On Fast Company Now, Heath Row talks about a Wall Street Journal article (subscription req’d) on peer-recognition programs that are now making a comeback. Three mentioned in the article:

* Yum Brands offers Customer Mania peer recognition cards that colleagues can use to indicate how someone exceeds in hospitality, accuracy, and speed — by giving them to a peer on the spot.
* Symantec holds quarterly conference calls to name and recognize recipients of the Serendipity award. The award doesn’t include a gift, but the public recognition is important and powerful.
* And Boeing provides an online form employees can use to nominate colleagues, print out certificates, and even send email alerts that someone’s efforts are appreciated.

I read the comments to his post, where Heath asks what programs people have at their places of work, with great interest. Then I ran across this one:

At my company they give a gold star on a departmental chart for exceptional, above and beyond service. Once you recieve 50 stars, they give you a %1 raise and a %2 bonus. After 100 stars you are then laid-off because you are making too much money.

While it’s tongue-in-cheek, I’m sure, it’s also all too true for all too many these days that monetary rewards can come back to bite employees. While we write articles on motivating and incentivizing employees all the time, I can’t help but wonder what really works. I like the idea of the “rock on jar” one Fast Co. commenter mentions.

Should speakers get an honorarium? Comped conference fees? Airfare and hotel? Nada? The whole topic of how and if speakers get paid is a recurring theme among some folks who speak at industry events and meeting planners. Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine represents one side of the story with this rant about being offered a “special one-day registration rate” as recompense for being on a panel at an association show:

What incredible nerve. Though it may be worth the price of admission to see me sitting on the same panel with Roger Simon of PJ media, I nonetheless had a patented Jarvis conniption.

We as panelists come as their trained monkeys to give these conference organizers the only damned content they have and they expect us to pay for the bananas? Well, peel this!

It’s time for panelists everywhere to unionize, to rise up and form the International Brotherhood and Sisterhood of Amalgamated Blatherers, Local 1. We demand free nametags — with ribbons. We demand good bottled water on the table. We demand decent swag briefcases made of real fabric or leather, no plastic. And we demand a cut of the gate.

But Hugh at Gaping Void says it’s worth his while to speak for free, because of the indirect payback he gets:

I don’t charge for speaking. Sometimes I’ll get them to pay for the hotel and the plane fare. I figure every time I go to one of these things, it’ll lead to something else down the line- a paid gig, an English Cut sale, whatever.

It’s up to every person to decide for themselves, of course, but if someone was asking me to actually pay to provide content for their meeting, well, as someone who makes a living being paid to provide content, I think I’d just say no. Then again, I’m no speaker.

Here’s a great essay on customer service—a must-read for anyone in the meetings and/or hospitality business. A snip:

Want a definition of a remarkable experience? How about, Reading my mind?

Really, that’s all your prospects, customers and clients want. They want what they want, the way they want it (preferably, without having to ask for it) – no more, no less…

The Four Seasons…always seems to know what I want before I do. If I want assistance there is someone there ready to give it. If I want to do it myself, they leave me alone. They read my mind, and as a result I pay significantly more for a room than I pay elsewhere. Why? Because the staff there has been trained to respect their customers and treat them as they themselves would expect to be treated under the circumstances. They pay close attention to what their customers are doing at any particular moment and “read” their level of need. That’s how they always seem to be reading my mind. It’s a level of attention for which there is no substitute. I simply can’t find that feeling having someone read my mind anywhere else at any price.

Are you reading potential attendees’ minds when you’re putting together a program? Or do you have a standard you adhere to, regardless of whether or not it’s what people really want at that point in time (like the writer’s other example of a restaurant that was so attentive it got in the way of what he was trying to do)? And how do you read people’s minds a year in advance, when you line up session speakers for a big conference?

