuff (and the conversations) live. What this means is that your blog post is “media” – your youtube video is media. What others do with this stuff on youtube and in the comments on your blog is the network in action. As a professional working to drive engagement you need to understand these new terms and tools in order to achieve your business objectives.

Why Now?

It’s important now because the wave is gathering steam. While there may only be a small percentage of your audience (whether consumer, business or current clients) on these networks and contributing their own content and opinions – the numbers are growing and within a few years it will be majority. You need to begin developing your strategy now so when it is the predominate way in which engagement occurs, you’ve already worked the bugs out of your process.

Gen Y is growing. In 8 years they will be more than 50% of the workforce. Currently 96% of Gen Y is active on social networks. Gen Y doesn’t use email. Boston College stopped assigning email addresses to incoming Freshman. 80% of businesses are using Linkedin for finding employees and 91% of B2B businesses are using social networking tools to research and buy services and products.

This is not going away and it’s only going to get bigger.

Babies and Bathwater

Understanding these tools is important – but it isn’t the panacea for business success. Don’t abandon your current marketing plan and go full-metal social.

Social media is just one more layer in an overall marketing strategy. It doesn’t take the place of other marketing tactics but it can enhance the ones you’re currently using. By leveraging social networks you can expand the impact of your white papers. You can reach more, and different, audiences with your information and your opinion. As a marketer you need to look at your marketing assets and decide how they can be repurposed for networks – and how you can add value to the audiences that use those networks.

Remember – it’s not about promotion – it’s about engaging conversations.

At the end of the day – what you say about you is less important and less influential than what others say about you. Spend time finding ways to engage your audience and give them a voice in your business and you’ll increase your reach and your relevance.  Below is our presentation slide deck from the EEA Networking Expo this past June.  It was one of four presentations given in a breakout focused on how best to communicate with your audience for engagement.

Presentation from EEA Networking Event from Slideshare

Today’s post is a guest post by Sue Oliver, President and founder of Katana Partners.  Katana Partners are expert at working with senior level executives, teams, employees, and workforce leaders to create new levels of organizational success. We focus on practical and measurable solutions that help you solve business problems and increase engagement, promote more effective leaders, and improve organizational performance.  Prior to launching Katana Partners in early 2009, Sue held key executive positions with retail and aviation industry leaders, including former Senior Vice President, People for Wal-Mart Stores, U.S. and CHRO for American Airlines, Inc. Katana Partners is a 100% woman-owned business.  Sue presented at the EEA Networking Event back in June of 2010.  Full presentation is embedded at end of post.

Employees use the same filters when thinking about their own attitude, their company, their leadership and their job.

The positive news is there are new, but proven business tools and strategies that can provide business leaders with the workforce information they need. They involve leveraging analytics to understand workforce attitudes, behaviors and performance.

Long known in the marketing arena – consumers don’t think or act alike and those that do think alike apply similar attitude and behavior patterns to their purchasing decisions. Marketing departments respond to these different perspectives with targeted programs to optimize revenue and customer loyalty.  And example is the study Amazon.com did during the recent Presidential election cycle.

Amazon wanted to understand whether a buyer who bought a book with a liberal orientation, would be more likely to buy a book to balance their perspective, or buy another book that reinforced their orientation? The answer was overwhelming. Buyers purchased a book with a similar orientation to their initial purchase.

Employees are no different.

Employees think and perform differently based on their perspectives.

What Leaders Want – What Employees Think

Even in the face of the worst economic downturn in 75 years, business leader expectations are still quite high.  Each leader wants their company to emerge stronger and more competitive.  They want the quality and commitment of their workforce to be better than their competition.

Business leaders are focused on:

• Retaining and Engaging Top Talent
• Promoting High Levels of Workforce Performance at Reduced Cost
• Strengthening Leadership Capability to Lead and Engage Employees
• Maintaining a Highly Engaged Workforce

So how do leaders accomplish this? – Simple:

A company armed with data rich insights into their employees’ perspectives is able to manage the relationship systematically in the same way that companies manage their customer relationships

But…

In my experience, organizations do not have the key workforce data that really matters to be strategic in identifying what needs to be done to build talent, engagement, performance and achieve improved business results.

Employee Attitude Profiles…

Most companies do engagement surveys and read and chart the results.  But how can we learn more – and apply the data more effectively?

