Motivating a Diverse Workplace: Maritz Travel Launches Tool to Improve Effectiveness of Incentive Tr

Maritz Travel Insight Enables Companies to Offer Choice and Increase Motivational Impact of Travel R

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. October 14, 2008

CHICAGO, IL, September 27, 2005, Today at The Motivation Show, Maritz Travel announced the launch of Maritz Travel Insight, a new survey and analysis tool that increases the effectiveness of incentive travel programs for today's diverse workforce. Designed by Maritz Research scientists, Maritz Travel Insight compiles the results of an employee survey into an easy-to-use tool that identifies what travel reward attributes and activities best motivate a specific company's employees. With this new tool, companies can build, test and compare the motivational impact of several different travel experiences. This, in turn, enables companies to offer choice in their incentive travel programs to ensure all segments of their diverse workforce are motivated to reach higher performance goals - often within the same cost of their current incentive travel program spend.

"One size does not fit all in today's diverse workplace. Employees are unique with different lifestyles, attitudes and interests, and therefore, are motivated by different things. For example, the travel experience that interests a single, 30-year-old male may be quite different than what interests a 40-year-old mother of two," states Christine Duffy, president and CEO, Maritz Travel. "This tool enables companies to compare the motivational impact of one travel experience versus another across different groups of people, so they can identify the most effective mix of travel rewards to increase employee performance and ultimately improve a company's return on incentive program spend."

A nationwide survey conducted using the Maritz Travel Insight tool found three out of four respondents (76 percent) prefer smaller trips that offer choice in dates, destinations and activities. The poll also found that almost one out of six employees (14.5 percent) who won trips failed to attend at least one earned trip; reasons cited included unappealing trip (16 percent) and date conflicts (65 percent).

"These results indicate there are a significant number of employees that could be motivated to higher performance levels if offered a travel experience that is more personally meaningful," notes Duffy.

Other statistics from the study show how certain preferences can drive motivation, including:

Younger participants prefer shorter awards programs more than older participants.

Having big-named entertainment on a trip is more appealing to participants traveling with a spouse/partner than to those traveling without a spouse/partner.

Date flexibility is more important to participants in lower income brackets ($75,000 and under) than to those with higher incomes.

Having on-your-own leisure time during a trip is more important to ethnic minority groups.

"This tool makes it easy to offer choice in incentive travel programs - something that has been difficult for companies until now. Offering choice solves the year-after-year dilemma companies face of delivering new and different incentive programs to continually engage their employees," comments Duffy. "This is especially important to companies with a large number of travel reward participants, which usually encounter limitations on destinations and activities that can accommodate their group size."

How Maritz Travel Insight works:

Maritz Travel Insight works by polling employees to determine what activities and interests are most motivating to them. Results are then compiled into an easy-to-use decision support tool that companies can use to build and test the motivational return of different travel experiences that are based on a variety of trip options, activities, destination preferences, preferred month of travel and other incentive travel reward factors. The trip options can be customized to meet each company's individual culture or needs.

The employee poll is based on a three-part participant questionnaire:

Part one - Program Attributes: this portion of the survey asks participants questions on up to 15 travel program attributes of incentive travel, such as trip length, destination choice, etc., and includes choice evaluation questions to identify which programs respondents would work harder to earn.

Part two - Trip Activities: this section analyzes the priority of up to 20 activities, as respondents are asked to select activities they would most and least like to do.

Part three - Participant Details: the last part of the survey uncovers respondent profile types using demographics, past reward travel experiences and "firmagraphics" such as past trip earners, non-earners and up to 10 additional sub-groups.