If you want to record results with your incentive planning, Data analytics is the tool in Incentive design and programming to achieve this. It provides insight into the motivating factors for rewarding and incentivising which will drive desired outcomes. It is a key element for creating an effective incentive program. The IRF (Incentive Research Foundation) in their 2018 report on “Predictive analytics and artificial intelligence on people management” opined that big organisations use big data, predictive analysis, and machine learning techniques to monitor and analyse their talents continuously. The usage gives the companies’ ability to make better decisions on recruitment, retention, development, and motivation of their employees. They suggest that it helps give these companies the ability to make better decisions about strategic initiatives designed to motivate, including those that incorporate rewards.

The below steps can help get the desired results from your data analytics in order to implement an effective incentive plan:

Behaviour identification: Most times incentive plans are designed with just end result in focus without consideration to identifying the specific behaviours or outcomes that are to be incentivised. It is important to identify the key areas or pain points that affect performance and productivity, and then to design a reward system that will motivate performance. These areas most often are in sales targets, customer retention, productivity, or safety performance.

Data Collection: The next step is to collect the relevant data that helps understands current behaviours or outcomes, these can be derived from customer feedbacks, surveys, sales reports.

Analysing the data: Data needs to be analysed for trends and patterns. It helps looks for correlations between different variables and identify factors contributing to current behaviours and hindering desired behaviours and outcomes.

Incentive designing: Results from the analysis helps as a guide in designing Incentive programs that drive the desired outcomes or behaviours that will be incentivised. The design will be able to determine the appropriate reward system for an effective plan. It could include financial rewards, recognition programs, travel incentives or other types of rewards that drives desired behaviours and outcomes.

Monitoring and Evaluating: Data analytics is required to measure the effectiveness of the incentive program. Collecting and comparing the data of what is incentivised with baseline measures helps determine if the program is achieving its desired purpose.
The effectiveness of data analytics to incentive planning optimises business performance, efficiency, increases profitability and guides strategic business decisions.
The ways data analytics can be utilised for effective incentives planning are:

Benchmarking: Data analytics helps keep in focus the business goals and objectives by comparing performance with competition and against industry standards. Its an easy guise for setting realistic targets.
Performance tracking: Data analytics provides the relevant information to measure performance, this is essential in determining progress against targets and necessitate adjustments if and where required.

Predictive analysis: Predictive analytics helps with forecasting future performance and identifying potential problems before they occur. This helps with program adjustment to improve performance.

Personalisation: Understanding motivating factors for improved performance is key, data analytics helps in this regard to tailoring incentives accordingly.

Overall, the incentives business and market is constantly evolving and growing, and data analytics is the one tool that is best utilised to scale up for growth and achieve results. Uwin Iwin Incentives Pty. Uwin Iwin: Incentive & Employees Recognition Programs has a powerhouse automated technology platform which supports data collection, data collation and report generation. It has a customised layer that works with supplied data in any format and performs the business logic of calculating performance elements. Our strategy lies in the use of technology to support uniquely tailored Incentive programmes for our clients and having end-to-end management of all the elements of the programme to generate results. We look forward to the opportunity to form strategic partnerships with you and improve your business performance. For more details, please contact us at info@uwiniwin.net