Incentive - November 2009 - (Page 16)

COVER STORY Global By Alex Palmer Symantec has thousands of employees at hundreds of offices across six continents—and its Applause program is getting all of them on the same page T hese days, business has no borders. Expanding across continents presents organizations with advantages, but it also poses challenges, such as how to keep far-flung employees engaged, especially during this time of economic tumult. Software giant Symantec Corp., headquartererd in Mountain View, CA, near San Jose, has experienced this firsthand, as the company’s rapid global expansion spurred a revamp of its employee recognition strategy. Centralizing program administration while localizing the awards, the company is now able to reach more employees and more effectively encourage the right kinds of behaviors—all the while cutting out the costs associated with running multiple programs. Symantec designs enterprise software for organizations and makes the Norton brand of anti-virus and data management software for the consumer market. To meet the needs of its broad customer base, Symantec employs 17,000 people in 282 locations across six continents. The company has grown rapidly since its founding in 1982, most notably in 2005, when it acquired Veritas Software and more than doubled its size from 6,500 employees to about 14,000. The acquisition also made it the fifth-largest software company in the world. Veritas had a similar international footprint to Symantec’s—about 50 percent of its workforce was in the U.S., and the rest was spread out overseas— but the huge expansion meant Symantec’s leadership needed to rethink how it ran the company, including how to best engage employees in a highly changed organization. “All of our programs had to be reassessed because it wasn’t a natural growth; it was a flip of the switch, and the things we were doing before just wouldn’t fit,” says Jennifer Reimert, senior director of global compensation for Symantec. Before acquiring Veritas, Symantec’s incentive programs primarily gave high-value awards to a limited number of top performers. Many departments ran their own contests—independent of the corporate human resources Norton virus-protection software maker Symantec, with the help of Globoforce, developed a central recognition program that is also powerful enough to be tailored to local company offices around the world 16 | Incentive | November 2009 | incentivemag.com http://www.incentivemag.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Incentive - November 2009

Incentive - November 2009
Contents
Editor’s Note: Incentive Excellence Exchange
Headlines
Amway’s Over-the-Top 50th Anniversary Incentive Trip
Cover Story: Growing Globally, Software Developer Symantec Seeks Centralized Recognition
Strategies: Motivating the Six Workplace Personality Types
Primer: Five Tools CEOs Can Use To Improve Engagement
Travel News: Where to Go and How to Get There
Switzerland’s Incentive Offerings Are Legendary
Potentials: Here and Now
Digital Cameras for the Social Networking Era
Incentive Gift Card Directory

Incentive - November 2009