Is it just me, or does it seem like we’ve entered the golden age of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) solutions?
When we face a problem or challenge, or have to deal with something even vaguely unfamiliar, what’s the first step that we usually take? Do we call up an expert and ask them for help, shelling out an uncertain amount of money in the process?
No, chances are if you’re like me, and your garbage disposal breaks, you’ll immediately turn to Google to find out the source of the issue, followed by YouTube to see how to fix it. If, and only if, this proves to be more time or effort than you’re willing to devote to the problem, will you seek out a local plumber (with satisfactory reviews on Yelp).
More and more frequently, it seems that people are turning to these DIY aids to help them solve life’s dilemmas, from the most common, like how to tie a tie to the more technical, such as how to change the speed of a GIF in Photoshop CS6.
While part of this might be traced to some philosophical idea of regaining a sense of self-reliance—something we’ve relinquished to a global, technology-based system for the sake of ease and comfort—a more practical explanation is that DIY solutions are typically cheaper than the alternative.
If I could install the new garbage disposal myself, I would probably save anywhere between $80-$200 on the cost of labor.
Of course, this would also involve time, thought, and energy, things that are often as valuable to us as dollars and cents. This is why we’ll find ourselves asking our mechanic neighbor if he’d mind helping us install a new battery in our car, or if our doctor friend could spare a few moments and diagnose that oversized mole we recently noticed on our shoulder.
We want the cheapest, best solution, but we also want the one that won’t require a tremendous amount of attention and effort. In other words, we’re looking for a happy medium, a solution that’s inexpensive yet effective.
The Issue
This concept translates just as easily to the business side of our lives. After all, we’re always seeking to improve our ROI, to minimize our expenses and maximize our profits, especially if we’re working with a limited budget.
We love phrases like “cost-effective” and “value-added.”
So, faced with various organizational challenges, what do we do? We search for solutions that are flexible and can be applied in myriad ways to fit the specific needs of our business.
Now, if our challenge is, say, keeping our employees or salespeople engaged, we might consider implementing a performance improvement program that targets behaviors that support engagement.
Maybe this program includes a 6- or 12-month campaign that keeps our people consistently focused on the big picture, or maybe it’s a quarterly promotion designed to keep them excited during the high or low season in our industry.
But what if our budget is limited? What if, for one reason or another, we lack the manpower to organize this kind of program on our own, and can’t afford to hire someone else to do it for us? Should we just say, “maybe next year” and stick with business as usual?
What we need is another option, a middle ground between devoting resources we don’t have and simply maintaining the status quo in the hopes that somehow, we can find some other way to move the needle.
What would be really useful in this type of situation is a versatile DIY incentive product, something that was essentially “off-the-shelf” and could be easily plugged in to fulfill various needs. It would have to be easy to use and provide significant bang for our buck.
Our Solution
Understanding this dilemma and the general trend in self-service, HMI’s worked hard to develop products that offer just these kinds of turnkey incentive solutions.
If you’re trying to push a product quickly through your sales channel, you might be interested in something like Promo2Go, which enables you to easily market a game-based promotion for your sales team to drive purchase minimums, boost steps-to-the-sale behaviors, and provide streamlined reporting and analysis of the results and other data collected.
Or if you want to recognize someone—a valued customer, loyal employee, or top salesperson—maybe our All for You Individual Incentive Rewards could be offered as an exciting bonus or a “grand prize” at the end of an internal company promotion. Using All for You, recipients would even have the option to choose their own rewards, a factor that recent research has suggested can have superb impacts on retention.
Conclusion
Ultimately, a small budget shouldn’t deter you from seeking out better, more effective ways of improving performance.
There’s definitely a happy medium out there, one that allows you to take advantage of third-party expertise and resources without breaking the bank. But just because this solution might make you feel like you’re doing it yourself, it doesn’t mean you’ll have to do it alone . . . unless you need to fix your garbage disposal.
Looking for a DIY incentive product or system that won’t cost you an arm and a leg? Contact us at 888.220.4780 or marketing@hmiaward.com to find out how our turnkey solutions can help you achieve big results at a fraction of the cost of a normal incentive program.
Sources
https://lifehacker.com/these-are-the-most-googled-how-to-s-1798704418
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/02/how-to-do-everything-on-youtube/385508/
http://www.iosrjournals.org/iosr-jbm/papers/Vol17-issue7/Version-2/I017726470.pdf
Photo by Pop & Zebra on Unsplash