We in the press have a similar dilemma when we try to decide what to cover, when. Especially when it comes to something like Katrina—how much is too much? How far in time beyond the disaster should we continue to report on it? While we don’t always get it right, we try hard. One of the nicest compliments I’ve ever gotten about Medical Meetings was at a show last month, when someone asked me how we always managed to have the story she wants to read, when she wants to read it. For at least that one person, we’re giving Four Seasons’ service, and that makes me very happy.

There’s some interesting conversation going around about the weird idea I floated a couple days ago: Wouldn’t it be an interesting experiment to offer a conference, and people paid afterward for the amount it was worth to them?

Some people have taken that little question and run with it: Check out these posts (and please drop some comments):

Rich Westerfield’s Pay What You Feel
David Gammel’s On Marketing and New Conference Models
Rich again, with Pay As You Feel, Part 2
Johnnie Moore chimes in and a commenter says I’m wacky for even posing the question: Six Apart Rocks

Kevin Holland basically says it doesn’t matter what Typepad does to make amends, because their product stinks: Typepad is Done, which is an excellent point. If your conference isn’t stellar, this idea would sink you so fast your head would spin.

I’m just glad this conversation is happening—even if it’d never fly for conferences, I think the idea is well worth exploring. And yes, I’m a little wacky!

I just got a note from the blog-hosting service Typepad, where this blog used to live. It sounds like they had a lot of technical difficulties last month. They not only sent out a letter apologizing and outlining what the glitches were, but today sent around another note offering to let customers choose how much free service they should get as compensation, depending on how much the disruption affected them (from 15 to 45 days).

I hope their faith in their customers to be fair about it bears out, and people like me (I’m not using my Typepad account much these days) will take the lowest they’re offering, not grabbing for all the freebie service we can get, because I love that they’re doing this.

Wouldn’t it be an interesting experiment to offer a conference, and people paid afterward for the amount it was worth to them? It’ll never happen, but I bet conference organizers would be surprised at just how people really value their events. I’d be curious to apply a similar model to our magazines, which are free to qualified subscribers. If people had the option to pay what they thought the magazines are worth, I wonder if they’d still be free, or if some would willingly pay a buck or two or three, depending on the value they got from each issue?

Being the starry-eyed optimist that I am, I’d like to think people are willing to be paid, or pay, based on the value lost or gained, but the cynic in me says there’s no way that’s going to happen. Think we’re ready for something like that, or would it be a step toward the road to financial ruin?

A recent survey found that e-mail, interruptions, and bad meetings are wasting huge amounts of workers time. Well duh. Here’s the numbers, from time spent in 2000 to 2004:

E-mail: 4 hours per week in 2000, 8.8 hours per week in 2004
Snail mail: 2 hours per week in 2000 to 1.3 hours per week in 2004
Ineffective meetings: 2000 of 0.7 hours a week, 2.1 hours per person per week in 2004.
Interruptions: 3.3 hours per week in 2000 to 4.5 hours in 2004
Working overtime: 4.9 hours per week in 2000 to 6.4 hours in 2004
Delegating work: 3.3 hours per week in 2000 to 3.5 hours per week in 2004

So, we’re spending a lot more time on e-mail, bad meetings, interruptions, and delegating work, and less on snail mail. No wonder we’re working more overtime!

While I should say my biggest productivity drain is e-mail, since I spend so much time on listservs in addition to the regular influx of messages and spam, the contacts, information, and resources I get this way make this time well spent. Ditto for the hours I spend each night going through my RSS feeds and reading blogs and news resources from all over the place. I spend very little time on snail mail anymore, and as a telecommuter, interruptions usually are when my dogs start barking hysterically because a leaf fell. Meetings are only once weekly, and are generally pretty productive, and I only wish I had someone to delegate work to on some days.

The problem with this survey is that it measures productivity losses based solely on time spent dealing with this stuff. While time wasted obviously isn’t good, for me, the biggest productivity busters are more psychic energy drains than anything else. You know, when you can’t get anything done because you’re fuming over unreasonable demands, other people not doing their part so you can do yours, that kind of thing (which thankfully happens very seldom in my job). Next to that, deleting spam is nothing.