We need to create employee attitude and behavior profiles.  We do this by conducting a follow up segmentation analysis on the employee responses to the survey. Segmentation analysis looks for patterns of attitudes and behavior – or “perspectives” – among the survey responses.

Generally, 4 or 5 segments capture the diversity of employee attitudes and behaviors within most companies, ranging from most supportive of company leadership and direction to least supportive. Cheerleaders and Casual Fans are the top two most supportive segments, followed by a middle group of Fair Weather Fans, followed by two negative bottom groups, Naysayers and Tuned Out.

Imagine being able to see a workforce report that, at a glance, provided you information about your workforce that could be actioned to improve:

• Work Environment Issues
• Leadership
• Engagement
• Support for Company Leadership and Direction
• Performance
• Business Results

Attitude segment information about your employees can be used to create focused strategies and goals to improve engagement and business performance.

For leaders this is the opportunity to confront…

• What it’s like to work on their team?
• What did the data tell you that was a surprise?
• Where are the gaps between your data and your goals?
• Potential root causes?
• Understanding the impact of your leadership?

It is time employee insights were accorded the same treatment as voters and consumers. These business tools are well established and known to be strategically effective.  These tools and approaches allow you to use your resources wisely and intervene and address issues in a targeted, strategic way.

Ensuring that workplace issues are addressed and segment profiles are improved will increase leadership effectiveness, enhance the work environment and foster high levels of engagement and commitment to stay.

The power of analytics to enable engagement is compelling.

It’s what’s missing in organizations today.

The following is a guest post from Sandi Daniel, President and CEO, FIRE Light Group.  Sandi was a presenter at the 2010 EEA Networking Event in June 2010 and provides some perspective here, along with a link to her slides from her presentation (see end of post.)  FIRE Light Group is a full service incentive marketing company focused on helping organizations motivate their workforce, distributors and/or customers.

A few months ago I was sorting through some old files that I had stuffed away from when I was a Marketing Director for a large Insurance firm.  I used to do a great deal of public speaking on the subject of changing demographics and how we need to tailor our message to market to various audiences.  I stumbled across a print out of an old email that referenced an article dated April 1998.  In the email it stated that… “internet commerce should top $300 billion by 2002”.

This got me thinking…..what did Internet Commerce actually reach in 2002?  Well I googled around for a bit and finally uncovered that it actually hit 2.929 TRILLION (and in 2009 it was over six trillion). I also looked into internet numbers while I was at it and surprisingly found that internet devices were around 1,000 in number in 1984 and moved to 1 million in 1992 and then to one billion in 2008.  What does all of this mean?  It means that the only thing about our changing world we can predict is that the RATE of change is moving at exponential speed!

When asked to address the role of meetings in today’s environment at the EEA Networking event this past June, I gave some thought to where we have been and where we are headed.

Remember the days of registering for a conference by mail or maybe even fax?  Remember overhead projectors and transparencies?  Your worst technology nightmare was to have a light bulb burn out during your presentation rendering your slides useless.  Then we graduated to the overhead LCD projector that sat on top of the overhead so you could show your computer screen on the stand up screen at the front of the room.  Then the handouts for the session, usually in a big bulky 3-ring binder which had to be shipped out in advance, or worse yet, photocopied and assembled on-site at the business center.  This not only ate up staff time but was expensive to produce.   Ok, so I am dating myself here, but really, that was not very long ago!

Now let’s talk about today.  We have flash drives, small data projectors that can hook wirelessly to laptops, virtual meeting technology, online registration and electronic meeting materials.  We are also on the brink of combined or stand-alone virtual meetings and teleconferences.  The latest technology is the hologram meeting.  You are literally face-to-face with your counterparts while they conference in from another part of the world.  To get a look at the newest advances in meeting technology you need only search for “Hologram Meetings” on YouTube.  It reminds me a bit of a corporate episode of Star Trek… beam me up Scotty!  But those sci-fi fantasies are becoming a very real reality.

Hemisphere Expo Services predicts 49,000 telepresence suites will be in use by 2014 and full hologram suites will follow closely behind.  Bank of America is investing tens of millions in this type of technology and they fully expect to realize the economic benefit in less than 18 months.  Starwood is also making big investments in the Cisco technology.  The technology is quite expensive now but as larger firms start to employ them, you can count on costs going down and further adoption taking place.

