Incentive - December 2007 - (Page 38)

experience and a bad experience. Our team wants our customers to have good experiences. And empowering them, and giving them the data to make it right—as opposed to saying, “You don’t have the authority to cancel an online air ticket unless you get a supervisor’s approval”—giving people the power to make things right is highly, highly motivating. Q A Have you come across any cultural barriers? Our call center agents get incentives based on their scores and based on their sales. But across the company we also have annual award and quarterly award programs. The quarterly award we have is called the Gnomie, the Gnome Award, and every quarter we give it to five or six employees around the globe, and those are employees who are nominated by their peers for outstanding values and execution, and we as leadership can pick. We announce them in my quarterly road show, and each of them receives a $750 gift travel voucher for a long weekend away and a golden gnome and a day off with pay, and they also get all the nomination forms from people who wrote in about them, and they’re kind of celebrated at the quarterly meeting. Q A What’s your largest incentive program? Sure, for instance, when I do brownbag lunches in North America, the hands will be flying with questions, and people have all sorts of questions. In Asia, in our Korean office for example, our team is just a little bit more reserved; they might be embarrassed or nervous to ask questions—remember we’re speaking in English not in Korean. So what we do instead is before our meeting, we solicit questions anonymously, and then I’m handed the questions to talk about and answer. We had to adapt the methodology. It’s not that people don’t have a lot of questions, they do. It’s just that you have to be thoughtful and smart about making it a safe environment for them to feel like they can ask their questions. help others in need. We’ve been really, really committed to New Orleans over the past two years, trying to bring tourism back. The third thing, I think, is just volunteering and improving our communities. We have an annual giving drive. In 2005 we raised $1.7 million. The team made $850,000, and Sabre and Travelocity matched it for $850,000. [In 2006, the goal was set at $1.7 million, and the company raised $2.1 million.] I can give you countless other examples. Across the globe we do extensive volunteering work and extensive fund-raising work. My expectation is that we’ll raise similar amounts to what we raised last year. Q A Q A What kind of feedback have you received from employees? Q A Corporate citizenship is huge. What community work is Travelocity involved in and in what ways do you support your employees’ involvement? Oh my gosh, they love it—people love volunteering—and it’s a great teambuilding activity. I did four events last week. It’s just a great way to take a couple of hours out of your workweek and do something good with your team. What about your mascot? Q A Travelocity is a global company. What are the major challenges of extending your philosophy worldwide? I think you have to rely on new tools. [With 5,000 employees around the globe] I’m not going to be able to do daily staff meetings, but I can do weekly meetings, I can do brown-bag lunches, I can be hyperresponsive on e-mails, I can make sure that people know when they ask questions I will get back to them really, really quickly. Well you know, this is so, so critical. All of us care about the communities we live in, and all of us want to feel like we’re part of a company that does more than just make money. For us, the first thing is helping the environment. In travel, obviously, there’s a lot of talk about the travel impact on the environment, so we started to ask our consumers to purchase carbon offsets when they’re buying on Travelocity and in Europe on Lastminute.com. The second thing we do is to make the world a better place through travel. We started this program called “Travel for Good,” and we show consumers “voluntour” opportunities in the places they’re going. And every quarter, we award a grant to a customer and employee to take one of these great trips and His name is the Roaming Gnome and he’s very popular. He’s too popular. I take him along on speeches and nobody wants to talk to me, they all want to get his picture. I’m starting to get a complex. He generates a lot of excitement and we have just a ton of fun with him. He gets out for various employee events. He’s gone through various schools, we get letters, really incredible letters: “My son has cancer, he wants to meet the Roaming Gnome.” (Of course, he did.) The Roaming Gnome has over 14,000 friends on MySpace; he has his own blog [where] he talks about all kinds of things. It is a lot of fun. Globetrotting Leader Makes Time for Employees Dallas, Texas–based Michelle Peluso is on the road about half of every month. But out of the office does not mean out of touch. Not only does she write a weekly e-mail that is sent to all her employees, featuring news about the company, but she has a 24-hour service agreement with herself. Employees know that if they have a concern, they can e-mail Peluso and will get a response within a day. “I have a sense of urgency to get back to people. If I don’t know the answer to the question they are asking, I will check with the appropriate people to get the correct answer, but will still get back to them within 24 hours,” she says. Peluso’s focus is not only on travel but on people in general. “In the end, it’s always, always, all about people. If you figure this out, the rest will take care of itself. And so, my leadership team and I think and talk about our people all the time.” How does she motivate her team? By making sure everyone shares the same vision. “It’s critical to make sure that everyone understands what you are trying to do as a company, and it has to be in emotional terms, not just financial terms. For instance, our mission is to be the best in the world at inspiring travelers and being their champion every step of the way.” 38 | Incentive | December 2007 | incentivemag.com http://Lastminute.com http://incentivemag.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Incentive - December 2007

Incentive - December 2007 Contents Editor’s Note: Revved Up In the News Cover Story: Rolls-Royce Empowers Its Own Case Study: Booz Allen Hamilton Beating Your Best Incentive Primer: Add Value to Your Event Keeping Safety In Mind Incentive Interview Potentials Here and Now Research: Corporate Gifts Facts Report Tabletop Awards: Travel Gift Cards Travel News Viva Puerto Vallarta Indigenous Spas Advertiser Index Off the Cuff: Ambassador Christoph Bubb Luxury Brands Special Supplement

Incentive - December 2007

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