Compensation Plan Design

Monthly Archive for April, 2009

A review of Callidus Software’s New MBO Solution: TrueMBO

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Before I left on vacation, I wrote a few posts on Management by Objectives (MBO), but I didn’t have time to post the solution reviews before leaving. I will now resume this series by posting a quick review of one of Callidus Software’s latest on-demand offering called TrueMBO.

As I mentioned in the previous posts, administering the MBO process can be very time consuming. TrueMBO eliminates the need for back and forth e-mails between employees and managers when objectives are being decided upon, and also later when employees are assigned a performance achievement for each objective. It can also be used as a central point to administer MBOs company-wide.

When a manager logs in TrueMBO, he or she will see 3 sections; one section displays the MBO programs currently setup, another is the Inbox section where managers and employees can exchange messages related to MBOs, and the last section is for the many pre-configured and customized reports.

Clicking on the name of the MBO Program opens up a new tab with additional information and options. In this tab, a manager will be able to set objectives for the program, to score these objectives, and to notify the team of their performance. The Organization Hierarchy panel shows the manager’s subordinates. Finally, the Team Status provides the most useful information to the manager by illustrating the MBO phase in which each team member is.

Setting up objectives is also a very intuitive task, where objectives are being given a name and a weight (which must total 100%), and a target payout (how much money is earned if the objective is met). These objectives can also be picked from previously used objectives, or from a library which can be defined by an administrator.

The employee’s interface is even simpler than the manager’s, and provides the employee with the ability to exchange messages with his or her manager, to participate to setting up and accepting their objectives, to approve the ‘scores’ and associated bonus received, and to view various reports related to their performance.

If you are looking for a simple on-demand solution to administer your performance evaluation process, TrueMBO could be the right solution for you. TrueMBO will appeal in particular to companies already using Callidus Software’s solutions because of the possible synergies with the Callidus Sales Performance on-demand applications (hierarchy maintenance, performance calculations, etc), but it can also be used as a standalone MBO solution. TrueMBO is available for 5$ per employee per month until the end of June 2009.

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A Lesson on Motivation at the Elephant Nature Park

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I haven’t written in quite a long time… not because I disappeared, but rather because I was on vacation. I took 3 weeks off to travel to Thailand, and I just came back home last Sunday. I had a very good time in Thailand and saw many interesting things, but one of my trip’s highlight was to visit the Elephant Nature Park (ENP) near Chiang Mai.

ENP is a rescue centre for abused or neglected elephants (currently 31 of them!), where elephants live a happy life on 2000 acres of land. These elephants are rescued from abusive owners, and often suffer from injuries, disabilities, or old age, making them unsuitable to be used for work. The goal is to eventually be able to release some of these elephants back into the wild - into another area purchased by ENP where the elephants will be safe from poachers.

In Thailand, domesticated elephants traditionally undergo a rigorous training (read torture) called phajaan, which is designed to break the elephants’ spirit. Baby elephants are taken from their mother, are immobilized, and beaten with sticks, nails and heated irons, for days at a time. That’s how elephants are usually trained to carry people on their back, to create nice paintings for tourists or to play music. At the ENP, some elephants are rescued early enough to be saved from this training. If you don’t believe me about how cruel elephant training is, I found these videos showing how it is done in Thailand.

Using the “stick” approach, it is no surprise that many of the young elephants die or go mad following the training. The Elephant Nature Park not only takes care of the abused elephants, it also tries to demonstrate that phajaan is a cruel method from the past, and that the “carrot” approach can work better.

If you can’t tell, I was really impressed by the ENP, and with this post I want to help getting the word out to potential tourists, that many places with elephants doing tricks and tours is bad for elephants and shouldn’t be encouraged.

In our everyday lives, people often stick to a certain motivation method, just because it’s the ‘culture’ of the company, it’s the ‘only way that employees get it’, it’s ‘the way it has always been done’, etc. But in most cases, the stick approach can be replaced by the carrot approach and yield even better results, and much happier employees.

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