So, what does all of this mean for the meetings world?  While nothing can quite replace the face-to-face meeting, I do expect more hybrids of teleconferences, virtual and holographic meetings are likely to emerge.  This technology wave in the meeting arena will allow companies, in the long run, to be more efficient and effective.  Most important though is the need to stay relevant.  Companies who ignore these new technologies and stick with only traditional meetings will be left behind.  Traditional meetings will (and should) always be a part of how businesses run but the face of meetings is certainly changing.  Businesses and meetings planners will have to work together to navigate this brave new technological world or all will be left in the dust.

Resources you may want to explore:

www.theirf.org

www.mpiweb.org (meeting deliver)

www.firelightgroup.com,

www.emsummit.eventmarketer.com/virtual

www.enterpriseengagement.org

www.westchestermeetings.com

The following is a guest post from Derek Irvine, Head of Strategic Consulting and CMO,Globoforce - a leading worldwide provider of global strategic recognition solutions.   In addition to their main website they can also be found on twitter, facebook, linkedin and have a well regarded blog.

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What engages people? Feedback. Knowledge that the work they do is noticed and appreciated. A sense that they are helping to accomplish something bigger than themselves or their individual role. Awareness that they are following the right path and working on the right critical tasks.

Feedback, of course, takes two forms – positive affirmation and negative or constructive criticism.

Positive Recognition

On the positive side, I saw this interesting statistic on the Leadership Intelligence blog:

“Ideally, managers should provide five compliments for every criticism to optimize engagement and motivation.”

(And the explanation from comments): “The 5:1 ratio comes from the groundbreaking work in couples therapy by John Gottman. He has shown that it takes at least five good or constructive actions to make up for the damage caused by one critical or destructive act.   The human mind reacts to bad things more quickly, strongly, and persistently than good things. This is called ‘negativity bias.’”

This begs the question, “What’s the impact in the workplace?” Does couples therapy advice necessarily transfer to the employee/employer relationship?

In this case, I think it does. As I’ve written here before, employee engagement is not a program or initiative that can be foisted on employees. It is a work environment and atmosphere that can be fostered in an organization in which employees choose to engage. A key to fostering that environment is creating a relationship of trust and accountability. Yes, employees will need to be corrected in their work from time to time, but that must be balanced with far more praise of strong working efforts.

This flies in the face of most managerial practices in which “as long as the employee is doing the job and getting paid, that’s praise enough.” It’s not. While we never get tired of hearing that we are doing is important and valued, our need to know that through positive recognition also never lessens.

Constructive Criticism

What about those times when employees or their work need to be corrected? Of course that criticism and feedback must be provided. But never forget your role as a manager in setting up the situation requiring correction in the first place. When asked about giving difficult feedback, Dan Rosensweig, president and CEO of Chegg, had this to say:

“The first thing I ask is, did I ask somebody to do something that they weren’t capable of doing? There’s nothing worse than somebody you like and respect doing something you know they can’t be successful in and knowing that you were the one that did that to them. I try very hard to understand, before I approach the person, why they may not be successful in that particular role. … Very few problems correct themselves. And the philosophy of sticking your head in the sand and hoping it goes away has never been that effective for me. So you sit down and have an honest conversation. I think people respect honesty without attitude.”

But what about the habitual poor performers? Those that, even when given every tool and chance to succeed, continue to fail and seem to have no desire to improve. Well, it’s time to help those people find new opportunities elsewhere.

What are your recommendations for delivering positive and negative feedback? What have you found works best for you, your team or your organization that contributes to – and doesn’t detract from – a work environment in which employees choose to engage?

And we’re moving forward!

Keeping You in the Loop

To keep you up to date on our progress, here’s an overview of where we stand today.  As always, we see this as a collaborative effort and your input and your ideas are always welcome.  Hit us in the comments if you have some thoughts or if you want to be part of the development team.

