When speaking with brands on loyalty program strategy, it’s clear companies know they should be utilizing their data and personalizing the user experience, but there is often a barrier of hesitation to openly treat customers differently. This hesitancy is rooted in the fear of ostracizing a portion of their consumers who are deemed “less valuable”. Why can’t we simply strive to provide every customer the same high-end treatment that they deserve? Well, because they don’t deserve it.

If necessity is the mother of invention, perhaps innovation is its father.

It’s common to “take stock” of our personal and professional goals. We may take the time to evaluate how we performed against our own goals or resolutions, year-end reports and performance reviews can evaluate how we performed against professional goals, and we can evaluate our programs, vendors, and customer/client experiences as a way to measure progress against organizational goals.

10 guaranteed, foolproof, effortless ways to take care of your employee engagement and company culture once and for all. Or not.

The larger the team, the harder it is for an employee to be singled out for individual praise. And, not coincidentally, the easier it is for an employee to hide from being singled out for individual blame.

What’s better than free money? Actually, when it comes to reward and recognition programs, quite a few things may be. So says a new study by the Incentive Research Foundation, Award Program Value & Evidence.

It’s always good to do the right thing, for no other reason than that it’s the right thing. What’s even better is when there are multiple reasons for doing the right thing. 

“If you want one thing too much, it’s likely to be a disappointment,” declares Augustus McRae in Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove. “The healthy way is to learn to like the everyday things, like soft beds, and buttermilk…a sip of whisky of an evening…”

For the past few years, an incalculable number of words have been expended on the woeful state of employee engagement, both domestically and worldwide. A prominent milestone in all the back-and-forth was Gallup’s pronouncement of a worldwide employment engagement crisis, noting, among other things, that the percentage of engaged employees in the U.S.—call it 33—has remained roughly the same since Gallup started measuring engagement levels in 2000. 

With the ever-increasing pace of change, organizations are not only under pressure to perform and transform, but they also face increased competition from all directions as they do it. And that doesn’t even include leadership changes, M&A activity, reorganizations or any number of typical crises that surface from time to time. Any of these pressures can result in bad behaviors and disengaged employees driving down performance, increasing turnover rates and eroding financial performance.