Incentivising participation vs incentivising a result

There is a big difference between incentivising participation and incentivising a result.

Incentivising participation is about encouraging as many people as possible to complete the survey. The more people complete your survey, the more confident you can be that the results you get at the end are representative and accurate. Please click here for some suggestions about how you can incentivise people to complete your survey.

Incentivising a result is about encouraging people to respond in a particular way. It is an attempt to positively affect people's instinctive, true responses in a way that makes the organisation's results appear better than they would otherwise be. Incentivising a result is strongly discouraged. Please note that one of the conditions of participating in the JRA Best Workplaces Survey is: Your organisation agrees to participate in the JRA Best Workplaces Survey in good faith. The Organisers reserve the right to investigate and disqualify from the competition any organisation considered to have acted in a way that brings the validity of the survey into disrepute.

Examples of incentivising a result include:

• Watching people complete the questionnaire or suggesting that their individual responses could be viewed later on
• Discussing people's individual responses with them
• Simply encouraging staff to respond positively
• Allowing managers to influence their staff's responses as per the above

Incentivising people in management roles to achieve performance targets is acceptable; allowing influence on the way individuals respond to the questionnaire is not.

In addition to incentivising a result, it is also unacceptable to manipulate your results by not making the survey available to particular people/parts of the organisation who you may feel may respond negatively. A requirement of the JRA Best Workplaces Survey is that all employees must be given the opportunity to complete the questionnaire (including full time and part time staff, excluding contractors or casuals).

Note that in our experience, attempts at incentivising a result normally backfire as staff resent being told how to respond to a questionnaire that asks them for their honest feedback - there is a good chance it will do more harm than good.

If you have any questions about this topic, please ask below. You can post your question completely anonymously if you wish - JRA will not be able to identify you.

*** Edited 3/19/2009 10:47:52 PM UTC by Leighton (JRA)***

One of our favourite suggestion for a post-survey celebration is exactly that - get people together for a morning or afternoon tea or even a dinner - it reinforces that your results are an outcome of a great team, gets people talking to each other, and reduces future expectations of individual rewards.

*** Edited 3/5/2009 8:08:35 PM UTC by Leighton (JRA)***

Also i really like the idea for Incentivising for Participation, specifically doing a prize draw for those that have participated, however i have had a comment made by a staff member that they find incentives (we used to give chocolate fish) insulting- how do you propose to deal with this, as i know all staff do not feel this way?

Thanks

Jess

Your comment about how one staff member responded negatively to the prospect of getting a chocolate fish for completing the survey is an interesting one. Maybe it's just the way that they interpreted the gesture - you intended it to be a small 'thank you' and an encouragement to complete the survey, whereas they interpreted it as a cheap bribe! I suspect any sort of incentive to complete the survey will be taken the wrong way by someone looking at it this way. The important thing is to communicate the reasons why you are offering an incentive - you want everyone to 'have their say,' you want to get results that will be representative of all staff, you want everyone to be involved in the building of a great workplace, you want to make the most of your investment in running the survey, etc.

Our position on chocolate fish etc for completing the survey is that we don't believe that a chocolate fish has the ability to change the way a person reponds to the survey, and this is why it is an appropriate incentive.

We've used incentives on surveys (only for participation as you suggested); that is a business process too. We had the most success with a full incentive tool -- draw for travel rewards or prepaid cash cards -- its shows the seriousness of the survey program when a professional tool is put in place AND the reporting is valuable for seeing which rewards get used by recipients. We were more worried about building a long term culture of participation rather than just getting one time responses. It worked and we roll out survey regularly with integrated incentives to generate higher responses.