The Executive Advisory Board

First of all, our initial Executive Advisory Board for the curriculum and certification is made up of some exceptional talent:

• Allan Schweyer, EEA Chair and Founding Partner, Center for Human Capital Innovation
• Don Peppers, Curriculum and Certification Co-Chair, Founding Partner, Peppers & Rogers Group
• Claire Howells, Curriculum and Certification Co-Chair, ad Vice President, Engagement, Zions Bancorporation
• Melanie Lewis, Advisory Board Sales Committee Co-Chair, Director of Sales Engagement, AstraZeneca
• Rodger Stotz, Principal, Delta Qi Consulting

Our Goal

Establish a formal framework for the field of enterprise engagement and a formal benchmarking process for best practices. By creating a formal curriculum and certification process, EEA enables organizations to maximize performance by applying an ISO-like method, used for years in manufacturing and logistics, to marketing and management.

Three-year Objectives

• 1,500 people with certifications
• 100 consultants and service firms certified as practitioners
• 300 companies with certifications or who have completed the certification process

Curriculum

The curriculum will be designed for different levels of management in different sectors of the economy – public, private, and not-for-profit. People will receive training for themselves or through their employers and will be able to take classes to train other trainers and to utilize the certification process.

Certification

There will be certification for individuals to demonstrate their understanding of engagement strategies and tactics, as well as the ability to enhance that certification by participating in other certification models related to engagement, such as training, measurement, recognition and incentive programs.

Organizations can gain certification by demonstrating or implementing best practices in the area of enterprise-wide engagement. By agreeing to collective standards, organizations have a better chance of getting more usable aggregate data for benchmarking and performance improvement.

Timeline

Live/webinar meetings will held in late October and November of 2010; a preliminary draft will be completed by the end of winter 2011, and the curriculum will receive its first test at the Enterprise Engagement Alliance Networking Expo in June 2011.

Just an FYI – We’re Looking for Marketing Partners

The EEA is looking to build strategic relationships with one or two national or international organizations focused on marketing and/or talent management, and also will seek cooperative arrangements with other associations with certification and curricula in specific areas of engagement, such as recognition, measurement, training and other disciplines.  Let us know if you want to be part of this exciting new area of study.

The following is a guest post from Derek Irvine, Head of Strategic Consulting and CMO, Globoforce - a leading worldwide provider of global strategic recognition solutions.   In addition to their main website they can also be found on twitter, facebook, linkedin and have a well regarded blog.

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The truth of this statement lies in its simplicity. Employees don’t engage with widgets, deadlines or even people, necessarily. People engage with a sense of meaning, of purpose, of an understanding of fair play, of company values aligned with their personal values. The sum of all of this is your company culture.

Though the truth of this statement is simple, the details are complex and not easy by any means. Pick any three people in your organization, at different levels, on different teams, in different global regions. Ask them how they would describe the company culture. If those three recite the company mission statement, you’ve failed in communicating your company culture. If they meander through an answer that gets to the heart of what’s expected, what’s tolerated, what’s encouraged and what’s appreciated, and the answers of all three are relatively similar to each other and to what you have defined as the desired culture, then you know the company culture you wished to foster is real in the everyday work lives of your employees.

Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of Nvidia, recently spoke to the culture of his company this way:

“I think culture is a big word for corporate character. It’s the personality of the company, and now the personality of our company simply says this: If we think something is really worthwhile and we have a great idea, and it’s never been done before but we believe in it, it’s O.K. to take a chance. It’s O.K. to try, and if it doesn’t work, learn from it, adjust and keep failing forward. And if you just fail forward all the time — learn, fail, learn, fail, learn, fail — but every single time you’re making it better and better, before you know it you’re a great company.”

Mr. Huang is very clear that this is the culture of Nvidia. But how did he arrive at this culture? How did it become real for his employees? Through the company’s core values.

“Let me tell you about the two elements that are our core values and that I most treasure and that I spent a lot of time nurturing. One is the tolerance to take risks and the ability to learn from failure. This ability to celebrate failure, if you will, needs to be an important part of any company that’s in a rapidly changing world. And the second core value is intellectual honesty — the ability to call a spade a spade, to as quickly as possible recognize that we’ve made a mistake, that we’ve gone the wrong way, and that we learn from it and quickly adjust.”

That was Mr. Huang’s answer when asked “What’s it like to work at Nvidia?” He never once mentioned benefits, compensation, career options, or the number of lunch choices in the company cafeteria.

No. He spoke about the core values of celebrating failure in an atmosphere of intellectual honesty. If those two values become real in the everyday work of the employees, then it’s easy to see how all could explain the company culture as “learn, fail, learn, get better, become a great company.”

And that’s something that would engage me.

How would you describe your company culture?

Does it engage you?

