Rewards and Motivation

How do we energize and engage?
How can we maximize individual and company-wide performance?

So why do people show up at work? Why do they stay? And, what motivates them? These are questions that need to be answered before the design of compensation programs begins. In short, this is the quest to answer the question that every employee should be able to answer: “What melts my butter?”

Holistically, in order to design effective reward and motivation programs (aka compensation and benefits to some) FutureSense studies individual motivation profiles and cultural norms for our clients. We subscribe to the collective wisdom of many cultural researchers including Clare Graves and Don Beck (Spiral Dynamics – see www.spiraldynamics.net), and Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson (Cultural Creatives – see www.culturalcreatives.org). We seek to understand the Cultural DNA of an organization instead of just imposi¬ng “best practice” compensation techniques on their environment. We design programs that work.

We look for the intersection of the corporate systems of environment, culture, development and rewards. We design reward programs that motivate, that energize and that help an organization produce desired results, change behavior and move onward and upward on the steps of success.

Our Approach

Our process consists of three steps:

  • Discovery. We learn as much as we can about the organization’s business strategy, operating plans, environment and culture, existing reward and motivation programs, people development philosophy and communications. We collect data, we read documents, and we learn from people in the organization through surveys, interviews and focus groups. An intimate understanding of the organization is an important product of this step.

  • Design. We use our discovery research to inform our design – whether it is in the areas of compensation (base salary, short and long-term incentives, salary increase (i.e. pay for performance and/or pay for potential), performance management, sales compensation), benefits, or other innovative programs to motivate performance, change behavior and produce results.

  • Delivery. We assist in the implementation and communication of the programs we design to ensure that they are understood and are producing the desired results.