Enough about me: What’s your biggest productivity killer?

(For some interesting discussion on this survey, check out Tom Smith’s Information Week blog.)

Ladies and gentlemen, how do your salaries stack up when compared side to side (and is it even possible to stack something side to side)? In addition to the MPI 2005 Salary Survey, here’s a nifty little tool called the Getting Even Wage Calculator. And yes, they do have a meetings/convention planner title, unlike so many of the other salary calculators out there.

My results were interesting. When I put my job title as editor, “After adjusting for age, education, and industry, you currently make 70% of what your corresponding White Non-Hispanic Male coworker makes,” the site told me, adding that my lifetime cost of being female chalks up to $761,734.72. Ouch. But if I put my title as miscellaneous reporter/correspondent/news analyst, I’m actually making more than my male colleagues, and I’ll earn $17k and change more than my male colleagues over the next 20 years. Interestingly, while both occupations are female-dominated, the second category was much more female than the first. I’m not sure what to make of it all, but it’s interesting, isn’t it?

There are lots more features on the site to explore, which I will when I get more time (we’re on deadline this week), so if you have more time than I do right now, check it out and tell me what you think, either in the comments below or via e-mail.

Back to work…

(Thanks to Jennifer for the link. If you’re interested in women’s issues, her blog is a terrific resource, including its Six-Figure Success Secrets section.)

The National Business Travel Association is reaching out to Homeland Security and other federal agencies to lend its expertise to the Adminstration’s proposed $7.1 billion plan to save us all from bird flu, should it jump from fowl to human. From the NBTA’s Web site:

NBTA was pleased to accept an invitation to attend President Bush’s announcement on national plans to aid against the spread of the avian bird flu. Speaking at the National Institutes of Health, Bush outlined his plans for preparing the nation for a potential outbreak of the virus.

Following the delivery of the President’s remarks, NBTA reached out to the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Michael Leavitt; Secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff; and Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, recommending the development of a working group to involve the travel industry in the national preparation for a possible avian flu outbreak.

Given the mass hysteria over SARS not so long ago, I think it’s a great idea to get some travel professionals involved in the planning. But there’s not two ways about it: If avian flu does become a human-to-human transmissible disease, the meetings, travel, and hospitality business are scrod, at least for the duration. Nobody’ll be going out of their houses, much less to meetings. I can’t even begin to get my mind around all the implications, so I’m just really, really hoping it doesn’t happen, or it is quickly contained if it does.

Anyway, here’s more about what NBTA is looking to do. Another good-sounding resource, though I haven’t had time to listen to it yet, is the bird flu segment on BTC radio, which aired on Sunday.

Doug Rushkoff’s new book, Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out, sounds like a must-read for any meeting planner (not to mention your organization’s leadership). Rushkoff is posting tidbits from the book, things he calls ‘thought viruses,” and judging from the first one, I like the way he thinks. One quick snip:

The longevity and prosperity of any enterprise depends most on its participants’ ability to maintain the wellspring of innovation. And the way to do this is to remember that you are always the source of your own best ideas. The most successful businesses for the next century will turn out to have been based not on infinitely repeatable Harvard Business School lesson plans, but on a combination of competence and passion. Dissecting an enterprise after the fact to see what made it work is akin to conducting on autopsy on a person to see what made him live. The very pursuit is symptomatic of the highly fragmented approach to business we’re leaving behind.

Here’s the full post.

It seems like pretty much everyone sends out press releases touting their event to the local (and beyond, depending on the topic) media. So how come most meetings PR don’t seem to generate any results? Speaker and futurist Jim Carroll has some press release-writing tips to share. As someone on the receiving end of all too many that just don’t say anything worth following up on, I second his tips.

Update: I just found this three-year-old press release about how germy the average desk is—you know, that same thing that’s been making the rounds again in the news lately about how gross it is for people to eat at their computers?—and it’s a great example of how to do it right, from catchy headline on down. Thanks to The Publicity Hound for the pointer.