If not, what kind of culture would you like to work in and engage with?

The first Enterprise Engagement Alliance Networking Expo and Conference exceeded everyone’s expectations – including ours – in terms of the support, enthusiasm and action plan that came out of it.

Our goals were to create a valuable experience for all concerned by:

• Defining the emerging Enterprise Engagement field and its opportunities for practitioners and organizations
• Providing education sessions that addressed the key components of Enterprise Engagement presented by expert practitioners in these strategies and tactics and laying the groundwork for a formal curriculum and certification
• Testing a new type of “Future Show” concept that consists of “conversation centers” instead of booths, designed for greater privacy to foster discussion about programs instead of products.

Results:

• Education session attendance exceeded our forecast and generated unanimous positive reviews. Attendees apparently grasped the logic of the sessions, which focused on the different audiences on day one and on engagement strategies and tactics on day two.
• The Enterprise Engagement Alliance curriculum and certification initiative got off to a great start, based on the willingness of people to get involved. Several dozen prospective collaborators attended meetings with curriculum Executive Advisory Board members Claire Howells from Zions Bancorporation; Don Peppers of Peppers & Rogers Group; Melanie Lewis from AstraZeneca; EEA Chairman Allan Schweyer, and Rodger Stotz, Chief Research Officer for the Incentive Research Foundation and Principal of Delta Qi consulting. Seminar presenters agreed to collaborate on the development of a formal curriculum and certification process for Enterprise Engagement.
• Sponsors and attendees roundly praised the “conversation center” format. People consistently said it fostered more relaxed and productive conversations focused on problems and solutions rather than products.



• Sponsors and attendees said they valued the opportunity for extensive dialog during the day and during evening events.
• Attendees told us they wanted an opportunity for even more focused time on the education and asked about having an education day solely on the curriculum and certification.
• Our sponsors were even more emphatic: nearly a third of them handed in signed commitments for next year, and most we spoke to said they would be doing so in the coming weeks. At this rate, next year’s event will probably be sold out by the end of the summer.

Action plans:

• The EEA will complete the formation of its Curriculum and Certification Advisory Boards by late summer.
• The EEA will hold both a virtual and onsite planning event during the fall for incentive companies, engagement services firms, and corporate end-users to collaborate on the development of the curriculum and certification.
• The EEA will cement dates for the 2011 event at the Doral Arrowwood, where the first phase of the curriculum and certification program will be presented.
• The EEA is listing all of the engagement services companies that exhibited or attended on its EnterpriseEngagement.org portal. Send an e-mail to info@enterpriseengagement.org if you would like to make changes to or upgrade your listing.

Again, our deepest thanks and sincerest appreciation to all of you who supported this inaugural event!

The following is a guest post from Derek Irvine, Head of Strategic Consulting and CMO, Globoforce - a leading worldwide provider of global strategic recognition solutions.   In addition to their main website they can also be found on twitter, facebook, linkedin and have a well regarded blog.

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The state of employee engagement is much in the news lately. The first quarter of 2010 largely saw engagement levels remaining steady, but this began to change by the end of the quarter and into April in both the US and the UK. Particularly concerning to advocates of the power of employee engagement are findings that only 25% of senior leaders and 17% of frontline leaders are themselves highly engaged.

And then there’s the seeming backlash against engagement from HR practitioners and business leaders who do not see the promised benefit of various “engagement initiatives” in their organizations or are confused by the seeming multitude of different definitions of engagement and systems to measure it.

To me, this all serves to complicate what is actually a simple issue. Achieving success in employee engagement initiatives depends primarily on the motivation for pursuing engagement efforts. Is employee engagement something you are trying to do to employees – yet another “initiative” being foisted upon them? Or is employee engagement something you are hoping to foster in the organization? It’s the latter that has a far greater chance of short- and long-term success.

Don’t Force It – Enable It

You cannot create, encourage or incent employee engagement. You can only create a work environment in which employees may choose to engage. Think about it. In my career I’ve worked in positions where I simply did not see the point of what I was doing or what the company was trying to achieve. I never received acknowledgment of the work I did. In those positions, why should I care? Why should I give my all and more? Why should I “engage?”

