Employee incentives: What works for different cultures? by Christian Arno

These days, thanks to digital communications technology, it’s possible to be a small to medium sized business and to have employees working from several different countries.
When I founded translation agency Lingo24 in 2001, it was with the idea of having many small, closely connected international hubs. I’ve since learnt some valuable lessons on the best ways to manage and incentivise sales teams from many different cultures.

Combining cash bonuses and non-cash incentives

In the case of Lingo24, we have sales staff from a wide range of national backgrounds, including the UK, Romania, Panama, Germany, Scandinavia, France and Australasia.

For each culture, and indeed for each team member, different incentives will be more effective. For instance, for the majority of the Romanian Account Managers, the financial incentives are the most important, closely followed by the opportunity for travel and feeling a valued and productive part of the team. On the other hand, for some of our German Account Managers, the primary incentive is career progression and earning more responsibility.

Whatever motivates our staff, though, we’ve found that there are two key elements to successfully inspiring sales staff across cultures. The first is to offer a combination of cash and non-cash incentives, which I’ll discuss further below.

The second is to ensure that each team leader understands what motivates each individual team member, so they can offer the right incentives. Our Sales Academy, which helps our best performers to move up the ranks, means that most of our team leaders have progressed from within the company and innately understand our people and company culture.

Cash incentives

The key to cash-incentives for geographically dispersed staff is to emphasise both international cooperation and team work within each hub.

As such, beyond their standard sales commission, our sales teams in each hub are eligible for six different bonus incentives, including the top referral between continents, the best team-work between Account Manager and Project Manager, the best individual customer service, the best individual dealmaker, and bonuses for when each team breaks its target. These bonuses are tailored for each hub to ensure they’re appropriate for the local economy and for the team’s level of interaction with other hubs.

Non-cash incentives

To complement the cash incentives, we also employ three main non-cash incentives across all teams. The first is an initiative called Space, designed to share skills around the company and provide staff with the chance to be creative, learn new skills and progress not just upwards, but also sideways.

The idea is that staff who meet their targets will be allotted ‘Space’ days – one to four per month – where they can choose to work on projects with another department. For instance, an Account Manager may choose to work with marketing to practice their writing skills, or a Project Manager may choose to work with IT to practice their Desktop Publishing skills.

Another key non-cash incentive is the opportunity for travel. Every month, the two best sales people from each hub are given the opportunity to work from one of our offices in another country – this is not only a very effective incentive, but also helps to strengthen ties between our international offices.

Lastly, every time a sales team breaks its sales average the whole team is taken out for a healthy lunch or dinner at a restaurant.

In summary, we’ve found that by providing incentives that address people’s desire for self-improvement and leisure, as well as the financial imperative, we can effectively motivate staff from any cultural background. But what are your insights around rewarding and incentivising staff in a global context?