Then again, I’ve also worked in positions and companies in which I not only understood where the company was going and what they were trying to accomplish in the world, but I also fully understood how I could help get us there and how my efforts mattered and were appreciated in accomplishing that. In these situations, I didn’t have to “be engaged” by some initiative, I chose to engage myself and yes, give discretionary effort (often the measure of success in employee engagement), because I personally understood and believed in what was going on.

Those are two very different scenarios. Companies considering employee engagement need to step back and take a deep, hard look first at what they are communicating to employees, how they are aligning company strategic objectives with personal tasks, and how they are making company goals real in the daily work of every employee.

That’s the magic dust, but there’s no magic in it. Just good, solid business practice. We believe the most positive way to effect this is through strategic employee recognition that specifically and deliberately recognizes employees when they demonstrate a company value in contribution to achieving a strategic objective. When you do this consistently and frequently, and you allow and encourage every employee to participate, then you help employees make the connection between their work and the company purposes, lending meaning and value to what they do. This in turn gives them the intrinsic motivation to engage.

The following is a guest post from David Bator – Senior Manager, Marketing & Customer Experience at PollStream, a Toronto-based company that develops and delivers engagement and community-building solutions to help leaders tap into Social Capital.

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On April 28th David Zinger and Steven Green joined me for a conversation about how to encourage participation in your employee communities and social networks during the latest installment of PollStream’s Real Engagement Webinar series.

They both spoke at length about the role senior executives can play in engaging employees, mobilizing them and making them more productive. According to Zinger, one of the keys is to ensure there is a “visible host” that invites the community to participate, takes the time to make them feel welcome and makes personal connections.

David suggested that often senior executives are a great choice to moderate or host the dialogue taking place inside the community. When senior executives “sit in the middle” community members know their contributions will be taken seriously. “It puts a face on the community and a face on engagement.” As you’ll hear in the recording of this session, David says that if he had his way he’d have CEOs work have a day sitting with the security guard at the front of the building. “They would sit at the foundation of the organization.”

PollStream founder Steven Green shared examples of customers who had enlisted senior executives as Subject Matter Experts and held live Q&A sessions using Comment Engine. Of particular interest was the story from NYT’s Corner Office segment which told of an executive who modified his blog into a purposeful venue through which to ask questions rather than deliver top down messages in an effort to encourage participation amongst the entire community.

I think that this week’s Corner Office column nicely weds David’s perspective with Steven’s. In “The CEO With The Portable Desk”, AdMob founder and CEO Omar Hamoui talks about making himself available to employees to engage them and learn what they think.

According to Hamoui, “I don’t have an office. We have an open office here. I also move my desk around. About every six weeks or so I just move to another part of the company that I feel I haven’t heard a lot about lately or don’t know the people that well in, and I just sort of sit there.

My whole desk construct is nomadic. I just pick up my computer and sit somewhere else. If people see you just sitting there and you’re not doing anything, they walk up to you and talk to you. It’s pretty effective in terms of hearing how things are going and how people are feeling about the company or how people are feeling about you.”

So my question is, where do  you stand when it comes to engagement? Are you accessible? Do you make it easy for people to participate?

The following is a guest post from Sandra Daniel, President and CEO of FIRE Light Group. FIRE Light Group is a full service incentive marketing company focused on helping organizations motivate their workforce, distributors and/or customers.

FIRE Light is one of our speakers and panel members at EEA Expo June 4-5, 2010.

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It is true that the media has made America rethink appropriate bonus and incentive structures from the boardroom, to government employees to union halls. However, let’s not forget that we still must convey that our human capital (employees, sales staff, and yes, our executive teams too) still need to be engaged to continue to perform at peak levels. Now more than ever we need to remember that if we cannot instill that “fire in the belly” for employees to want to be a part of a successful organization – then where do we expect them to go when this recession ends?

The focus on big and extravagant bonus and rewards has taken us into a national mentality of throwing the baby out with bathwater. We cannot forget that rewards and incentive strategies are still a key tool to drive performance and hence, production and profits. We need high performing employees to drive profitable businesses that can support a growing economy. Whether or not you are a great believer in capitalism, it is what our economy is founded on. We cannot simply switch gears and expect that eliminating such an important business driver is going to fix our economy. Engaged employees are just as necessary to a business’s success as a solid product.

With a little work and some smart innovation, the engagement industry should come out of this recession stronger and more resilient than ever.

Don’t forget that more millionaires were born out of the great depression than at any other time in our history.